When being “the dependable one” turns into carrying an organization that was never yours to carry alone

Photo Credit: Chu Chu

Photo Credit: Vitaly Gariev

For years, I had some kind of serious drama or dysfunction at almost every place I worked.

At one restaurant, a chef screamed obscenities at me in front of a kitchen full of people, and I stayed and finished my shift. And I didn’t quit after that. At another point in my career, I worked at a restaurant where the owners’ son was sexually harassing women on the wait staff. When I told them about it, they eventually said, “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about that.” Before all that, I worked for a guy I dated who continually berated me for not knowing how to do things no one had taught me (which he knew). And I stayed, with him and on the job.

I worked for the same boss for 19 years and spent a lot of that time bending over backwards trying to get her to do things my way. I took on things that weren’t mine to do. I made excuses for her behavior. I buffered her from the consequences of her own actions.

And at the time, I thought all of this was about work. It wasn’t. I was bringing patterns I’d learned long before I ever got my first paycheck into every workplace I entered.

We all do this to some extent. We don’t walk through the office door, log onto Zoom or open our email and suddenly become people without histories. We bring our beliefs about authority, conflict, worth, belonging, responsibility and safety right along with our laptops.

And sometimes the qualities that make us fantastic employees are the very patterns that are costing us the most.

When your coping mechanisms get excellent performance reviews

One of the things I understand now that I didn’t understand for most of my career is that my codependence made me a fantastic employee in a lot of ways.

I could be counted on to get things done. I took initiative. I anticipated problems. I went above and beyond the call of duty. I was extremely accommodating. I often saw what needed to happen before anyone asked me to do it. And I got rewarded for those things.

That’s what makes workplace patterns particularly difficult to recognize. Some of the behaviors that developed as ways of protecting ourselves or earning our place can look remarkably similar to dedication, professionalism and leadership.

There’s nothing unhealthy about being conscientious, helpful or ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with caring deeply about your work.

The question is what’s underneath it. And what’s it doing to us.

Are you taking initiative because you genuinely want to contribute, or because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t?

Are you helping a coworker, or have you quietly taken responsibility for making sure they succeed?

Are you staying late because there’s an unusual situation that matters to you, or because you believe being a good employee means always being available?

Are you doing excellent work because excellence matters to you, or because criticism feels like a threat to your worth?

Are you accommodating because you’ve thoughtfully decided to be flexible, or because someone else’s disappointment feels intolerable?

The behavior can look exactly the same from the outside. But inside, it can be an entirely different experience.

Your boss may have more power, but that doesn’t make them your authority

One of my strongest workplace patterns was my reaction to authority figures. Bosses scared me.

Sometimes there was good reason for that. I worked for people who behaved terribly. Healthy boundaries don’t mean pretending that every workplace problem is something from your childhood. Sometimes the workplace really is dysfunctional.

But my history affected what I did when I encountered that dysfunction. I gave people in positions of authority far more authority over me than their jobs actually gave them.

A boss has legitimate authority in a workplace. They may decide what projects you work on, evaluate your performance, approve your time off or even determine whether you continue working there. But that doesn’t make them the authority on your worth.

They’re not the authority on what you’re allowed to feel. They don’t get to decide whether something that happened to you was acceptable. They aren’t automatically right because they’re above you on an organizational chart.

One of the most profound realizations I had after years of recovery and boundary work was this:
 

I’ve become my own authority figure.

That doesn’t mean I don’t respect legitimate authority. It means I don’t automatically abandon my own judgment in its presence. That’s a very different way to walk into a room.

Sometimes “I’m just being helpful” is over functioning

Another pattern I brought to work was taking responsibility for things that weren’t actually mine. If someone wasn’t doing something quickly enough, I might just do it for them. I often knew exactly how I thought something should be done. I believed my way was the right way.

For years, I thought this was competence. Sometimes it was. But sometimes it was control, or rescuing or anxiety disguised as helpfulness. Over functioning can be especially difficult to identify at work because organizations often benefit from it and we get rewarded for it. If you routinely pick up other people’s dropped balls, the balls don’t hit the floor.

That looks great.

Until you realize that nobody can see the actual problem because you keep preventing its consequences from becoming visible. 

I did this with my longtime boss. I buffered for her. If her behavior created a problem, I helped smooth it over. I made excuses. I absorbed the impact. I thought I was being helpful. What I was actually doing was preventing other people, especially my boss, from having the consequences of their own behavior.

That’s one of the biggest shifts boundaries have given me: I can be helpful without making myself responsible for things that aren’t mine.

“Why didn’t they know?” may be the wrong question

I once had a coworker I really liked who would walk into my office and start talking while I was working. So I started shutting my door. He opened it.

I put up a Do Not Disturb sign. He still came in.

And I said nothing.

Instead, I got increasingly annoyed and complained about him behind his back. I thought, What is the matter with this guy? Can't he see the sign?

Here’s what I know now: it was my boundary. But I was waiting for him to enforce it.

I could’ve said, “When my door is closed, please knock before coming in.” I didn’t.

This is one of the reasons I don’t teach boundaries as simply finding the perfect words to make other people behave differently. A boundary requires me to take responsibility for my part. That means recognizing what isn’t working for me, communicating when communication is needed, and deciding what I will do if the situation continues.

It’s much easier to be resentful about someone else's behavior than to risk the discomfort of directly addressing it. I know. I did that for decades.

Perfectionism can be a workplace safety strategy

I never thought of myself as a perfectionist. But I could write an email and reread it eight times before sending it. A spelling or grammatical error could feel like evidence of something much bigger than a spelling or grammatical error.

I also had difficulty asking questions. Growing up, one of the messages I internalized was that I was supposed to know things. Not knowing felt dangerous. Asking for help exposed the possibility that I might be flawed. 

Think about what that does in a workplace. You can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to make sure nobody ever discovers that you don’t know something. You overprepare, rehearse, reread or hesitate to ask for clarification.

Or maybe you try to figure things out yourself rather than risk looking incompetent. You may call it “professionalism.” But professionalism allows you to be human.

Healthy professionals ask questions. They make mistakes. They receive feedback. They learn things they didn’t know yesterday. They send an occasional email with a typo and survive the experience.

The farther I’ve gotten in my own healing, the more room I’ve made for being flawed. I call it being flawesome.

Criticism isn’t the same thing as danger

Criticism of my work used to feel incredibly personal. If you told me something I’d done could be better, my nervous system didn’t necessarily hear, This piece of work could be better. It could hear, There’s something wrong with you.

That distinction matters enormously.

It’s very difficult to receive feedback when feedback threatens your sense of self. You may become defensive, overexplain, obsess about the conversation afterward, work twice as hard to prove yourself, or decide the person giving the feedback doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Internal safety gives us another option.

I can hear something uncomfortable without immediately deciding it means something terrible about me. I can ask, Is there useful information here?

Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t.

But I can evaluate the feedback rather than automatically defend myself against it. That’s self-trust.

A high tolerance for dysfunction isn’t necessarily a strength

This was another major pattern for me. I could tolerate a lot. For years, I might’ve called that resilience. I could handle difficult people. I could work under pressure. I could make things work. But being capable of tolerating something doesn’t mean you should tolerate it. That’s something I wish I’d understood much earlier.

If chaos, emotional volatility, unreasonable expectations or disrespect feel familiar to you, you may be able to function remarkably well in environments that other people recognize much sooner as unhealthy.

