4 Steps To HEALTHY Boundaries | PTSD Relationship, Family, and Marriage Boundaries

You deserve so much better. Stop letting people push you around, walk all over you, or abuse you. We get what we accept in life. If we accept all this negative behavior from other people, we will get it. But if we don't accept it, if we set up these hard boundaries, these rules in our life of what we accept and what we don't accept, then we can actually start moving forward and prevent all of these people from mistreating us. So it's an internal game. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Brad Schipke, and that's what we're talking about today— a 4-step process to create Boundaries in your life, rules in your life, so that you don't have all these negative people walking all over you and really just treating you like dirt. And like I said, it's up to you. It's up to you. So often we want to look out there and be like, "It's this person's fault. It's this person's fault. It's this person's fault." But a lot of times, it's because we don't respect ourselves enough to set up these rules, to set up these boundaries, to prevent people from treating us a certain way. So a lot of times, we just you know people will treat us poorly, and we just accept it. We kind of just lay down and accept it. And I'm definitely not blaming. Anybody who allows that to happen, because I had that happen in my life. I had no boundaries for most of my life, right? Like, I just— I was like the nice guy. I, I never spoke up. I never said, hey, don't do that, or I never said no, right? If you can't say no, that's, that's a good sign that you, you don't have any boundaries in place. But I always let people kind of walk all over me. And not that everybody walked all over me, but when I encountered somebody who would do that, I didn't respect myself enough. I didn't believe in myself enough to set that boundary, to say, no, hey, I don't want to do that, or even just to leave the situation. So these boundaries, once you're able to set them, it's going to absolutely change your life. So I'm going to walk you through that process, but first I want to kind of teach you what boundaries are. In a lot of cases, the best way to teach something is by teaching the inverse, so what something is not. So I'm going to walk you through, uh, kind of 4 different scenarios of what What boundaries are not. So if you are letting somebody constantly abuse you or take advantage of you, you don't have any boundaries. If you're letting somebody yell at you or scream at you, you don't have any boundaries. If you are, you know, being— allowing yourself to be around people who are treating you less than or maybe making fun of you or whatever that is, you don't have any boundaries. And really, anytime if you're going to any situation and you want it to be this way, but you're allowing it to be this way. You're not really setting any boundaries. So really what boundaries are, are setting up these hard rules to be like, hey, if you cross this line, I'm not going to allow it, or I'm not going to allow you to cross this line, right? So it's setting up these hard lines in your life and basically saying, I'm not going to allow you to cross this. I'm not going to allow you to move past this line because I respect myself enough. So the first, first step and the most important step For creating boundaries is self-respect, building self-respect, building self-love, and really realizing that you deserve better. So the reason why we allow people to do negative things in our life is because we truly believe that we deserve it on some level, right? Or we, we don't believe that we deserve better, right? So the very first step is developing a strong, powerful sense of self-respect, of self-love, of self-worth. So that you can build off of that. That is the foundation of boundaries. If you don't have that, if you don't believe in yourself, if you don't believe you're worthy of being treated right, you're not going to allow people to treat you right, right? You're going to allow people to walk all over you and treat you poorly. So that's the first step. So the first one is realize that you deserve it, right? You deserve to be treated well, and that comes from the self-respect. So that's the first step, self-respect. The second one is define the goal. So like, how do you want your life to be? How do you want people to treat you? I just want you to imagine I want you to visualize what is my ideal life? What is my ideal interaction with other people? So right now you can think of maybe some, some situations, uh, like off the top of your head, you can probably think of some situations where, you know, you, you let people kind of cross those boundaries, whether they're yelling at you, they're screaming at you, they're abusing you, all of the above, any of those. You can think of those situations and define the goal, right? Define the goal outcome, the dream outcome of how you want that to look. Because if you don't know how you want your situations to look, you have nothing to really base your actions off of. You're just going to be guessing. So second step here is to really visualize, really immerse yourself and see how you want your life to be. So that's the second piece. See yourself, see that ideal scenario you want to have in your head. So visualize, you know, a situation where you would have let somebody cross your boundary. And now imagine, what do you want it to be like? Imagine like if somebody starts raising their voice, right? Starts getting loud, starts getting angry. Maybe what you say or your Your new goal response is be like, hold up, I'm not going to talk to you while we're in elevated state, so let's calm down for a bit. Whatever it is to you. Or maybe it means just leaving the scenario, leaving, leaving that situation. You can't control the other person, right? Their emotions are not your problem. They're not, because you can't control them. At the end of the day, they have to deal with their stuff and you have to deal with your stuff. And that's where boundaries come in, is you set boundaries for you. You set boundaries for you, for what you deserve. You don't set boundaries for the other person, you set them for you. And for a lot of people who have been abused or have been in a lot of these negative situations, that can be a hard thing to accept, right? Doing anything for yourself might seem like a stretch, right? So you set those for you. So the second step was to find the goal, and the third one is to write down your boundary, right? Write it down after you set that goal, after you imagine yourself in that scenario where, you know, previously someone would have crossed this boundary and you're imagining it going differently. Write down how you want it to go. And there's something magical to me when you put pen to paper, even if you never look at the— look at it again. Writing down specifically, when, you know, this person does X, Y, and Z, I am going to do this, right? So basically it's about having a plan for when somebody is being negative, is being abusive, is yelling, whatever it is. So you have a plan in place and you know exactly what to do if and when that happens. So You are going to be prepared for it. So you're going to write it down and then again visualize it further. So every time you visualize it, your plan gets stronger in your mind and it makes it that much more likely that you're actually going to do it. And this is something that we tell all of our coaching clients too. You know, the more you