This is part of The Hidden Mechanics of Boundaries, a limited series about what happens under the surface before, during, and after a boundary.

You’ve told someone you can’t do what they’re asking. Your answer is clear, and you’ve given them the information they need. But then there’s a pause. Maybe they look disappointed. Maybe they haven’t even responded yet, and you’re already imagining what they’re thinking.

So you keep talking. You explain what else you have going on, how much you’ve thought about it, and why you really would help if things were different. Or you’ve already sent the email, and now you’re composing a follow up because you’re worried your answer sounded selfish.

You knew what your answer was. What you’re having trouble with is letting it stand while someone else has their own response to it. That’s where the hidden mechanics of overexplaining can come into play.

When more context becomes a search for agreement

I used to overexplain a lot. At the time, I didn’t understand what I was doing. I thought I was being thorough and helping people understand where I was coming from. And because I personally really like context, I assumed everybody else wanted it too. They don’t!

Looking back, I can see that something else was happening. I felt like I needed to justify what I was saying. If the person only knew how much thought I’d put into something, and if I could walk them through my reasoning, then surely they’d have to agree with me.

I was also trying to convince myself. If I could make a good enough case for my decision, maybe I’d finally feel okay about making it. Getting the other person to agree would give me the permission I hadn’t yet learned to give myself.

That’s an exhausting way to make decisions, because someone can understand every word you’ve said and still want a different answer. There may be no missing piece of information that will make them like your boundary.

What happens under the surface after you give your answer

For me, the underlying issue was how much I needed someone else’s agreement in order to trust myself. I could have an answer, but if the other person wasn’t okay with it, I was difficult (if not impossible) for me to feel okay with it too.

The process can unfold so quickly that you don’t realize you’ve started seeking permission for an answer you’ve already given:

1. You give an answer based on your needs, preferences, or capacity.
2. You notice or imagine disappointment, disagreement, or disapproval from the other person.
3. Your attention shifts away from what you know and toward what they might think of you.
4. An old subconscious belief kicks in: My answer needs their approval before I can feel okay about it.
5. You feel an urgency to justify yourself so they won’t think you’re selfish, unreasonable, or wrong.
6. You keep explaining, hoping that if they understand your reasoning, they’ll have to agree.
7. If they question your reasons, you offer more. Your answer begins to sound negotiable, and you may start doubting it yourself and cave in.
8. When they finally approve, you feel relief. Their agreement becomes the reassurance that your own judgment didn’t feel sufficient.

Even if they eventually agree, you may come away believing that all that explaining was necessary. You got relief when they approved, and that relief gets registered in your nervous system. So the next time you need to give an answer they might dislike, you reach for another explanation so you can get some relief again.

This is one way overexplaining can keep us focused on other people’s reactions. We keep asking, “Do they think my answer is reasonable?” and lose touch with the reasons it was reasonable to us.

How extra explanations can weaken a clear message

Here’s how I think about it now. If I write five paragraphs justifying a boundary, I’ve given someone five paragraphs of material to argue with. If I give them one clear sentence, there’s much less to pick apart. A short message is also easier to read and less likely to bury the actual answer.

Suppose you say, “I’m not available Saturday.” Then you add that you’re tired, have errands to run, and haven’t had time to yourself. Someone who wants you to change your answer might suggest that you rest later, move the errands, or come for just an hour. Now you’re discussing whether each of your reasons is good enough.

Repeated justification can also make a settled decision sound uncertain. At work, colleagues may hear an invitation to keep negotiating when you intended to communicate a limit. With children, continuing to defend an answer can make it harder to tell whether the limit is going to hold.

Of course, colleagues sometimes need your reasoning, and children benefit from explanations they can understand. Context can be thoughtful and necessary. The question is whether you’re helping someone understand, or continuing until they give you permission to mean what you’ve said.