Familiar doesn’t mean healthy. And your ability to survive dysfunction doesn’t obligate you to remain in it. 

Sometimes the boundary is speaking up.

Sometimes it’s no longer doing somebody else’s job.

Sometimes it’s asking your boss to help you prioritize instead of silently accepting another assignment when you’re already overloaded.

Sometimes it’s documenting what’s happening.

And sometimes the boundary is deciding you’re no longer willing to work there.

What are you bringing to work?

This isn’t about blaming your childhood for everything that happens at your job. And it’s definitely not about assuming every workplace problem is yours to fix by healing yourself. It’s about becoming curious about the patterns you bring with you.

Maybe you become a chameleon around powerful people or need praise to feel secure. Maybe you’re the person everyone can count on because being needed makes you feel valuable, or you’re terrified of disappointing your boss. Perhaps you avoid asking for help because you think competent people should already know what they’re doing.

Maybe you’re resentful that everyone keeps giving you more work, but you’ve never actually told anyone you don’t have the bandwidth. Or you keep rescuing coworkers and then get angry that they aren’t taking responsibility. It could be that you’re working incredibly hard to earn a place you already have.

None of this means there’s something wrong with you. It means there may be information here. It’s info, not ammo. Because once you can recognize the pattern, you have choices you didn’t have when you were simply reacting from it.

You can ask yourself: Is what I’m doing right now actually required by this situation, or is an old pattern running the show?

That question can change the way you work. It certainly changed the way I do.

And over the next few weeks, we’re going to keep exploring what happens when you stop automatically taking responsibility for everything around you, learn to speak up when something needs to change, and trust yourself even when someone at work doesn’t approve.

Because workplace boundaries aren’t only about learning how to say no. They’re about learning how to bring yourself to work without abandoning yourself once you get there.

This week, pay attention to one workplace behavior that feels almost automatic for you, especially one that earns you praise but costs you something. Instead of immediately trying to change it, get curious.

What am I afraid might happen if I stopped doing this?

The answer may tell you much more about your workplace boundaries than the behavior itself.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

When we started exploring transitions and resetting routines this month, we began with what happens when life doesn’t go according to plan.

We’ve looked at how something that initially feels like adversity can lead somewhere you never would’ve chosen for yourself. Then we explored how transitions can change your sense of who you are and actually make you more recognizable to yourself. And last week, we talked about aiming for the target instead of the trophy (i.e., building your life around what matters to you rather than becoming overly attached to one particular outcome).

There’s one more piece I want to explore before we leave this theme behind: How do you build a life that supports who you are now?

Because change doesn’t just ask us to adjust to new circumstances. Sometimes it asks us to reconsider the routines, practices and structures we’ve built our lives around.

And I’ve learned that the question isn’t always, How do I get back into my routine?

Sometimes the better question is, What does the life I’m living now need from me?

A routine isn’t just something you do

For a long time, I thought about routines primarily in terms of consistency. You figure out what works, and then you keep doing it.

I still believe there’s tremendous value in consistency. Some of the practices that have supported me most profoundly have been part of my life for years. But I understand their value differently now.

A good routine doesn’t just help you get things done. It helps you become and remain the person you want to be. For example, for years I did my gratitude journaling at night. Now I do it both in the morning and at night. I also read from several daily meditation books for years, and have dropped that practice in the last few months.

Good routines can help you hear yourself more clearly. They can remind you what’s important when everything around you feels urgent. They can help regulate your nervous system when you’re activated and they can help create internal safety. They can also make it easier to have your own back when guilt, fear, uncertainty or somebody else’s disappointment makes you want to abandon yourself.

That’s a very different definition of success than simply being disciplined.

And it’s one of the reasons our routines matter so much during transitions.

When life changes, your old routines may not fit anymore

Transitions disrupt things.

Sometimes they're enormous transitions: a relationship ends, you start a new job, someone you love dies, your health changes, your children leave home, you retire, you move.

Sometimes they're ordinary ones: summer ends, the school year begins, your work schedule changes, you start traveling more, or something that used to happen on Wednesdays now happens on Tuesdays.

Even positive changes can throw us off because our routines are usually attached to the structure of the life we had before.

That's where I think we can get ourselves into trouble: We assume the goal is to get back to what we were doing before.

But what if you're not supposed to go back? What if the question isn't, How do I get back into my routine?

What if it's, What does the life I'm living now need from me?

That's a question I couldn't have asked early in my recovery when I was establishing a more structured life because I was still learning how much my routines had changed me.

My routines aren't rules I use to control myself

I've spent much of my life trying to control things - other people, outcomes, what people thought of me, what might happen next. Even my own feelings.

I know now that control doesn't create the kind of safety I was looking for. And my routines can very easily become another form of control if I’m not careful.

You can create an elaborate morning routine and then feel like you've failed because you didn't complete it. You can turn exercise into another obligation. Meditation can become something you're "bad at." A spiritual practice can become another item on your list of things you should be doing instead of a way to connect to something greater than yourself and the relief that comes from knowing you’re not alone.

That's not what I want my routines to do for me. I want them to support me. That's a significant distinction.

I didn’t develop supportive routines so I could prove I'm disciplined enough, productive enough or good enough. I developed them because I've learned something about what helps me function well.

I'm not trying to force myself into submission anymore. Instead, I'm learning how to take good care of myself.

Some of my foundational practices haven't changed

My spiritual life is still foundational to how I live. I make consistent conscious contact with my Higher Power throughout the day. Prayer, meditation, gratitude, journaling and reflection aren't things I do because somebody told me I should. They're things I've learned help me remember that I don't have to run the whole damn universe!

That's particularly important for someone who spent a lot of years believing it was her job to manage everything and everyone.

I also still move my body. I've always liked that phrase better than "exercise" because so many of us have ideas about what counts as exercise or what we should be doing. Moving my body helps me physically, of course, but I understand much more now about what it does for my nervous system, my energy and my ability to think clearly. Sometimes what I need isn't to figure something out. I need to get out of my chair. The often repeated phrase from recovery comes to mind: Move a muscle change a thought.

And recovery remains woven into my life.

Recovery is the best paying part time job I'd ever had. The return I've received on the time and energy I've invested in recovery is immeasurable. But even here, something has changed. Recovery isn't simply something I do anymore, it's how I live.

The deeper routine is returning to yourself

This may be the biggest thing I've learned since in the last few years of recovery.

There are the routines we can see: meditation, meetings, prayer, movement, journaling, reading, sleep, meals, whatever practices support us.

And then there are the internal practices underneath them. 
 

• Noticing when I'm activated and pausing to stabilize my system.
• Asking myself what's actually happening rather than immediately believing the story my nervous system is telling me. 
• Separating what belongs to me from what belongs to someone else.
• Recognizing when I'm analyzing, predicting, fixing or managing another person instead of paying attention to my own behavior.
• Allowing someone else to be disappointed without making their disappointment an emergency.
• Paying attention when something inside me says “nope!”
• Letting discomfort be uncomfortable without automatically interpreting it as danger.

These have become practices too. In fact, they may be some of the most important routines I have. Because I don't want to build a life in which I'm incredibly consistent about meditation and exercise while continuing to override myself in my relationships.

I don't want a morning routine that looks fantastic on paper if I spend the rest of the day abandoning myself. The external practices are there to support the internal ones.