visualize a positive belief in your life or the more you visualize a positive change in your life, the more likely it's going to happen. The more you visualize yourself doing a morning routine before you actually do the morning routine, the more likely you're actually going to complete the morning routine the next morning. So visualizing is such a powerful exercise. So after you define the goal, the ideal situation, I want you to write it down. That's step 3. Write it down and then visualize it again to drive it in further. And then step 4, the final step— for a lot of people, this is the most challenging part of setting boundaries— is to enforce it. Right? So you've gone through, you've realized that you deserve better, you know, you've developed that self-respect, that self-love, you've kind of defined your goal, your ideal scenario of how you want that situation to go, you've written it down, you visualized your plan. The last step is just enforcing it, right? And that's when the rubber hits the road, right? That's when you're put in that high-stress situation and you have to make a different choice. You have to make a different choice. And what you need to realize is that you have probably habitualized other people's behavior in your life. So you've come to expect a certain level of disrespect or a certain level of abuse or whatever it is, and that's become normalized for you. So making a new decision is not going to be easy the first time. You choosing to set down this boundary the first time is not going to be easy. It's going to be something different. Like, you're going to have to, you know, feel that resistance of choosing a new path. So When it really comes down to it, you need to realize a few things, right? Because there's a few areas, or there's a few things that come up for people when they're setting boundaries that just destroy their boundaries, right? So one thing, when you, when you go to enforce it, realize that the other person might not like it. They too have developed habitual patterns around this scenario, even if they're not a bad person. And, you know, maybe you both are kind of prone to yelling at each other or whatever it is. If you now make the decision to be like, I'm I'm not going to yell anymore. I'm not going to, you know, go into this situation with this other person and yell. Once it starts getting elevated, that's my boundary. And then, you know, we're going to separate until we can have that calm conversation. Now, this other person doesn't know that you're setting that boundary, right? So they're going into this situation expecting things to go, you know, just like they always have. So what you need to realize is that people don't know. People react differently. People might not like you setting boundaries. So you, you can expect, you can expect with a high degree of probability that there will be some pushback on some degree. It won't just be like, oh, awesome, you know, that's— I love your boundary, perfect. And if that happens, that's great. But I want you to expect a little bit of pushback, because when you can expect it, you can plan for it and you can course correct from it, right? And you can stay strong in your boundary. And at the end of the day, that's the most important thing, because you've already made the decision of what's best for you. And now what you need to do is you need to make sure you stay strong on that commitment to you. So realize that when you set a boundary, people might yell, people might scream, people might throw tantrums, people might do some crazy things, you know, to get your attention, to pull you back in into that fight, into that abuse, into whatever it is. It might be name-calling, you know. If you're in an abusive situation and you're like, hey, I don't want to, you know, have a conversation in this elevated state, The other person might, like, uh, result to name-calling or being mean or throwing things, honestly. So it really depends on what the scenario is. Those are all things that I've, I've seen and experienced on different levels. So, um, just know that depending on your situation, there's going to be different levels of pushback on those boundaries. But again, that's something that you have to expect. It's something you have to plan for. Right? And you have to stay strong. You have to stay strong. At the end of the day, you have to do what's best for you. And the reason why you allow all these boundaries, or all your boundaries to be breached all the time, it's because you don't see your worth. And that's where the foundation comes in. If you truly saw how much respect you deserved, how much worth you have, how much love you deserve, if you truly saw that and you truly felt that and you truly believed that, It wouldn't matter what this other person does to pull you back in. It doesn't matter what names they call you. It doesn't matter, you know, what they yell, what they scream, what they throw, you know, whatever it is, what they break. You're going to respect yourself enough because that's the foundation. If you don't respect yourself, you're not going to be able to enforce that boundary. And it's not about the other person. It's not about them. Take them out of the equation 100%, 100,000%. They're All the way across the world. When you're making this decision, you're doing it for you. You deserve to be in a peaceful environment, but it's up to you. It's up to you. You can't wait for that other person to change because they might change. Who knows? Who knows? But at the end of the day, you can't control that. And a lot of times, here's what happens when you start setting boundaries in your life. A lot of people actually start to change. That's where the change process happens because You start— you're starting to break out of that mold, and other people are starting to see, hey, she's not allowing me, or he's not allowing me to do this to them anymore, right? So they're not allowing me to do this anymore, and that causes them to introspect, right? And causes them to think and causes them to change a little bit. Now, that's not the purpose. I'm just saying that as a positive, nice unintended consequence of setting boundaries is that a lot of times other people Step up. You know, when other people see you respecting yourself, they start to look inward and they start to do some self-development on their own. But again, it always comes back to the first step of knowing that you deserve it. You deserve to be— and I can't say that enough— you deserve it, you deserve it, you deserve it. You don't deserve to be treated like crap. I don't care what you've been through. I don't care, you know, what other people have said in your life. You deserve to be treated well. I don't even care what you've done in your past. It's time to turn over a new leaf and start a new life, right? Starting to forgive yourself and really step into that. And if you wanna learn a more detailed step-by-step process on how to develop that self-love and that self-worth, you can go to this video right here. I'll link it on the screen. Make sure to watch that. I go through, it's probably a 20-minute video with some very actionable items Um, on how to do that. So you can click here to watch that. And if you enjoyed this content today, you can also coach with Kayleen and myself every single day for free. So all you have to do to check that out, to coach with us for free, is go to the link in the description right now, click it. Otherwise, hit the subscribe button, and I will see you in the next video.