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We can all revert to the age we were when a childhood trauma happened and remains unhealed. That’s why we have to work through these things and grow into a maturity enabling us to use restraint.
If the glimpses of kindness and potential are what’s keeping you going, then eventually you’ll start accepting even harsh things as good. If you find yourself so grateful for the smallest common courtesy, you’re hanging your hope on nothing but air.
And if you’re too afraid to talk about any of this with your wise friends, that’s not just a red flag—it’s a full-on fire.
If you feel you have to trade the best of who you are to protect the worst of who they are, do not ignore this red flag.
If we’re progressing toward emotional maturity, we’re not staying stuck in immaturity.
Emotionally mature people aren’t eager to weaponize the list above against other people.
While being passive may look good at first, if I’m letting the tension of the situation build and intensify, I run the risk of getting so worn out from the hard dynamics at play that I start slipping back into immature reactions and unhealthy patterns.
while it is true that God wants us to give Him our anxiety, we also have a responsibility to stay clear-headed and pay attention to what is affecting and triggering our emotions.
When someone doesn’t work through their issues, they’ll make their issues your issues.
Blame is an attempt to medicate unhealed pain.
Chances are the manipulator has unhealed trauma or childhood wounds from the past that make them resistant to any perceived control over them.
A manipulative person will see your boundary as a yellow light while you intended it to be a red light—with a full stop—to ensure your safety. A manipulator will intentionally speed through that intersection, risking whatever damage may happen to themselves or to you. A manipulative person will do anything to resist feeling controlled.
I think most of us, no matter what our natural bent is, don’t want to be misunderstood, misrepresented, or have intentions assigned to us that are not true.
if we are afraid that this person will think poorly of us, potentially abandon us, or try to make us feel crazy for taking a step toward making the relationship healthy, chances are even higher that, without wise boundaries, they will eventually do all three of these things to us.
Their thought process is often that their need trumps your limitations. And the telltale sign of their unhealthiness is their unwillingness to accept no as an answer without trying to make you feel terrible, punished, or unsure about the necessity of the boundary.
If we want to stay healthy, we have to use our limited energy in the right way.
biblical love is an intentional action where we want what’s best for us and the other person.
Healthy people who desire healthy relationships don’t have an issue with other people’s healthy boundaries.
Healthy people understand your limits because they are in touch with their own limitations.
If our identity, the foundational belief we hold of who we are, is tied to an opinion someone has of us, we need to reassess.
When we give people personal access to us, those people must be responsible with it. And emotional access to our hearts is especially important.
Posing a boundary as a question opens us up to be questioned, debated, and disrespected. If a boundary is presented with doubt, it won’t be effectively carried out.
Remember, you are closest to who you really are when you are the closest to who He created you to be.
go for a walk. Or a run. (That ain’t gonna be me because I don’t want to hack up a lung while trying to tend well to my heart. But to each her own.)
LMAO
“God’s love isn’t based on me. It’s simply placed on me. And it’s the place from which I should live . . . loved.”
If people are constantly annoying us, frustrating us, exhausting us, or running all over us, chances are we either don’t have the right kind of people in our life or we don’t have the right kind of boundaries.
Good boundaries bring relief to the grief of letting other people’s opinions, issues, desires, and agendas run our life.
we can be okay even when the choices of someone we love are not okay at all.
If you personalize an incident by attaching it to your identity, you’ll bear the weight of it like an unremovable scarlet letter.
Someone else being disappointed doesn’t make us a disappointment.
Other people don’t get the final say about who we are. God does. Therefore, what makes it possible to not fall apart into a fractured and frail shadow version of the woman we are meant to be is this: we must place a boundary around our identity, protecting it and guarding it, using God’s truth to inform and stabilize what we know, what we feel, and what we do.
I must stay whole by keeping what I know, what I feel, and what I do in alignment with God’s truth about who I am.
A fractured human being is one who has disconnected some part of their thinking or feeling or doing from who they are.
If I am a responsible person but I say yes to too many things because I am too afraid of saying no to others, then chances are high that I’ll drop some balls. It’s not because I’m irresponsible. It’s because what I knew I should do and what felt right (saying no to too many requests) got fractured from what I actually did (saying yes to everything).
if we are fractured in our thinking, we won’t use our thoughts in healthy ways. If we are fractured in our feelings, we won’t use our emotions in healthy ways. If we are fractured in our doing, we won’t act and react in healthy ways.
the goal of someone else being happy shouldn’t be your definition of healthy.
we can finally accept that not everyone will be happy with us—and that’s not a bad thing at all.
We’ve got to know who we are, so we don’t lose ourselves in the fractured realities of others. We can’t live our lives to satisfy the unrealistic demands of other people.
What is communicated in vagueness, stays in vagueness, so we want to get as specific as possible.
I don’t want to get so emptied by the fractured people that I don’t have anything left to give to anyone else.
integrity isn’t perfection. Integrity is humble honesty before the Lord and with other people.
I was afraid that because I told her no and drew a boundary, she would withdraw from me. And she would take something with her that I needed. My motivation in wanting to please her was partly because I loved her, but it was also partly because I loved feeling that if I kept her happy, she wouldn’t walk away from me.
No trauma is healed in a healthy way by developing unhealthy ways of coping.
I was so afraid of her rejecting me, I kept accepting her irresponsibility as if there was nothing I could do about it.
I want to be is driven by a desire. I must be is driven by a demand. And when our desires shift into becoming demands, we run the risk of getting caught in the most serious form of people pleasing.
before we know it, no part of what we are doing for people is motivated by authentic love. It’s actually not about them at all. It’s about us getting from someone what we feel we can’t live without.
People pleasing isn’t just about keeping others happy. It’s about getting from them what we think we must have in order to feel okay in the world.
we will always desperately want from other people what we fear we will never get from God.