Your routines should serve your life, not the other way around

Everyone has to find their own constellation of daily habits. There's no perfect morning routine that works for everyone all the time. There's no magic combination of habits that will make you emotionally healthy. And there's certainly no prize for doing what works for somebody else.

You have to pay attention to yourself.
 

• What helps you feel grounded?
• What helps you hear yourself clearly?
• What makes it easier to respond rather than react?
• What helps you remember what's true when you're activated?
• What helps you take your own needs seriously?
• What helps you come back to yourself after you've gotten knocked off course?

Those answers are information. And they may change. In fact, they probably will change over time.

This is especially important to remember during a transition. A routine that supported you beautifully in one season of your life may be completely impractical in another. That doesn't mean you've failed at the routine. It may mean the routine has finished doing its job and you get to create a new one.

Resetting doesn't mean starting over

I think that's what I most want you to take from this month's exploration of transitions. We tend to talk about getting "back on track," and I understand why. Sometimes we really do need to recommit to practices we've let slide.

But sometimes there isn't an old track to get back onto. You've changed. Your circumstances have changed. What matters to you has changed. What you know about yourself has changed.

So resetting a routine isn't necessarily about recreating the version of your life that existed before the transition. It's about taking everything you've learned and asking what will support the person you are becoming.

You aren't starting from scratch. You're starting from experience. And that's very different.

Maybe your next routine is smaller than the old one. Maybe it's gentler. Maybe it's more structured. Maybe something that used to be essential isn't anymore. Maybe you're finally ready for something you couldn't sustain before.

The point isn't to create the perfect routine. The point is to create practices that help you live in alignment with what matters to you. I realized in the last couple of years that I’d become hypervigilant about person development, spiritual development and business development. So I’ve backed way off on all that stuff. I’m doing more resting, relaxing and reading for pleasure instead of constantly needing to learn stuff.

Ultimately, the habits that have changed my life aren't valuable because I've been doing them for a long time. They're valuable because, again and again, they help me come back to myself. And that's a pretty good place from which to build whatever comes next.

If you're in a season of transition, consider looking at the routines and practices you're carrying with you and asking whether they're supporting the life you're living now.

You might also ask yourself: What helps me come back to myself when life knocks me off course?

You don't need a ridiculously long list. Start there.

Photo Credit: Balint Mendlik

There’s something about transitions that makes us want to figure everything out: I want to know now how things are going to play out!

What should my new routine look like? What should I be doing differently? How am I going to make this work? What do I need to change?

Those are useful questions. But I’ve come to believe there’s a more important question underneath all of them:
 

What am I actually trying to create?

This month, we’ve been talking about transitions and resetting routines. We started by looking at how even difficult or unwanted transitions can create opportunities we couldn’t have anticipated. Then we explored how transitions can change the way we see ourselves (our identity) and help us become more recognizable to ourselves.

Now I want to talk about what happens when we begin building what comes next.

Because one of the things I’ve learned is that it’s very easy to organize your life around what you’re trying to avoid rather than what you actually want. And if you want to live a life on purpose, it makes much more sense to focus on what you want than on what you don’t want. “What are you going toward?” not “What are you going away from?”

When your focus is on what you don’t want

I never realized how much of my life was oriented around what I didn’t want until I got into recovery.

I’d done a ton of personal development work before that, and I’m a very introspective person. But recovery helped me see how much time I spent imagining worst-case scenarios, replaying difficult events from the past, anticipating future problems, and trying to prevent other people from being unhappy with me.

In other words, my attention was constantly going outward.

What is she/he/they thinking? What are all the shitty things that could happen? What are the 50 million things I can do to prevent those things from happening? How do I contort myself so they won’t be disappointed? What can go wrong, how do I prevent it and what do I do if something does go wrong??

I didn’t understand then that you can’t create internal safety by focusing externally.

For much of my life, my “gravitational pull” was outside of me. I was paying far more attention to other people’s feelings, opinions, reactions, expectations, and needs than I was to my own internal experience. In fact, I often wasn’t paying any attention at all to my internal experience.

That’s one reason transitions can be so difficult. They destabilize us. When the familiarity of our lives changes, we often become even more focused on trying to predict and control what’s going to happen next than on the present moment and our internal world.

But uncertainty doesn’t just contain the possibility that something will go wrong.
 

In uncertainty lies hope.

Every good thing that has ever happened to us also came out of a future we couldn’t predict.

So rather than using all our energy trying to prevent an unwanted future, we can start asking what kind of future we want to move toward.

Aim for the target, not the trophy

Years ago, I heard a metaphor from Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies that stayed with me:
 

The archer focuses on the target she wants to hit, not the trophy she’s trying to earn.

Imagine an archer standing there with her bow and arrow, but instead of looking at the target, she’s staring at the trophy sitting off to the side.

She really wants that trophy. But if she’s looking at the trophy instead of the target, she’s probably not going to hit the target.

The trophy is the result. It’s not where you aim.

I can see now how often I used to aim at trophies. I wanted people to like me. I wanted people to think I was a good person. I wanted approval (but I honestly didn’t even realize that’s what was motivating me). I wanted relationships to work out. I wanted other people to be happy with me.

And because those were the outcomes I was focused on, I tried to control them.

I said yes when I really wanted to say no. I pretended things were okay when they weren’t. I did things I didn’t particularly like because somebody else liked them. I morphed myself around other people and then eventually resented them for the shape I’d contorted myself into.

Years after I stopped drinking alcohol, I realized I hadn’t even developed my own preference for what beverages I liked to drink. I drank what the person I was dating drank.

That’s how much of Barb was up for negotiation.

Now I can see that it wasn’t simply that I needed better boundaries - I needed a stronger relationship with myself.

Boundaries helped me find the target

Boundary building was one of the ways I developed that relationship.
For a long time, I thought boundaries were primarily about figuring out what I would and wouldn’t tolerate. But eventually I realized that the way I knew where I needed boundaries was by paying attention to what mattered to me.

If health matters to you, you build your life in ways that support, promote and uphold your value for health. If family matters to you, you make choices about your time that allow you to be present with your family. If creativity matters to you, you need room in your life to create. If rest matters to you, you can’t continually give away every available hour and hope rest somehow happens.

That’s why I’ve often described boundary building as living on purpose.

But I’d like to expand on that now. Living on purpose isn’t only about setting boundaries around what matters. It’s about becoming internally oriented enough to know what matters in the first place.

That means learning to hear yourself clearly. It means noticing what you want, what you need, what you value, what feels right to you, and what doesn’t. It means taking your internal signals seriously instead of automatically overriding them because someone else wants something different.

The boundary is sometimes the action that comes afterward. The deeper work is staying connected to yourself long enough to know what action you want to take.

Transitions give us a chance to choose again

This is one reason transitions can be so valuable.

When our circumstances change, our routines often have to change with them. And while that can be inconvenient or uncomfortable, it also gives us an opportunity we don’t always get when life is running on autopilot.

We get to reconsider what we’re aiming at.

A routine that worked beautifully three years ago may not fit who you are today. Something you once believed you had to do may no longer matter to you. Something you used to tolerate may now feel completely unacceptable. Something you didn’t value enough to make time for may have become one of your highest priorities.

That doesn’t mean the old version of you was wrong. It means you’ve changed.

The temptation during a transition is to recreate stability as quickly as possible. We want to get the new schedule figured out, establish the new routines, and feel settled again.

