On Boundaries, Saying No, & Trusting Ourselves
Therapy reflections + an experiential exercise
Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on boundaries, saying no, and trusting ourselves.
It’s not an easy feat for a lot of people.
In fact, saying no and setting boundaries brings up a lot of discomfort for most people.
There’s fear.
There’s worry.
There’s anxiety.
This is often rooted in some kind of anticipation of how the other person is going to respond. (Side note: My clients hear this from me a lot, and are fairly familiar with my phrase “anticipation anxiety”. This is a pretty good example of when this shows up).
The irony of it all is that: We can never fully anticipate how the other person is going to respond. Truthfully, we never really know. And this is especially true if we don’t know the other person all that well or we haven’t been in a relationship with them for all that long.
So if we don’t know for certain how the other person is going to respond, where does this anticipation come from?
The answer is relatively simple and it connects back to one big psychological truth:
We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. - Anais Nin
In other words, we’re not stepping into every present moment experience with a fresh new pair of eyes, senses, and perceptions. Rather, we’re bringing in the experiences of our past with us into each and every moment.
So, if you experience a feeling of anxiety every time that you feel compelled to say no, it likely has significantly less to do with this specific instance and has more to do with what you’ve experienced in the past when you have said no.
Say, for example, someone asks you if you’re available for a work call on Friday morning. They’re asking you on Thursday and you’ve already made plans for how you want to spend your Friday earlier in the week. Your initial gut-response is to say no, but it quickly takes another turn.
You notice that you feel anxious about it. As you check in with your body, you notice a tightness in your chest and a “buzzy” feeling throughout your body. For some reason, you’re finding it really hard to sit still.
As you feel into it, slow down and get curious about this response, you might also start to notice some inner dialogue creep in. You notice a thought of:
If I say no, what if they catch me? What if they ask me what I’m doing instead? Well, now I’m obligated because I don’t have a good enough reason.
Well, now that’s an interesting inner narrative with a ton of information waiting to be unpacked.
If this person were a client, there’d be a few different directions I could go depending on what might be easier for the client to connect with.
For starters, I might ask:
Has there been a time in your life where someone “caught you” after saying no?
When in your life have you said no and someone told you that wasn’t a “good enough reason”?
I could also go the more somatic-route inquire about those responses, such as:
Is that tightness in your chest and “buzzy” feeling familiar?
As you tune into that feeling, what is an earlier memory that comes to mind where you felt that way?
The answers could take us in all kinds of directions. It could go back to a specific parent’s way of communicating — or, in some cases, both parents. It could go back to interactions with another family member. It could go back to experiences in school, whether it be with teachers and staff or fellow classmates. It could also go back into very specific instances of physical or sexual abuse or domestic violence.
Essentially, there’s a lot of possibilities.
Regardless, the way to really start to unravel from these patterns is rooted in these old experiences that could use “a light shined on them” so there’s more room to breathe, so to speak.