Practice noticing what the next sentence is for

The next time you notice yourself adding another explanation, pause long enough to ask, “What am I hoping this next sentence will do?” Maybe there’s something important you left out. Or maybe you’re hoping that one more detail will make them stop being disappointed so you can stop feeling guilty.

That moment gives you somewhere to practice. Feel your feet on the floor, take a breath, and bring your attention back to your own experience. You might remind yourself, “I’ve thought about this. I can let them have a response without immediately changing mine.” You don’t have to feel completely confident before you practice stopping.

For an email, write the whole explanation if you need to get it out of your head. Then identify your actual answer and the information the recipient needs. If the rest is there to prove that you’re a good person, consider removing that from the message.

For example, a work message might be, “I can finish this by Thursday. If you need it sooner, we’ll need to decide which other priority can move.” You’ve given useful information and a way to discuss the work without presenting a defense of your character.

If you’ve already answered and someone keeps pressing, you might pause, reconnect to yourself and say, “I understand you were hoping for a different answer. I’m still not available.” Then give yourself a chance to pause again and reconnect with yourself so you can tolerate any difficult feelings that arise. You can be warm and considerate while allowing your answer to stand.

Why shorter answers are only part of the work

A shorter message won’t guarantee that someone respects your boundary. They may still argue or be disappointed. That doesn’t automatically mean you communicated badly, and you don’t have to find the perfect wording before you’re allowed to set a limit.

There are also situations where you need to explain your reasoning, document a decision, or work through an issue with someone whose needs are involved. The number of sentences alone doesn’t tell you whether you’re overexplaining. What matters is what’s driving you to keep going and whether the conversation still serves a useful purpose.

This is why learning a concise script is only part of the work. If you still need the other person’s approval to feel okay, you may send the short message and then spend the next hour fighting the urge to send three more. Building internal safety includes learning how to support yourself in that uncomfortable space after you’ve spoken.

Trusting yourself enough to let your answer stand

A client recently described feeling more solid in herself and having more trust in her own needs, preferences, and perceptions. She also noticed that she was doing a lot less overexplaining. I see a connection between those changes. As she becomes more anchored in herself, there’s less need to get someone else to validate her experience before she can honor it.

That’s the deeper shift I’m talking about. You can listen to feedback, consider new information, and change your mind when you choose to. You can also recognize that someone disagreeing with you doesn’t automatically invalidate your decision.

The next time you’ve given an answer and feel yourself reaching for another explanation, ask yourself, “What do I need right now to trust myself enough to let this answer stand?” That question brings your attention back to the person you can actually support in that moment: you.

If this pattern feels familiar and you want it to change

If this pattern of overexplaining is familiar and you want support with what happens inside you before and after you set a boundary, my online self-led course, Boundaries That Hold: How to Stop Overriding Yourself in Real Time, is designed to help you build internal safety so you can stop overriding yourself in real time. It’s a place to practice staying connected to yourself when someone else’s response makes that difficult, including after you’ve already given your answer.

Photo Credit: Yunus Tug

Let’s say someone asks where you’d like to go for dinner, and you immediately start thinking about what everyone else would enjoy. You know who likes which restaurant, who won’t want to drive very far, and who might complain about the menu. By the time you say, ‘Whatever works for everyone,’ you’ve considered every person in the group except yourself.

Maybe you really don’t have a preference on that particular night. Maybe you do. But you’ve already dismissed it because someone else might not like it. It could be that you’re like I used to be and have spent so much of your life organizing your choices around other people’s preferences that you really don’t know what you want anymore.

I know that last experience very well. Before recovery, I could tell you a lot about what other people liked, wanted, and needed. When it came to my own preferences, I often had very little to say. I was so busy figuring out how to fit into their lives that I wasn’t paying attention to whether the life I was living actually fit me.

When I drank alcohol, I didn’t even have my own drink. I changed what I drank based on who I was dating. I watched sports I didn’t care about, became a fan of teams I had no real interest in, and went to restaurants I didn’t particularly want to go to. I used to be proud of being a chameleon. I thought being able to fit in anywhere was a strength.

