Setting Boundaries With Crazy-making Family Members: 4 Steps

Do you come from a toxic, dysfunctional, crazymaking family and do you struggle to set healthy boundaries with them to safeguard your mental health? If so, in this episode, Lisa A. Romano dives into 4 steps you can take to begin creating healthier boundaries with toxic family members. However, be prepared; they might not like the new and more assertive you.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

So today we're talking about how to set boundaries with people that you love and why it's so difficult for some of us who have grown up with childhood trauma to set a boundary.

When we're talking about a boundary,

We're talking about the ability to know what is right for us and what is wrong for us.

This is screwy for those of us who have grown up in a dysfunctional home.

Why?

Because we haven't been taught that what we think and what we feel are valid.

We've been conditioned throughout childhood to suppress our emotions and even to repress our emotions.

So repression is more a subconscious process where suppression is I feel something,

I see something and I go,

No,

I'm not going to think about that.

I'm not dealing with that right now.

Or my husband comes home and he smells like alcohol and he was supposed to be at an AA and I don't acknowledge it.

I suppress the fear that I feel.

This is very common for those of us who grow up feeling like what we think and what we feel is not important.

It's even stupid.

It's irrelevant.

And we feel guilty for noticing what we notice.

If you come from a dysfunctional home,

Then you've been gaslit by your parents,

Maybe even siblings,

Maybe even other family members where your reality and your noticing of what you notice is devalued.

You are chastised,

You become the scapegoat.

The truth tellers in the families are those who are really emotionally,

Immensely beat down and who are ostracized for telling the truth,

For seeing what they see.

Now on a psychological level,

This has such severe consequences because it's messing with our survival.

It is normal and it is organic and it is necessary for our personal development,

Our emotional and psychological and social development to feel like we belong.

And so when you are a child and you come from chaos and perhaps there's addiction in your family or narcissism,

Gambling,

You name it,

Or you have an emotionally immature mom or emotionally immature dad,

If they're fighting all the time,

So many children are growing up in chaos and so many of us are dealing with the long lasting effects of that type of chaos.

And we're walking around with these bleeding wounds and we don't even know it.

So how does it manifest?

Self-doubt,

Perfectionism,

Anxiety,

Depression,

Codependency,

A need to please,

A desire to turn oneself into a pretzel,

A need to edit oneself,

Walking around constantly in a fog,

Worrying about everyone else but yourself,

Feeling guilty for needing anything.

When you grow up in this type of a home,

You're conditioned to worry about everybody else but yourself.

And that could be maddening because how do you then go out into the world as a young woman or a young man and how do you then set a boundary?

You can't oftentimes,

And that's why you get pushed around or that's why you settle for a job that you don't like and you don't ask for a raise or you settle for relationships that are breadcrumb relationships.

So you live in an apartment that you don't want to live in,

You live in a neighborhood you don't want to live in,

But you don't know how to assert the self.

That is not your fault.

If you're looking around your life and you don't like what you see,

It could be a self-issue,

A loss of self-issue,

A loss of selfhood.

And it's not the end of the world because yourself is divine.

You can always get reconnected with yourself.

You can work on developing a connection with yourself.

You can work on integration.

You can work on healing the wounds that are responsible for this psychological break between you and the divine self.

Now what I wanted to do is help people understand why do I have such a hard time setting a boundary with someone that I love?

Boundaries are difficult.

And if you come from a dysfunctional home where you were disrespected,

You're not accustomed to boundary lines.

It's sort of like you live in a neighborhood and there's no property line.

Everybody's throwing their garbage over onto everybody else's lawn.

There's no linear mark that says that's your space and that's my space.

When it comes to emotions,

There's a violation of emotional space.

There's a violation of physical space.

So your brother is taking your clothes.

He's ripping up your clothes.

He's hanging out with his friends.

He's throwing up all over your clothes.

He doesn't care.

There's no consequence.

You've grown up in a home where no one really cared if you bought yourself some mac and cheese and stuck in the refrigerator and you were going to take it to work the next morning,

Your sister comes along and eats your mac and cheese.

There's just no ability to accept or respect that someone else is different from you and that that person is deserving of respect.

That person is deserving of being honored.

And so if you grew up in that home,

Then you don't have the data in your brain for a boundary.

It's just not part of your microchip.

It's not part of your data,

Which means that as you're growing up,

You could be in a relationship where you are being pushed around and you just don't have the microchip for boundaries.

I don't know what that looks like.

So you're going to have to learn to get that information.

So throughout your life,

You're really going to have to really figure that out.

In other words,

Like,

A,

Why do I have a hard time setting a boundary?

And B,

How do I develop the wherewithal to develop a boundary so that I can show up in my life,

A powerful person,

A real self,

A real I am person.

