Do you need boundaries in your relationship?
To be honest I can no longer see or hear the boundaries in my marriage.
They are just there.
They are unspoken and are an integral part of the healthy relating that goes on between myself and my husband.
My husband and I are adaptable and flexible. We trust ourselves and each other to adjust to the flow of life that takes place between us.
It wasn't always this way.
Before we changed the framework of relating in our relationship, there was a need to assert a boundary when we felt the other person was overstepping the mark in some way.
We didn't really know how to create healthy boundaries without the need to speak them.
Going on a journey of transformation together, we discovered that the most important boundaries, which served to create the sense of trust and safety we have between us, were actually internal boundaries.
Healthy internal boundaries can help your relationship in the following ways:
➡They help you act in integrity with who you want to be and how you want to do things; not who you think you need to be or what you think you should do to get your partner's attention and love. Greater integrity makes for a more authentic relationship free from manipulation, avoidance, control and entitlement.
➡Internal boundaries diffuse anger so you don't keep holding onto it and use it against your partner. They help you use that anger as fuel to shift your state of being so that you are a more attractive person to hang around with.
➡Internal boundaries shift anxiety so that you don't create unnecessary worry that puts pressure on the relationship.
➡Internal boundaries are evidence of compassion towards all parts of yourself because they are activated from a place of radical acceptance. If you are compassionate towards yourself it makes sense you will be able to relate to your partner with greater compassion.
➡They create energetic space that is unseen but opens you up to the discovering of new possibilities.
➡Internal boundaries help you significantly reduce the influence of your status quo mind, that is prone to sabotaging your relationship in an effort to keep you 'safe'.
The thing is, this mind does not realise that true security comes from within. Many people are constantly looking to their partner to provide that security (it can come from our partner as well) without establishing it within themselves first.
Every day we are in a battle against our status quo mind. It is the mind that will trigger the victim, the judge, the addict and the petulant child in us all. We can be forgiven for lapsing at times and having off moments. We are after all human beings and life can throw us many curve balls.
However, if we want what we say we want in our relationship we need to be a match for what we want on an energetic level.
How do we create healthier internal boundaries?
A healthy internal boundary involves a healthy relationship with our mind and our feelings.
We need to be conscious of letting our thoughts keep triggering us. When we trigger ourselves through the stories and thoughts we think, our body feels the discomfort. Our 'pain' body, then feeds the thoughts and we get stuck in a negative feedback loop.
This feedback loop serves to render us powerless because we are viewing ourselves, our partner and our relationship from a limited perspective. We are not holding ourselves open to a higher vision of what is possible.
This is not about shutting down every single negative thought you have. When we apparently have 60,000 thoughts per day, that's a tall task.
However, with awareness and commitment we can certainly stop many thoughts (right at the beginning of the thought) that we know are not serving us. For this to happen we need to prioritise looking after our mental and emotional health and well-being.
We cannot expect to have a healthy mind if we are feeding ourselves with the kinds of things that we know don't help us focus or have a clearer mind.
Whether it is sugar, alcohol, the internet, pornography, unhealthy food, too much work stress, or not enough exercise. In the addictive world we live in, we all have a vice or two.
We all fall off the wagon in our own way.
We just need to get back on the horse again and decide to be the person we want to be for ourselves and our partner more often than not.
This is how we step into our capacity to create the kind of transformation we want in our relationship.
If you would like to explore your next best steps, you can book a 30 minute Complimentary Consultation with me here.