But before you start rebuilding everything, it may be worth asking:
 

What do I want this next version of my life to support?

Not: How do I make sure nobody is disappointed in me? Or how do I prove I can handle all of this? Or how do I keep everything exactly the way it was before circumstances changed?

And not even: What should my new routine be?

Start with the target: 

Who do I want to be in this season of my life? 
What matters to me now? 
How do I want to feel in my own life? 
What relationships do I want to nurture? 
What do I want more room for? 
What am I no longer willing to sacrifice?

Then you can begin building routines, boundaries, and choices that support those answers.

You don’t have to control the outcome (in fact, you can’t)

There’s another important difference between how I understood this years ago and how I understand it today. Focusing on what you want doesn’t mean that if you think positively enough, you’ll somehow attract exactly what you want into your life. We don’t have that kind of control.

You can aim carefully and still miss. You can communicate clearly and someone can misunderstand you. You can be thoughtful and dependable and someone can dislike you. You can make a wise decision and have an outcome you didn’t anticipate.

The point isn’t to guarantee the trophy. The point is to know where you’re aiming.

If I want healthy relationships, my target isn’t getting someone to stay. My target is showing up honestly, communicating what’s OK and not OK with me, staying connected to myself, and allowing the other person to decide what they’re going to do with that.

If I want a meaningful life, my target isn’t making sure everything works out the way I planned. It’s making choices that are consistent with what matters to me.

If I want internal safety, my target isn’t creating a life in which nobody ever gets upset with me and nothing uncertain ever happens. It’s becoming someone who knows she can have her own back when those things happen.

That distinction has changed everything for me. I’m much less interested these days in controlling the trophy. I want to keep my eyes on the target.

And when life changes, as it inevitably will, I can ask myself again: What matters to me now? What am I trying to create? And what would it look like to build my life around that?

Maybe that’s one of the greatest gifts transitions give us. They interrupt the life we’ve been living long enough for us to decide whether it’s still the life we want to build.

Want to go deeper?

If this brought something up for you, spend a few minutes thinking about the transition you’re in right now, even if it seems relatively small.

Ask yourself:

What am I currently organizing my life around avoiding?

What do I actually want instead?

What matters to me in this season that may not have mattered as much before?

If I stopped focusing on the trophy, what would my target be?

Your answers can tell you a lot about the routines, choices, and boundaries that belong in whatever comes next.

Last week, we explored how unexpected changes can become detours in our lives, even when we didn’t choose them and would never have asked for them. This week, we’re moving into the identity questions that transitions often bring to the surface.

• Who am I now?
• What do I want at this point in my life?
• What matters to me if I’m no longer arranging my life around the role, relationship, job, responsibility, or routine that used to define me?

These questions can be unsettling, especially if you’ve spent your life revolving around other people and their needs. Maybe you became so accustomed to anticipating what others need, keeping everyone else comfortable, or being whoever a situation required you to be that you never discovered what was actually true for you.

Then something changes. Your children leave home. A relationship ends. You retire or change careers. Your body develops different needs. You enter recovery. You lose someone or something that helped you understand who you were. Even a transition you chose can leave you feeling untethered when an identity that felt like so much of the core of who you are shifts.

Maybe you think you’re supposed to know who you are before you decide what comes next. But often, you discover who you are by beginning to make those decisions.

Your identity isn’t something you simply “uncover”

In the ACA program, the first promise of recovery is, “We will discover our real identities...”

I’ve come to believe that we don’t only discover our identities. We also create them.

The word “discover” suggests that your real identity already exists in its entirety, hidden under all those survival strategies you developed. If you could just let go of the people pleasing, perfectionism, caretaking, morphing, and self-abandonment, you’d find one complete, authentic self waiting underneath. Nope!

I definitely believe there are parts of us that have always been there. Certain qualities, interests, sensitivities, and ways of seeing the world may have been present since childhood. But if you grew up in a dysfunctional environment, you may not have had the safety, support, or freedom to develop those parts of yourself to their fullest, or to bring other parts of you to fruition.

You learned to adapt instead.

Maybe you became easygoing because it felt unsafe to have preferences because that created conflict. Maybe you were exceptionally helpful because being needed felt safer than having needs. Maybe you learned to agree with whoever was in front of you because feeling like you  belong seemed to require you morphing yourself into someone else.

Those adaptations can become so familiar that they feel like your personality. But sometimes what you’ve been calling your identity is actually a collection of strategies you developed to maintain connection and avoid danger. One of my clients said, “I help people. I am a helper person. That’s who I am.” Actually, it’s what she does, not who she is. And that identity was crippling her.

A transition can disrupt the strategies we developed to survive and feel connected to others. That’s one reason why transitions feel so disorienting. They don’t only change the circumstances of your life. They can loosen the roles and patterns that have defined you.

You’re allowed to find out what’s true now

People often tell me, “I don’t know who I am,” or “I don’t even know what I like anymore.”

That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them. It often means they’ve spent years contorting themselves around other people’s preferences, expectations, emotions, and needs. Their center of gravity has been outside themselves for so long that turning inward feels unfamiliar and unsafe, and frankly, selfish.

If that’s true for you, you don’t need to pressure yourself to produce a definitive answer to the enormous question, “Who am I?”

Start smaller.

What do I like and not like?

What feels right to me?

What drains me?

What am I no longer willing to participate in?

What do I want more of in this season?

What matters enough that I want my life to reflect it?

You probably won’t know the answers immediately, especially if you’ve rarely asked these questions or haven’t felt free to answer them honestly. But keep asking. Identity develops through experience. You make an educated guess about what you want, try something, and notice what happens inside you.

You’re not taking a test. You’re gathering information.

Boundaries help you get to know yourself

This is one of the reasons building healthy boundaries was so important in discovering and creating my own identity. Boundary building is an experimental process. You make decisions based on what you believe is right for you, then you learn from the experience.

I remember one of the first times I was consciously aware that I was setting a boundary. I don’t remember the exact situation, but I remember the boundary. It was way too harsh.

I didn’t know that before I set it. If I’d known it was going to be too harsh, I wouldn’t have set that particular boundary; I would have chosen something different. I learned it was too harsh because I tried it and paid attention to how it felt. That experience helped me understand the kind of person I wanted to be when setting boundaries. I wanted to protect what mattered to me without being a dick about it.

The boundary wasn’t evidence that I was “bad” at boundaries. It was part of how I developed discernment.

This is an important distinction because people who don’t trust themselves often believe they have to get every decision right the first time. They want to identify the perfect boundary before expressing it. But self-trust doesn’t come from making flawless decisions. It comes from knowing you’ll remain connected to yourself, pay attention to what you learn, and make an adjustment when something doesn’t feel right. You won’t give up on yourself just because things didn’t turn out the way you hoped.

Some of your boundaries will be firm and consistent. I don’t eat sugar, regardless of the circumstances or who’s involved. Other boundaries depend on the person, the situation, my capacity, and what else is happening in my life. I may be willing to give someone a ride one day and not another. That doesn’t mean my boundary is inconsistent. It means I’m responding to what’s true for me in the moment rather than following a rigid rule.

Healthy boundaries require you to keep checking in with yourself. That ongoing relationship with yourself is what allows your identity to become clearer.

Resentment may be telling you where you’ve disappeared

Sometimes you already know what you want, but you aren’t communicating it.