I am this.

I am that.

I like this.

I don't like that.

So setting boundaries is very difficult,

Especially with people that you love,

Because on an emotional level,

On a deep psychological level,

At a subconscious level,

And even at a neurological level,

You have been taught that boundaries equal abandonment.

You have been taught that boundaries equal punishment.

And so below the veil of consciousness,

Pain versus pleasure kicks in.

And no,

When you feel like your inner being tells you,

Uh-oh,

I've just been violated,

My brother's asking me for rent money again,

And he's a heroin addict,

And my mother's going to pressure me to give him money because I'm the only person that's working in the family,

The red flag comes up,

Which is divine guidance.

So your brain,

However,

Will override that divine guidance because it has been conditioned to fear a negative outcome for setting a boundary.

At a deep psychological level,

Your ability to feel safe has been threatened because feeling connected to these sick people,

And let's face it,

Lots of our families are sick.

But that doesn't mean that on a deep survival level,

At a neurological level,

At a physiological level,

I don't love these people and I don't want them to love me.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

And that's where we need to become individualized.

That's when we need to say,

I know this family system is sick,

But it's not my fault.

I didn't make them sick.

I'm a part of a sick system,

And I have to override from a conscious level.

That's why all of my work is rooted in raising your level of consciousness.

All my work is rooted in how can I help someone realize that there's some default subconscious level at play here that's keeping this person stuck?

How can I help people understand that below the veil of consciousness,

Their ability to be a strong I am is going to be hijacked by default settings of the brain,

And that's not your fault.

So if you're having trouble setting boundaries with someone that you love,

It's not your fault.

So if you have any shame around allowing people to push you around,

You have to understand that your brain may be hijacking your divine guidance system.

So how can we help you?

Once you understand that it's not your fault,

That it's difficult,

Then you stop berating yourself.

A lot of the negative self-talk starts to wane,

Like,

It's not my fault.

My brain knows that I love these people.

Me being loved by these people and being accepted by these people is tied to my survival brain.

It's literally hardwired into the amygdala,

Into the hippocampus.

It's your limbic system.

There's going to be a physiological change in you when you think,

Uh-oh,

I need to set a boundary.

What we're trying to do is get you to take control over that physiological change.

How?

Through metacognition,

The ability to think about the way that you think,

The ability to observe how you feel without a knee-jerk reaction.

It's called a pattern interrupt,

And consciousness can help you interrupt the pattern that your brain naturally follows,

And then your being changes or your being follows when you are triggered by the potential for needing to set a boundary.

It's really important that you understand what's happening.

You need to change the way that you're seeing this person.

Once your perception shifts of your inability to set a boundary,

Everything will follow.

Once your perception shifts of your place in that family,

Everything else will follow.

Once you understand and have compassion for your brain,

Your neurology,

For your inner being,

For your edge,

Your ego,

And even your superego,

Which is the moral aspect of you,

Your superego is just trying to get you to adhere to the sick norms that your family has conditioned you to believe that you need to follow in order to be a member of this sick family.

You really are coming out of level one consciousness,

Level two consciousness,

You're in a level three consciousness where you are actively changing the patterns.

When I got to a level three consciousness,

It was amazing because it was like,

Wow,

I really do get to change the cookie recipe here.

I don't like that my mother is mean to me.

I don't like that she's condescending.

I don't like that she puts me on the spot in front of family members and my father shakes his head like Switzerland,

Oh my God,

What's going on here?

He doesn't see that my mother is being passive aggressive and trying to embarrass me in front of my children.

She's trying to belittle me and make me feel small and that makes her feel better.

No one's going to accept that.

Well,

When that shift happened in me where I thought,

No,

My salvation is myself.

My salvation is me connecting to the divinity in myself.

There is no rescue boat coming as Melody Beatty says,

So I'm going to have to choose me.

And if I want to teach my children to choose them,

Because one day I'm not going to be here to diaper their bottoms,

They're going to have to figure this out on their own.

The world is full of darkness as well as it is light.

And so that's just a reality.

But if I want my children to be able to live as a self in this world,

Mommy was going to have to pick herself up from the bootstraps and figure this out.

And that meant I needed to individualize from my parents.

I needed to push them into their own backyard and define a boundary line that said,

This is my yard and you don't get to throw crap into it anymore.

What's the crap?

Your nasty comments,

Your put downs,

Your sarcasm,

You going around triangulating me against other people,

You telling me that I'm crazy,

You insisting that there's something wrong with me because I want a divorce,

You insisting that because I have any say at all about anything,

I define something,

I see something that I don't like.

That means that I am someone who likes drama.

Quite the contrary.

