People may no longer…
I have a right to ask for…
To protect my time and energy, it’s okay to

HEALTHY BOUNDARIES
• You can say no or yes, and you are ok when others say no to you.
• You have a strong sense of identity. You respect yourself.
• You expect reciprocity in a relationship—you share responsibility and power.
• You know when the problem is yours and when it belongs to someone else.
• You share personal information gradually in a mutually sharing/trusting relationship.
• You don’t tolerate abuse or disrespect.
• You know your own wants, needs and feelings. You communicate them clearly in your
relationships.
• You are committed to and responsible for exploring and nurturing your full potential.
• You are responsible for your own happiness and fulfillment. You allow others to be
responsible for their own happiness and fulfillment.
• You value your opinions and feelings as much as others.
• You know your limits. You allow others to define their limits.
• You are able to ask for help when you need it.
• You don’t compromise your values or integrity to avoid rejection.

COLLAPSED BOUNDARIES
• You can’t say no, because you are afraid of rejection or abandonment.
• Your identity consists of what you think others want you to be. You are a chameleon.
• You have no balance of power or responsibility in your relationships. You tend to be either
overly responsible and controlling or passive and dependent.
• You take on other’s problems as your own.
• You share personal information too soon. . .before establishing mutual trust/sharing.
• You have a high tolerance for abuse or being treated with disrespect.
• Your wants needs and feelings are secondary to others’and are sometimes determined by
others.
• You ignore your inner voice and allow others expectations to define your potential.
• You feel responsible for other’s happiness and fulfillment and sometimes rely on your
relationships to create that for you.
• You tend to absorb the feelings of others.
• You rely on others opinions, feelings and ideas more than you do your own.
• You allow others to define your limits or try to define limits for others.
• You compromise your values and beliefs in order to please others or to avoid conflict.

RIGID BOUNDARIES
• You are likely to say no if the request involves close interaction.
• You avoid intimacy (pick fights, stay too busy, etc.)
• You fear abandonment OR engulfment, so you avoid closeness.
• You rarely share personal information.
• You have difficulty identifying wants, needs, feelings.
• You have few or no close relationships. If you have a partner, you have very separate lives and
virtually no shared social life.
• You rarely ask for help.
• You do not allow yourself to connect with other people and their problems.

People who grow up in a dysfunctional family may fail to learn the difference between love and sympathy. Children growing up in these conditions may learn to have sympathy for the emotional crippling in their parents’ lives and feel that the only time they get attention is when they show compassion for the parent. They feel that when they forgive, they are showing love. Actually, they are rescuing the parent and enabling abusive behavior to continue. They learn to give up their own protective boundaries in order to take care of the dysfunctioning parent. In adulthood, they carry these learned behaviors into their relationships. If they can rescue their partner, they feel that they are showing love. They get a warm, caring, sharing feeling from helping their partner – a feeling they call love. But this may actually encourage their partner to become needy and helpless.

So, considering that boundaries have a core purpose in civilization, an individual’s lack of personal, psychological boundaries isn’t really a true lack—at least, it’s not a lack in the philosophical sense of something “missing.” Instead, this apparent lack is really a refusal to defend one’s own dignity. And it’s a refusal based on hatred. That’s right. Hatred: a hatred of the self that results from living always in fear because of having been abused as a child. Unable to make sense of senseless abuse, a child, using the full effort of imperfect childhood logic, arrives at the only “logical” conclusion: “It must be my fault. I’m just a worthless person. I deserve condemnation.” And there you have it: self-hatred engendered by fear that is engendered by abuse.

The goal in an intimate relationship is to feel calm, centered and focused. The intimacy needs to be safe, supportive, respectful, nonpunitive and peaceful. You feel taken care of, wanted, unconditionally accepted and loved just for existing and being alive in a healthy intimate relationship. You feel part of something and not alone in such a relationship. You experience forgiving and being forgiven with little revenge or reminding of past offenses. You find yourself giving thanks for just being alive in this relationship.

A healthy intimate relationship has a sense of directedness with plan and order. You experience being free to be who you are rather than who you think you need to be for the other. This relationship makes you free from the “paralysis of analysis” needing to analyze every minute detail of what goes on in it. An intimate relationship has its priorities in order, with people’s feelings and process of the relationship coming before things and money.

A healthy intimate relationship encourages your personal growth and supports your individuality. This relationship does not result in you or your relationship partner becoming emotionally, physically or intellectually dependent on one another. An intimate relationship encourages the spiritual growth of both relationship partners and makes room for God in the relationship as a partner and friend.

Unconditional love has no goal in view. It simply is. It is the love that made us. I believe that this is the root of humankind’s restlessness, that we are looking for unconditional love and do not realize that it is already within us. So we fantasize and when we hear about unconditional love, we think we must emulate God and extend it to everybody immediately.

Then, of course, we flunk and feel a failure. Unconditional love is a universal principle, but it is also a learning experience. If we take the conscious decision to choose love as our spiritual practice, our personality blooms and flourishes. We grow.

But a misunderstanding of the true nature of unconditional love can be disempowering and weaken a person‘s capacity for self-sovereignty. It can foster dependency and co-dependency in a relationship. If I surrender or ignore my boundaries, then I don’t have to worry about or do the hard work of maintaining them. But boundaries don’t have to be separative at all; they are defining, and they help coalesce and focus energy and presence in a unique way.

Unconditional love does not say “I love everyone equally,” but rather “I love everyone appropriately and in response to their uniqueness.” And, very importantly, unconditional love does not mean unconditional acceptance of behaviors.

Unconditional love happens best within a context of plentitude rather than neediness.

Such inner fullness overflows spontaneously into the five essentials of genuine love, which offer a blueprint for openness. When we are present in these five essential ways, we find ourselves opening. And when we give these five essential of genuine love to ourselves, we grow in self-esteem.

The Five Essentials of Genuine Love
Attention (of ourselves and/or others)
Acceptance (of ourselves and/or others)
Appreciation (of ourselves and/or others)
Affection (of ourselves and/or others)
Allowing (of ourselves and/or others)

In order to full receive others’ feelings and help them to move through their emotions, we need to stay present with the five essential ways of genuine love and without the mind-sets of ego: fear, attachment, control, judgment, complaint, blame, contempt, or censure.

Intimacy means the exchange of our feelings with the support shown in the five essentials of genuine love without interfering mind-sets. An adult relationship that has made even one of the four feelings verboten does not allow the full monty of intimacy.

For once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear. You cannot then believe that fear is caused without. And God, Whom you had thought to banish, can be welcomed back within the holy mind He never left.

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