Before recovery, I had a boyfriend who preferred eating at diners and buffets. I didn’t mind those places occasionally, but I also liked vegetarian food, ethnic cuisine, and fine dining from time to time. Instead of saying that, I continually deferred to him.

Then I resented him for the choices I kept allowing him to make.
At the time, my attention was focused on what he was doing wrong. Now I can see that my resentment contained important information. I had abandoned my preferences and expected him to somehow recognize and protect something I wasn’t expressing.

That doesn’t mean resentment always indicates that you’re the problem. Sometimes someone truly is treating you badly or trampling over a boundary you’ve clearly communicated. But resentment can also show the places where you’re overriding yourself, failing to speak up, or expecting someone else to take responsibility for a choice that belongs to you.

The question isn’t only, “Why does this person keep choosing the diner?”

It’s also, “Why do I keep acting as though I don’t get a vote?”

Each time you tell the truth about what you want, you strengthen your relationship with yourself. You begin shifting your center of gravity from other people’s experiences back to your own internal world.

Your values give your changing identity a foundation

Transitions can change your roles, routines, relationships, abilities, responsibilities, and priorities. Your values can help you decide what you want the next version of your life to support.

Years ago, I taught that your purpose is to live in alignment with your values. I still believe that, but I understand it more deeply now. Your values don’t hand you a fixed identity or a perfect plan. They give you a direction to move in while your life and identity continue evolving. They’re like guide posts or guard rails.

If health is one of your values, living in alignment with it may once have meant going to the gym several times a week. During a different season, it may mean resting, going to medical appointments, changing how you eat, or choosing movement that works with your current body. The value remains important, but the way you live it can change.

This is especially important during transitions. You don’t have to keep performing an old version of yourself to prove that your values are real. You’re allowed to ask what those values look like now.

You’re also allowed to discover that something you organized your life around doesn’t matter as much as it used to. That doesn’t mean your former life was false or wasted. It means you’re paying attention.

Authenticity isn’t maintaining the same preferences, roles, or routines forever. It’s staying connected to what’s true for you as those things change.

You become yourself by staying with yourself

For years, I thought becoming authentic meant finally figuring out who I was and then confidently presenting that person to the world.

Now I think it’s more relational than that.

Authenticity is your willingness to stay connected to your internal reality, especially when someone else doesn’t like it. It’s hearing what your body, emotions, values, and experience are telling you without immediately talking yourself out of it. It’s not turning against yourself because your truth creates disappointment, tension, or uncertainty for yourself or others.

That’s why internal safety is such an important part of identity development. If it doesn’t feel safe to disappoint people, make a mistake, change your mind, or be different from the people around you, you’ll keep adapting yourself to preserve external harmony.

You can’t create internal safety by focusing entirely on what’s happening outside you. You create it by repeatedly returning to yourself and responding to what you find with care, curiosity, and respect.

This is how boundaries contribute to something much larger than saying no. They help you develop a secure attachment to yourself. They help you stop believing that belonging and connection require self-abandonment. They allow you to participate in relationships without disappearing inside them.

Over time, you don’t simply become better at setting boundaries. You become more recognizable to yourself.

Let this transition introduce you to yourself

If you’re in a season when you don’t know who you are or what comes next, you don’t need to force an answer. Instead, pay attention to what this transition is revealing.

Notice what you miss and what you don’t. Notice what brings relief, what creates energy, and what you’re no longer willing to tolerate. Notice the preferences you’ve dismissed as unimportant and the desires you’ve been afraid to admit. Try something new, gather information, then make an adjustment.

Your identity isn’t a final destination you have to reach before you can begin creating your next chapter. It emerges as you make choices, learn from them, and build a life that reflects what matters to you now.

Next week, we’ll look more closely at values and how they can help you decide what you want your next season to support. From there, we’ll move into building routines that keep you connected to the person you’re becoming.

Want to go learn more?

Explore my free Internal Safety Resource Pack for practices that help you stay connected to yourself when guilt, discomfort, or other people’s reactions make that difficult.

Self-trust isn’t built by always making the right decision. It’s built by staying on your own side after you make one.

When people talk about self-sabotage, they often describe it as though some inexplicable part of them is determined to ruin their lives.

Why did I ignore what I knew about that person?

Why did I agree to something I didn’t want to do?

Why did I talk myself out of an opportunity I wanted?

Why do I keep making choices that hurt me?

I used to think about self-sabotage this way too. But through my recovery, my reparenting journey, and years of helping people learn to create boundaries, I’ve come to understand it differently.

What we call self-sabotage is often self-abandonment.

That distinction matters because sabotage sounds like something is wrong with you. Self-abandonment tells you what is actually happening: at the moment when you most need your own care, protection, honesty, or support, you leave yourself.

You override what you know. You dismiss what you feel. You ignore what your body is telling you. You make someone else’s comfort more important than your internal reality. You organize your decisions to avoid guilt, disapproval, conflict, or rejection instead of around what is true for you.

You may believe the problem is that you don’t know how to make good decisions. But often, the deeper problem is that you haven’t yet learned how to remain connected to yourself while you make them.

Self-abandonment was once an intelligent strategy

Many of us learned to abandon ourselves long before we had language for what we were doing. No one sat us down and said, “If you want to belong here, you’ll need to stop listening to yourself.” We learned it through experience.

It didn’t feel safe to have needs, feelings, preferences, or limits. Staying in relationship and connection with others, especially the adults caring for us, depended on being agreeable, useful, undemanding, successful, quiet, or easy to manage. You likely learned that other people’s emotions mattered more than yours, or that telling the truth about your experience created conflict that you weren’t equipped to handle.

Self-abandonment helped you preserve whatever connection, predictability, or safety was available to you. It was an intelligent adaptation to circumstances you couldn’t control. Until it wasn’t.

Your nervous system and thinking patterns that developed back has not have been updated yet if that’s still happening. If you still react as though someone’s disappointment could threaten your belonging, or as though making a mistake could leave you completely unprotected, it’s still happening. A present-day decision touches an old “fault line,” your survival response activates, and suddenly you become disconnected from what you know as an adult. You revert to childhood reactions and behavior patterns.

This is why you can understand boundaries intellectually and still override yourself in the moment. It’s also why another boundary script isn’t always the answer. The problem may not be that you don’t know what to say. The problem may be that your system still believes it’s dangerous to remain on your own side while someone else is upset.

The fear beneath so many decisions

Many decisions that appear to be about work, relationships, family, money or time are quietly organized around one question:

What do I need to do so I won’t be abandoned?
 

We say yes because we’re afraid someone will withdraw, reject or abandon us. We stay in situations that aren’t good for us because leaving feels more frightening than staying. We trust people who have repeatedly shown themselves to be untrustworthy because believing what we see might require us to act. We overexplain our decisions because we hope that, if the other person understands us, they won’t disapprove of us – which feels intolerable.

Sometimes we don’t go after what we want because failing would confirm our greatest fears about ourselves. Sometimes we don’t take care of basic needs because urgency feels more legitimate than rest, food, pleasure, or attention to the body. We keep organizing our lives around a future version of ourselves while abandoning the person who is living our life today.

These choices can look very different from the outside, but the internal pattern is the same. We leave ourselves in an attempt to prevent someone or something else from leaving us.

The painful irony is that self-abandonment doesn’t protect us from abandonment. It ensures that we are already abandoned, because the real version of us isn’t fully present in our own life or relationships.

