Don’t Underestimate the Impact of Your Relationships
I’ve written a whole lot on this blog about the power and impact of my wonderful friendships that I have in my life. I have the absolute best people — both friends and family and I am eternally grateful for all of them (many of them pictured here!). That part of the lesson about friendships has been the easy part for me to learn. It’s eas(ier) to focus on all of the amazing and positive people you have in your life. The harder part of the lesson that I’ve had to learn over the last few years is to be more aware of the impact of negative, unhelpful and sometimes toxic relationships in my life. My approach to everything in my life is often “I can handle it.” I think I can handle most everything —give me a new project, a high-stress environment, lots of chaos, a big goal to achieve, etc. and my response is usually “I got this.” And on the surface, I do. I do fairly well with whatever life throws at me. I get the thing done, respond to what needs to be responded to, and just keep swimming. It often looks like everything is all good.
Over the past few years, I had to face the hard reality that the impact of unhelpful relationships on my nervous system, my body and my soul should not be underestimated. I found myself in a place of thinking that I was doing all of this healing for my physical body and yet, there have been relationships in my life over the past few years that felt like they sucked the absolute life out of me. Whereas my perspective used to be “I can handle it” — meaning, I can handle someone crossing my boundaries, not talking to me kindly, not treating me in the way I want to be treated, I realized that I could no longer afford this type of perspective. Something had to shift for me over the last few years. I had to get more serious about setting boundaries. This is really hard work for me. Because my perspective has been that I have endless capacity, love and care for people no matter how they treat me, it has been counterintuitive to set boundaries to take better care of myself. Over the past few years, I hit a few low points where I realized that my health (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) was literally depending on whether I would make the choice to love myself more through the people I intentionally kept in my life. I figured out the hard way that I did not have endless capacity to give, especially when I was at rock bottom as it relates to my health. My body has been in such physical pain and for a while, I was not able to recognize the damage that some people in my life were having on my nervous system. These things are all connected. I took the scenic route to figuring that out.
This message might be hard to hear. It is still hard for me to face. It can sound a little cruel or overly strict, and in some ways, I think I had to be for a while. But I’ve come back to thinking about boundaries as a form of love and care over and over again. If we don’t set healthy and appropriate boundaries with people in our life, we are actively making a choice to let people walk all over us — and that’s not love. You might convince yourself it is from a place of love and care, but it is not. And it will take a toll.
If healing is your priority, the people who are in your physical, mental and emotional space have the ability to support that healing or get in the way of it. I had to train myself that setting a boundary wasn’t mean or unloving, it was the most loving thing I could do for myself. I’m not good to anyone around me if I can’t love myself enough to set a boundary that is rooted in love for me and everyone around me. I had to change my narrative from “I can handle it” to “I deserve only love and support, nothing less.” This is going to continue to be the work of my life. It’s hard. I’ve tried and failed over and over again, but when you hit a point where it feels like your health and well-being depend on your ability to set boundaries to love yourself better, it forces you to wake up and make some different decisions.
When I started learning about food and the impact of food on the body many years ago, I remember hearing “the food you eat is either contributing to your health or deteriorating it.” I now feel the same way about so many things in my life and in particular, my relationships. The reality is that the people in your life are either contributing to your health or deteriorating it. You deserve to be surrounded by people who love and care for you and are supporting the highest version of yourself. Make choices about who those people are going to be wisely — your health depends on it.
