Overexposed: What I Learned Setting Boundaries With Myself.

Setting boundaries with others is one thing, but setting them with yourself is a whole other type of experience.

Ever since I began therapy in 2018, a topic of discussion that often came up was learning how to set boundaries with those around me. It’s no secret that I grew up being a people-pleaser; I always put the feelings of others before my own, even if I got hurt or silenced in the process. While the process of actually applying those practices into everyday life took years of trial and error, I can confidently say that I make my boundaries known and make sure they are heard for the sake of protecting my energy and my self-worth.

A lot of those boundaries unfortunately were enforced once I already made myself too available and too open in the relationships I had with people in my life, so most (if not all) successful “setting boundaries” stories were learning experiences, whether or not the outcome was what I expected it to be.

It really wasn’t until I had to learn that setting boundaries was not just an external thing I needed to do in order to better my mental health; it was also something I needed to do with myself.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I just recently started to set boundaries with myself. These are the things I’ve learned so far in doing so.

Let’s take it a few steps back before we just jump into this: setting boundaries is not a new thing for me to do, but the way I would set them in the past was still unhealthy for my overall mental health. In the past, setting boundaries was strictly an act of selfishness. My boundaries with people consist of me being completely one-sided and too protective of myself when really I was just hurting more in the end. It was either you respected my unrealistic boundaries that only accommodated my needs or you were cut out of my life. Cue 2016 Liz after graduating college and thinking I had my life all figured out.

Setting boundaries once being in therapy became more about setting them with the intention of challenging the social anxiety I’ve developed in those last couple of years into my early twenties. Again, transitioning the relationships in my life already to set these boundaries weren’t easy; especially for a person that still had to learn so much about myself and how my anxiety looked like on me versus everyone else. Many of those relationships ended because I simply didn’t know how to express what I needed out of them. I didn’t know how to express to others that the way I functioned had a lot to do with my anxiety disorder without never taking accountability for the shitty behavior I put on them. Even to this day, I’m learning to express this to others that will never fully comprehend how anxiety looks like on me; only I would know it completely.

Even after developing friendships later in my twenties and had a better knowledge about who I was as a person, I still struggled to set boundaries with people. It wasn’t because I was afraid to set them at this point in my life; it was because I was unaware that there were situations and points in these relationships that needed to have boundaries set early on.

It wasn’t until just recently that I realized that I needed to set boundaries with myself in order to know how to properly set them with the people around me.

I’ve known that I wasn’t always in the right when the relationships fell out. I know that just like everyone else I carry toxic traits that I’m not proud of. I know that I do things and say things that do not align with the energy I try to put out there, that I’m not proud of, and that truly act as the catalyst between me feeling better and me overthinking everything.

And jut like the “toxic people” you may need to set boundaries with, you also have to set them with your own “toxic person.”

For me, that includes actually blocking certain profiles on social media so that I’m not inclined to obsess and lurk to see how the people I cut out of my life are doing. It includes me thinking about the impulse decisions I make before actually doing them. It includes reminding myself that I am also capable of ruining my good energy by overthinking and allowing myself to do unhealthy things. Once I found ways to set these boundaries with myself, I find myself focusing on myself in positive ways. Whenever I feel myself slip into these bad and unhealthy habits, I remind myself that I could spend this time doing something beneficial and useful; something that enhances the good energy in me.

Since then, I’ve felt like there’s been so much more progress in my healing than previous times.

Setting boundaries with myself has shown me the type of boundaries I should be setting with other people. Boundaries, in the simplest form, are meant to protect us from things that affect us in a negative way. We set them so that we let others know what we will and will not tolerate, and I think we all need a better understanding of what that they mean for us by setting them with ourselves. By setting them with ourselves first, we’re learning if they need to be revised in any way before we project them onto other people.

I’m in no way saying that setting boundaries with yourself works with everyone. Maybe it’s not an universal thing that people may do, but for the type of person that I know I am personally, I believe that setting these boundaries with myself will allow me to let go of this belief that I am able to control what other people do or how they react to different scenarios and situations. While I know that for most of my life, I’ve been known to accommodate to other people’s feelings, I’ve also been known to not carefully consider what or when was the right time to enforce boundaries or do certain things just because I felt ready. I always need to control the situation even when I knew I couldn’t, because that also involved trying to control the other person in it.

Setting these boundaries with myself gave me the power to control how I should react and what I should say in situations that were triggering or bothered me. Instead of being reactive and controlling instantly, I now stop myself and ask questions to rationalize and truly understand why I am acting the way I am towards something. I ask, “if you know what’s bothering you, why and what about it did it make you feel this way? Have you thought about other possibilities before taking it personal? Does it serve you any good by allowing it to make you think and feel this way? What can you do to step back and gather yourself so that you are able to approach this at another time when you know you will not be so emotionally reactive to it?” For me, I really do ask myself if it serves me any good to allow something to damper my good energy, because 9 out of the 10 times, it’s not.

I’m not a stranger when it comes to setting boundaries, but I am definitely a novice when enforcing them in a positive, non-reactive way. I am still learning what works and doesn’t work for me, and how can I revise some of the key boundaries with people by enforcing them on myself first. So far, it’s teaching me a lot about what it truly means to protect my good energy, when if i have to protect it some myself.