You can’t create internal safety by focusing externally

For most of my life, my “center of gravity” was outside me. I paid close attention to what other people felt, wanted, thought, and needed. I tried to create a sense of safety by managing what was happening around me with other people, places and things.

Over time, I began repeatedly asking myself, “What’s going on for me?” I learned to notice my internal signals before immediately turning my attention outward. Slowly, my center of gravity moved inside me.

That is what internal safety means to me now. It doesn’t mean I always feel calm, certain, or fearless. It means I can experience discomfort without automatically abandoning myself to make it stop.

I can feel guilt without treating guilt as proof that I’ve done something wrong. I can let someone be disappointed without reversing a decision that is right for me. I can discover that I trusted the wrong person without attacking myself for failing to know sooner. I can make an imperfect choice and remain kind to myself.

Internal safety cannot be created through enough approval, reassurance, control, or certainty. It is built from the inside out, each time you stay with yourself in the presence of emotion. Each time you don’t abandon yourself to your old patterns.

Self-trust is NOT trusting yourself to get everything “right”

When people say they don’t trust themselves, they often mean they’re afraid of making the wrong decision. They want a guarantee that they won’t regret their choice, hurt someone, miss an opportunity, or discover later that they misunderstood the situation.

But self-trust isn’t certainty about the future. It’s believing that you will remain with yourself regardless of what the future brings. You’ll stay connected to what’s true for you and not abandon your truths in preference of others.

You can trust yourself to notice when new information changes what you know. You can trust yourself to change your mind when changing your mind is appropriate. You can trust yourself to repair what you can, learn from what happened, and make a different choice next time. Most importantly, you can trust yourself not to turn against yourself simply because a decision didn’t produce the outcome you hoped for.

The goal is not to become someone who never makes an imperfect decision. The goal is to become someone who doesn’t disappear when life becomes difficult.
That is a very different kind of self-trust.

Becoming your own loving parent

One of the deepest parts of my recovery has been learning to become my own loving parent. At its most basic, reparenting means learning to treat yourself with the care, protection, patience, and guidance you may not have consistently received when you were young.

A loving parent doesn’t demand that a child predict the future perfectly before making a decision. They help the child consider what they know, make the best choice available, and respond to whatever happens next.

They don’t say, “I can’t believe you didn’t know better.” They say, “Now we know more. What do you need?”

They don’t withdraw love when the child disappoints someone. They say, “You’re allowed to make a choice that another person doesn’t like.”

They don’t shame fear or insist that it disappear before the child acts. They say, “I know this is scary. I’m here, and we’ll do it together.”

This is how you begin building a secure attachment to yourself. You stop requiring yourself to be certain, fearless, or perfect before you offer yourself support. You become the person who stays.

And when you stop abandoning yourself, the fear of other people abandoning you begins to lose its power. You may still feel grief, rejection, or disappointment when a relationship changes. But you’re no longer depending on that relationship to keep you from being completely alone, because you haven’t left yourself.

Boundaries are one way we practice staying

This is where boundaries remain central to my work, even as my work has expanded into internal safety, self-trust, attachment, emotional regulation, and reparenting.

A boundary is not only something you communicate to another person. It’s a decision (yes, a decision) not to abandon yourself in the presence of emotion.

You stay connected to what you know while someone disagrees with you. You remember your values while guilt tells you to change course. You allow another person to have their experience without making their feelings the deciding factor in your decision-making. You listen when your body, resentment, exhaustion, or anxiety tells you that something isn’t working.

Sometimes the boundary is spoken aloud. Sometimes it is entirely internal. It might sound like, “This feeling is not a command,” “I don’t have to decide this right now,” or “I’m not going to attack myself for being afraid.”

Boundaries create healthy separation with connection. They allow you to remain connected to other people without disconnecting from yourself. In that sense, every boundary that holds is an act of attachment repair in real time.

The decision beneath all the other decisions

Throughout this month, we’ve explored what happens when you don’t recognize that you have choices, how control can masquerade as self-trust, and why believing what you’re already seeing matters more than finding someone who can guarantee you’ll never be hurt.

Underneath all of those ideas is one foundational decision:

Will I stay with myself?

Will I stay when I don’t know what will happen? …when someone doesn’t like my choice? … when I discover I was wrong? ...when guilt, fear, shame, or uncertainty arrives?

You won’t do this perfectly. No one does (including me, though I’ve gotten much, much better). Sometimes you’ll realize after the fact that you overrode yourself, dismissed what you knew, or made fear the deciding factor. That realization doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It is an opportunity to return to yourself

You can pause and ask, “Where did I leave myself, and what would it look like to come back?” or “What kind of support do I need from myself to handle this differently next time?”

Every time you return instead of attacking yourself, you become a little more trustworthy to yourself. Every time you honor an internal signal, tell yourself the truth, or allow another person to be disappointed, your system gathers evidence that staying connected to yourself is survivable.

Eventually, self-trust becomes less about knowing which decision is right and more about knowing who will be there afterward.

You will.

If you want to go deeper, download my free Internal Safety Resource Pack if you want practical support for staying connected to yourself when guilt, fear, or someone else’s reaction makes a boundary difficult to hold.

Photo Credit: Matt Bango

One of the most important things I learned about boundaries came from recovery meetings. And honestly, when I first encountered it, I hated it.

It’s called the “no cross-talk” rule. When someone shares during a meeting, you don’t interrupt them. You don’t comment on what they said. You don’t give advice. You don’t tell them what they should do. You don’t try to fix their problem, and you don’t comfort them.

When I first heard this, it seemed cold and uncaring. If someone was crying, we weren’t supposed to hand them tissues. If someone was struggling, we weren’t supposed to jump in with advice. If someone shared something painful, we weren’t supposed to reassure them or tell them everything would be okay.

I just didn’t understand how this was supportive. And wasn’t this supposed to be a support group?

What I eventually learned is that the rule isn’t about being distant. It’s about respecting boundaries. More specifically, it’s about allowing people to have their own experience.

My Job Wasn’t What I Thought It Was

Before recovery, I thought being caring meant getting involved.

Read the rest at your own pace here

Alex Moliski

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about self-care is that it’s mostly about adding things to your life: bubble baths, massages, vacations, pedicures, yoga classes, meditation apps. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things, most people don’t actually need more self-care activities. They need to stop overriding themselves.

They need to stop saying yes when their whole body is saying no. They need to stop performing participation while secretly counting the minutes until they can leave. They need to stop exhausting themselves trying to keep the peace while quietly abandoning themselves in the process. That’s where self-care boundaries come in, because real self-care isn’t just about what you add to your life. It’s also about what you stop forcing yourself to endure.

I was reminded of this when I reread a message from a former client. She had gone away with family for Thanksgiving and texted me something that perfectly captures what healthy boundaries actually make possible. She said:

“I just ended up backing out of a family hike because I hate hiking and needed alone time. I was able to let them know I just need some alone time, and they should go on without me. And it was so freeing, and I’m so enjoying soaking up these quiet hours alone.

If I hadn’t done this, I don’t think I would have been very pleasant on the hike or at dinner tonight. But now I’ll be rested up and ready to talk all evening. Thank you for teaching me how to do this gracefully.”

I love this story because on the surface, it sounds so simple. She skipped a hike. But underneath that decision was an enormous internal shift. She stopped abandoning herself in real time, and honestly, that’s what self-care boundaries are really about. Not controlling other people, becoming rigid or refusing to participate in life. And not turning into someone who only does what they want all the time. It’s about learning how to stay connected to yourself while you’re making decisions.