People who are saying,

Uh-oh,

There's a pothole up ahead are trying to avoid the family drama because if I roll into that pothole and I get another flat tire,

I'm three hours late,

Which is going to be drama.

But sick families and dysfunctional families,

They make the person who's saying,

Uh-oh,

That's an issue,

The wrong one.

They ostracize you and criticize you.

So that's the garbage I'm talking about.

I'm not letting it into my backyard anymore.

And so what you want to do is you want to identify clearly what the behavior is that you want them to change.

The second thing that you want to do is you want to communicate it clearly.

I don't like when you're passive aggressive.

I don't like when you call me at 2 a.

M.

I don't appreciate you not taking care of yourself and then you expecting me to pay your rent.

I don't want you to knock on my door at 4 a.

M.

In the morning with you and your buddies because the bar is closed and you want to hang out at my house.

Not doing that anymore.

So you want to identify the boundary very,

Very clearly.

The next thing you want to do is you want to tell the person what is going to happen.

In my case,

When I really started to get my strength and I understood,

Uh-oh,

I need to set a boundary with people that don't understand what a boundary is,

Who are used to punishing me,

Who rally around the narcissist in the family to support them against the person who's like,

No more.

Okay,

I need a boundary with these people.

I'm fighting for my life here,

Literally fighting for my life.

I let them know.

So if you yell,

If you raise your voice at me,

If I notice that you're sarcastic,

If I notice the put-downs,

If I notice that you're going to start devaluing me,

If you're going to talk down to me,

If you're going to embarrass me,

If you are going to put me in a position where I feel like I need to defend myself in front of family members,

I'm out of here.

If you start with me on the phone,

Click.

My brother today will tell you that he remembers that he could not speak to me at a point because when he was talking to me and I was doing this work,

I'd be like,

Dude,

I got to go.

Click.

He says,

You didn't care.

I said,

No,

I didn't care.

Because the minute I heard you starting to turn and do the thing that you did,

Which is blame shift,

Turn the conversation around,

I was done.

And so that's what you have to do.

I have to communicate.

If you do this,

I'm going to do that.

All right.

And the fourth thing that you want to do is you want to start paying attention to yourself.

You really need to self-care.

You really need to find things that are going to make you happy.

You know,

What makes me happy is personal development work.

What makes me happy is philosophy.

What makes me happy is working with clients.

What makes me happy is meditating in the woods.

What makes me happy is spending time with my family,

Spending time with people that I love.

I'm not a big dancer.

I'm not a big art person.

Who cares?

I'm a very introspective person.

I tend to want to and need to spend time by myself.

So connecting with other people is great,

But I need a lot of time to reboot myself.

And so I love that about myself.

I finally accept that about myself.

And we have to figure out what it is about ourselves that we love and then to nurture that and stop going against the natural divine grain.

Nothing is more important that we get back into touch with our natural divine emotional guidance system.

If you come from a dysfunctional home,

That ability to connect with your emotional divine system has been conditioned out of you.

And the problem with that,

Dear one,

Is that you become someone in society,

You're easy to manipulate.

And unfortunately,

Someone who has high narcissistic traits,

Somebody who might be a sociopath or a psychopath is going to very quickly understand,

Oh,

This girl or this guy does not have boundaries.

They'll do anything to keep me in their life.

And you don't want that.

So you want to show up as your true self.

You want to work on boundaries.

You want to start identifying clearly the toxic people in your life.

You want to clearly identify their behavior and clearly set boundaries with them,

Letting them know what is going to happen.

And then you have to stick to it.

And of course you have to self-care.

One major thing that I caution you to remember is that you cannot change anyone.

And so all you're trying to do when you're trying to set a boundary is to figure out what behavior they're engaging in that is not good for you.

And you're giving them an opportunity to say,

Listen,

If you want to be a part of my life,

This is what we can do.

And I want you to be a part of my life because I love you.

But if you don't do this,

I can't have you in my life because I'm finally at a point where I matter.

And I'm going to put myself first.

And if you violate these boundaries,

We cannot be a part of each other's lives.

And that would make me very sad,

But this ball is in your court.

So actually a boundary is the ability to give someone,

You're giving someone the ability to show that they care about you.

And by you expressing a boundary,

That's you really telling them how much that you care about them and that you don't want to lose them in your life and how they take it.

That is up to them.

Reviews

This was so amazingly clear on what I need to do to set a boundary! I appreciate this message and the power I seem to get from it that really makes me feel ‘ I can do this!’. Thank you!!

Thank you Lisa.

Boundaries were tough for me to put in place, but once I did, there was peace & freedom. Thank you.

Awesome, as usual.... thank you, Lisa!!

Wonderful