Let’s talk about poor personal boundaries
I recently saw a client who had a terrible rash all over her body that was driving her crazy from all the itching and scratching.
As always, symptoms are not problems, they are messengers, telling us is a psycho-somatic sense that we are in emotional distress. Our skin is our protection from the outside world, it protects our individuality and sense of self. So, when the skin flares up, it’s an indication that our boundaries are being pushed, causing us intense distress.
I wrote an article recently about the root cause of different skin conditions, but today is all about boundaries. In particular, why they may not be strong, why we need them and how to fix them.
Symptoms of poor personal boundaries
When I asked this client what was irritating her, she immediately launched into a story about how a friend was continually pressuring her to do things. In her own words, it made her feel stratospherically stressed.
When we tested the rash on her skin and asked the body which meridian it was related to, both the large intestine and stomach were priority. What this means is, there was an imbalance in these meridians that caused the skin to flare up. The emotions related to both these meridians are grief and inability to let go, and not being heard or listened to.
When we tested these emotions, we discovered a grief from the past, when the rash first started, linked to boundaries. This is very common. We always go back to when a symptom first started and, in this case, it was five years ago. We also discovered an invalidation, linked to this person who my client couldn’t avoid and who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
My client wasn’t being heard or listened to which is extremely invalidating and irritating. The result? Her body used a coping mechanism from the past that caused a rash to flare up on her skin, communicating to her that her boundaries were once again being trampled on.
Where does an inability to say no stem from?
One of my favourite techniques in Kinesiology is working on emotional reprogramming. In this case, my client was feeling a lot of guilt and shame around saying ‘no’ which we needed to reformat.
This is very normal for people with poor personal boundaries. We feel terribly ashamed for letting people down and often bend over backwards to please others because we’re so afraid of being disliked. I say ‘we’ because I definitely include myself in this category and it’s something I work on every day.
An inability to say ‘no’ is a learned behaviour, like so many others, that we learn from school, a parent or even further back on the ancestral chain. Maybe we were punished when we stood up for ourselves. Maybe we didn’t feel loved so we craved approval from others. Maybe we are just good-natured peacekeepers who fear confrontation so would rather suffer in silence.
The lovely thing is, saying ‘no’ in itself is a complete answer. It’s absolute madness that we owe anyone an explanation about our actions. It’s also crazy to think we need to feel guilty, ashamed or apologetic for standing up for ourselves when something doesn’t feel right or comfortable.
Yet, while we understand the feelings of shame and guilt are ridiculous, the behaviour is so deeply ingrained that we still can’t help feeling them. This means we need to unroot them and extract them from our subconscious using Kinesiology emotional reprogramming techniques.
It’s a huge relief when we undo the habits that keep us trapped in a cycle of shame and guilt. We feel free when that burden is finally lifted.
Dealing with boundary abusers
People abuse our boundaries because we let them.
I spoke about this is my post on how to create boundaries against energy vampires. Poor personal boundaries tend to attract the exact people who like to abuse them. They are subtle but they know how to walk all over you, exploiting your weakness, because they know you won’t put up a fight.
Instead, you burn with suffering and resentment that builds up inside until one day it bursts in a form of psycho-somatic complaint in the body. Maybe it’s your skin that flares up, like with my client.
This is why knowing and understanding our boundaries is so extremely vital. We only harm ourselves when we don’t erect them.
I recently realised that when someone causes an emotional reaction inside of us, whether it’s fear, anger, irritation or distress, we tend to focus outwards on them and their opinion of us and how they make us feel and what we can do to appease them.
Instead, we want to be looking inwards at what we need in order to feel safe, supported and empowered. Often, it is love and acceptance of ourselves, exactly as we are, without any shame and guilt at other people’s perception of who we are.
We need to look inwards at how to self-soothe and cut that other person out of the picture completely. They don’t matter. They don’t resonate with our frequency. By focusing on them we lower ourselves to their vibration which is far duller and denser than our own.
Let them go, it’s not about them, it’s about you.
Give yourself a voice and stand strong
Knowing our limitations is an expression of self-love. Knowing when to say no or stand up for ourselves is an expression of self-respect. We need to bolster these to keep our boundaries healthy and strong. We need to let go of caring what others think of us, knowing that it doesn’t matter and that they don’t matter in the slightest.
If your boundaries are being challenged then you need to give yourself a voice and expression.
Our throat chakra is our communication centre, so nurture it by giving yourself a healthy expression. It doesn’t have to be voiced to the boundary-pusher, it can be on paper, to a friend, out loud, written down.
You can also create affirmations around how easily and effortlessly you speak your truth, about how much you love and respect yourself, about how much you enjoy saying no, about letting go of what others think of you.
There are wonderful ways you can affirm your worthiness through targeted affirmation work and in my clinic, we have great fun creating affirmations that make you laugh as well as cry.
When you change your energy around boundaries, you carry that new energy around with you that other people pick up on. Energy is the currency of the world, so change yours and just wait and see what happens.
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