That means being able to hear yourself clearly. Being able to notice your own limits before resentment takes over. Being able to remember what’s true for you, even when other people are disappointed, confused, or doing things differently than you would. 

For many people, especially women who grew up in dysfunctional families, this is incredibly difficult because we learned that being “good” meant going along to get along, being easy-going, low maintenance, always available, and being accommodating. So we override ourselves constantly and call it being “nice.”

But eventually that creates exhaustion, resentment, irritability, emotional shutdown, and disconnection from ourselves as well as others. Then we wonder why we don’t even know what we want anymore. It’s because we’ve spent years leaving ourselves.

What struck me most about my client’s message was not that she hated hiking. It was that she finally allowed that truth to matter.

Read the rest at your own pace here

Not everything that looks like self-care actually nourishes you.

Sometimes what we call “self-care” is actually avoidance. Sometimes what looks like rest is shutdown. And sometimes what feels like helping is really self-abandonment in disguise.

And that’s why I think one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is this:

What’s my motivation here?

Not: “Is this good or bad?”

Not: “Would other people approve of this?”

Not even: “Does this technically count as self-care?”

But: “What is this actually doing for me emotionally?”

That question changed my life.

Years ago, when I first started learning about codependence and recovery, I heard someone say that the difference between healthy helping and rescuing behavior is your motivation. At first, I didn’t understand that at all.

I thought I was just a nice, helpful, generous, and thoughtful person. What I couldn’t yet see was that much of my helping behavior was driven by anxiety, fear, approval-seeking, and an unconscious attempt to control outcomes (esp. what others thought of me) so I could feel emotionally safe.

I wasn’t helping because I simply wanted to help. I was helping because I needed something (Yikes! What a revelation!). 

I needed reassurance, connection, validation, certainty, and relief from discomfort. That realization opened an entirely new way of understanding myself.

And over the years, I’ve realized this same question helps us understand so many things related to self-care, boundaries, healing, and emotional well-being. Because the same exact behavior can be healthy or unhealthy depending on what’s happening underneath it.

Alone Time or Isolation?

One of the clearest examples is time alone. Healthy solitude can be deeply nourishing. It can look like reading, resting, skating, coloring, napping, working on a puzzle, going for a walk, journaling, creating art, or simply enjoying your own company without needing to perform for anyone.

Healthy alone time usually feels intentional. There’s choice in it. You’re present with yourself.
You have a sense of returning to yourself rather than disappearing from yourself. You often leave it feeling more grounded, more connected, more energized, or more settled inside yourself.

Isolation feels different. It often comes from overwhelm, shame, fear, exhaustion, resentment, or emotional flooding. Instead of reconnecting with yourself, you’re trying to escape yourself (or the world). Or avoid feelings you don’t know how to stay with.

That’s a very different internal experience.

The external behavior may look identical (you’re still alone, still at home and may even still be watching Netflix under a blanket). But internally, one experience is restorative and the other is draining.

One creates more internal safety. The other slowly disconnects you from yourself.

That is why your motivation matters.

Read the rest at your own pace here

Photo Credit: Braxton Apana

There’s a phrase I heard years ago by the Buddhist teacher Cheri Huber that completely changed the way I relate to emotions:

“You are responsible for your feelings, not for your feelings.”

At the time, I understood it intellectually. But I don’t think I truly understood it emotionally until recovery. I get now that you don’t need to explain your feelings. You actually don’t even need to understand them. You just need to honor them (i.e., feel them). That’s what it means to be responsible TO your feelings.

For most of my life, I thought feelings were problems to solve, explain, justify, control or suppress. I believed that if I felt something intensely, there had to be a reason. And that there was some kind of fix or strategy to make it go away.

Especially if the feeling was inconvenient, made other people uncomfortable, and particularly if it made me uncomfortable. So instead of feeling my feelings, I analyzed them. Rationalized them. Judged them. I tried to out-think them (or ignored them completely while focusing on everyone else!).

That’s what so many people do when they’ve learned that emotions aren’t safe. Not physically safe, relationally safe, and especially not internally safe. Once you understand that, so much starts to make sense.

When Feelings Didn’t Feel Safe

I grew up in a family where feelings weren’t really welcome. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Some feelings were allowed: calmness, pleasantness, composure. But sadness, anger, overwhelm, grief or vulnerability? Nope!

One of the worst things my father used to say to me was:

“Do you want me to give you a reason to cry?!”

That sentence carries so much distortion inside it. It really fucked me up.

It taught me: My feelings weren’t real, my emotions were excessive and that I shouldn’t trust myself. I got the message, “You need to shut this down immediately.”

And for many people, that’s where self-abandonment began. That’s not because they consciously chose it, but because overriding themselves became necessary for emotional survival.

So they stopped asking: “What am I feeling?”

And started asking: “How do I make this go away?”

Or worse: “How do I make sure nobody else has to deal with it?”

Read the rest at your own pace here

Photo Credit: Alex Shadowz

This past week I had one of those moments where I realized how much my relationship with my own mind has changed.

I was thinking about something coming up and noticed myself starting to go down a familiar (negative) path. You know the one… Thinking through all the possible scenarios, trying to predict what might happen - what someone might say, how I might respond. It wasn’t even particularly dramatic, but I could feel the shift in my body. It felt tighter, I felt a sense of urgency and a pull to “figure it out.”

And then I caught it. Not in a harsh way. Just a simple, “oh… this is a story, not a prediction of the future.”

That one moment changed everything. Because instead of continuing down that path of living into the wreckage of the future (and jacking up my nervous system), I paused and came back to reality.

I never used to be able to do that. I didn’t even know it was an option!

When Your Thoughts Feel Like Facts

Have you ever caught yourself thinking something like:

• They’re upset with me… I must’ve done something wrong 
• This is never gonna work out 
• She’s gonna think I’m a bad person
• Something bad is going to happen, I can feel it 

And then, without even realizing it, your mood shifts, your body tightens, and your nervous system start reacting as if that thought is true.

That’s not just overthinking. It’s you believing a story your mind is telling you. And most of the time, you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Stories are not predictions of the future. They’re stories.

Read the rest at your own pace here.

I’m local to New Haven and want to share briefly.

Alongside my coaching business, I offer part-time administrative support for professionals who need help staying organized and keeping things running smoothly but don’t need a full-time hire.

I’m currently looking to take on one consistent role, around 20 hours a week.

If that’s something that might be helpful now or in the future, I’d be glad to connect.

Photo Credit: Tanya-Barrow

If you’ve ever thought:

• Why do I keep saying yes when I really want to say no? 
• Why do I know what to do but can’t seem to follow through? 
• Why do I keep ending up exhausted, resentful, or overwhelmed? 

There’s a good chance you’re dealing with something most people never name directly.

Self-abandonment.

I don’t say that lightly. It’s strong language, and I use it on purpose because softer language can sometimes let us off the hook because we think “it’s not that bad.” When we say things like “I’m not following through” or “I need more discipline,” we miss what’s actually happening.

We’re leaving ourselves. Abandoning what we know we want or is in our best interest.

Read the rest at your own pace here.

Photo Credit: Itstock

Practical strategies to manage email, meetings, workload, and expectations without burning out

Why Knowing Isn’t Enough

By now, you probably understand that boundaries matter. But knowing that doesn’t automatically change your behavior.

The real challenge is this: following through when it feels uncomfortable.

Because setting boundaries at work isn’t just a logistical issue. It’s an emotional one. Guilt, fear of judgment, and anxiety about consequences are what stop most people from taking action. And your livelihood might be at stake in the workplace, which is different than in personal relationships.

Read the rest at your own pace here.

Reclaim your time, reduce stress, and stop over-giving by shifting how you think about responsibility, control, and work-life balance

The Lie That Keeps You Overwhelmed

Most people who feel overwhelmed at work think the problem is their workload.

Too many emails. Too many meetings. Too many demands.

But that’s not actually the root issue. The real problem is a lack of boundaries, combined with a belief that you don’t have a choice.

I see this with clients all the time. They feel pulled in a dozen directions, stretched too thin, all while building a smoldering resentment. They project competence and confidence on the outside. Meanwhile, they feel like they’re falling apart on the inside. Sometimes they keep it together until the meeting ends, then they run into the bathroom to cry because they can’t hold it together any longer.

What changes everything isn’t the workload. It’s realizing you have way more control than you think.

Read the rest at your own pace here.

The Moment Everything Changes

Two years ago, I coached a woman on the podcast who was overwhelmed by her living situation. She was doing all the work, her roommates weren’t contributing, and nothing changed despite repeated conversations.

When we got off the call, I didn’t think I got through to her. She messaged a few months later that she’d moved out. As a result of our call, she finally realized, “I can’t change them, but I can change me.”

It wasn’t after another conversation, or trying harder or explaining herself better. She made a decision, then followed through on that decision.

That’s what healthy boundaries look like. 

They’re not about getting other people to change. They’re about deciding how you’re going to live and then living that way. And yes, it feels scary and awkward. She said it felt “scary in a good way,” which is often exactly how it feels when you start taking your life back.

One of the most impactful and effective types of boundaries you can use to take your life back are digital boundaries.

Why Digital Boundaries Are Essential for Time, Energy, and Focus

Most people think boundaries are about saying no to others, but the deeper work is about reclaiming your time and energy. Your time is finite. Your energy is limited. And without clear digital boundaries, both can get drained when you’re constantly being interrupted.

Your phone, notifications, email, and social media are designed to grab your attention. Without boundaries, you end up living reactively: responding to texts, alerts, and demands instead of choosing how you spend your time.

Read the rest at your own pace here.

Photo Credit: Ivana Cajina

I realized something recently that feels both simple and profound.

I don’t feel like I have to hide anymore.

For most of my life, I did, but I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing. It wasn’t in obvious ways. It’s not like I was disappearing from the world. It was by carefully managing what people saw.

The Many Ways We Hide

One of the ways I hid was by isolating. Another was by lying. Not the dramatic kind of lying where you invent stories or deceive people about big things. My main form of lying looked much more socially acceptable - it was through people pleasing. I would say I was happy to do things for (or with) other people that I really didn’t want to do.

“Sure, that sounds great.”

“I’d be happy to help.”

“No, I don’t mind at all.”

Meanwhile, inside, I felt completely different. I didn’t want to do it. I was resentful, exhausted, and overwhelmed. But I didn’t want anyone to see that. So I hid by lying.

Secrets Are What We Use When We Don’t Have Boundaries

Recently, I came across something in an old recovery journal of mine that explained this perfectly. It said:

“If we have no boundaries in our families, we tell lies so we can have privacy. Secrets stand in for boundaries.” I don’t know where I heard or read that, but it really struck me because it perfectly described my life before recovery. I didn’t have boundaries, so I created secrecy.

I didn’t tell people what I really thought, didn’t say when I didn’t want to do something and I didn’t admit when I made a mistake.

Instead, I hid.

But once I started developing boundaries, something changed. I didn’t feel the need to hide anymore.

Learning to Be Human in Public

One of the biggest shifts in my life was realizing I didn’t have to hide the fact that I’m flawed, and I didn’t need to present like I have it together 24/7 under all circumstances. That might sound obvious. But for years, I carried around a subconscious belief that I wasn’t supposed to have any flaws, and if I had them, I Goddamn well better hide them!

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that I was just not supposed to have flaws. And if people discovered that I had them, they’d reject me.

So I hid the evidence.

I covered my mistakes, pretended things were fine, and I tried to manage my image. But recovery changed that. Today, when I make a mistake, I can simply say:

“Oops!”

And surprisingly, the world doesn’t end. I don’t collapse into a flood of shame. In fact, I typically smile and have a sense of relief, knowing that I get to be flawed in public. And other people don’t hate or ridicule me.

Repair Instead of Hiding

One of the greatest gifts recovery gave me was learning what to do when I mess up. Before, mistakes felt like catastrophes. Now, they feel manageable. If I make a mistake, I own it. If I hurt someone, I apologize. Then I change my behavior. That’s it. No more raking myself over the coals because “I shouldn’t have done that” or “I should have known better.”

When you know how to repair things, you don’t have to hide from them anymore. You don’t have to pretend you’re perfect. You can just be human.

Boundaries Make Honesty Possible

Another reason I don’t feel like I have to hide anymore is that I’ve learned to communicate directly. If I want something, I ask, and I don’t feel like shit about it.  If I need something, I say so. If I don’t want to do something, I’m honest about that too, instead of hoping people will magically figure it out (or manipulating situations so I can get what I want without saying it out loud).

Boundaries make honesty possible. Without boundaries, honesty can feel dangerous. With boundaries, honesty becomes normal.

The Unexpected Bonus

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There’s a simple practice that has helped me maintain my boundaries more than almost anything else I’ve done.

It’s not complicated, doesn’t take long, and you can start doing it tonight. If you’re in 12-step recovery, you’re probably familiar with it: it’s called a nightly inventory.

I’ve been doing some version of this practice for years now. But over time, my understanding of why it works has evolved. Today, I see it as one of the most powerful internal boundary practices there is.

How This Practice Started

Every night, I write at least ten things I’m grateful for. In the past few months, I’ve started writing a few things in the morning to start my day, then I add to that list at night. I started this practice in July of 2000, originally writing five things each night. That small habit completely transformed my life.

Years later, when I came into recovery and learned about the idea of a nightly inventory, it fit perfectly with what I was already doing. I simply added it to my evening routine. Truth be told, I don’t do this every night now, but anywhere from 5-7 nights per week.

I remember reading something in my twenties that made this whole idea seem ridiculous. In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie talked about doing a weekly inventory of his behavior. On Saturday nights, he’d reflect on the week and ask himself how he could have done things better.

I thought, “Are you fucking kidding me??! Who would do that?” Fast forward 30+, and here I am doing something even more consistent.

The Basement Metaphor

Here’s the image that helps me understand what a nightly inventory really does. When I first worked the 12 steps, it was like I went down into the deep, dark, dank basement of my life. There was junk and debris everywhere: old resentments, defects of character, unexamined patterns, emotional wreckage.

Doing the 12 steps was like cleaning the entire basement out. First, I cleared out the junk, then I sandblasted the walls, then I painted, carpeted, and furnished the place. Then I redecorated.

By the time I was done, the basement had become a beautiful space where I could relax. A place I wanted to invite people into and that I could actually enjoy. My nightly inventory is like sweeping the floor every night, so the junk never piles up again.

Where Internal Boundaries Come In

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