What I couldn’t see was how much of myself I was giving up to do it. Now I think back on that and say, “A lot of Barb was up for negotiation.” I said yes when I really wanted to say no, and sometimes I didn’t recognize that until much later, when I was resentful about something I’d agreed to.

In one of my first group coaching programs, I joked that my top five rules for setting boundaries were all the same: keep the focus on yourself. We laughed, but it was the thing people remembered. It’s still one of the most important things I teach, and my understanding of what makes it difficult has deepened considerably.

Why Everyone Else’s Preferences Come First
 

For many of us, paying attention to everyone else became a way to feel safer. We learned to notice a shift in someone’s mood, anticipate what they might need, and adjust ourselves before there was a problem. Being agreeable or helpful may have protected a relationship, prevented conflict, or helped us feel accepted. Our own wants became something to consider later, only if there was any room left.

If that sounds familiar, ‘What do I want?’ can be a surprisingly uncomfortable question. An answer might begin to form, followed immediately by, ‘But she’ll be disappointed,’ or, ‘I don’t want to make things difficult.’ It can be such a knee-jerk reaction that you move quickly into thinking about someone else’s possible reaction, and you never even consider what you want.

This is one reason learning how to stop people pleasing takes more than finding the right words. You need room inside yourself to notice what’s true for you before you start talking yourself out of it. You need practice taking your own experience seriously, even when someone else might have a different experience.

That’s part of what I mean by Internal Safety. I’m learning that I can listen to myself, support myself through discomfort, and get help when I need it. I don’t have to make everyone happy before I’m allowed to acknowledge that something isn’t working for me. Over time, that changes how I make choices and how I participate in relationships.

Your Preferences Deserve a Place in the Decision
 

Keeping the focus on yourself starts with including yourself in the situation. What do I enjoy? What do I have the capacity for? What matters to me here? These questions give you information you need to make a choice. Knowing that you’d prefer a quiet evening doesn’t mean you can never choose to go out with someone you love. It means your need for rest gets considered in that decision.

There’s a meaningful difference between choosing to accommodate someone and automatically removing yourself from consideration. You might gladly go to a restaurant that isn’t your favorite because it’s your friend’s birthday. You can know your preference and still choose something else. The trouble comes when you don’t feel entitled to have a preference in the first place, or when keeping someone happy routinely requires you to override yourself and your own likes and dislikes.

Personal boundaries begin with that awareness. Before you can know what’s okay with you and what isn’t, you need to be able to access your own internal experience about what’s okay and not okay with you. And if you’ve been disconnected from those preferences for years, it makes sense that reconnecting to them will take practice. You’re allowed to start with something as ordinary as what you’d like to eat or how you’d like to spend an hour.

Looking for Your Part Helps You See Your Choices
 

For me, turning my attention inward also meant noticing how much energy I spent deciding what other people should do. I gave a lot of unsolicited advice. I thought I was helping, but I also wanted people to do things my way, and I got upset when they didn’t. Meanwhile, all that attention to their lives kept me from looking closely at my own.

A useful question became, ‘What’s my part here?’ (thank you step 4 of 12-step recovery!). That might mean noticing that I said yes to something I didn’t have the energy for, or that I was waiting for someone to read my mind and notice a need I hadn’t expressed. Looking for my part in things doesn’t mean I was responsible for their behavior. It means I came to see where I had choices that I didn’t perceive before I looked for my part. As I often say, that’s info, not ammo. It’s something to learn from, not another reason to beat yourself up.

Start With One Small Preference
 

You can begin this week by noticing one small preference each day before considering anyone else’s. You don’t have to act on every preference you discover. Just give yourself a chance to notice it. If you’d like a quiet morning, acknowledge that. If you’d rather see a different movie, let yourself admit it. If you’re tired, notice how quickly you begin building a case for why you shouldn’t be.

When the answer is ‘I don’t know,’ stay curious. You might know what you don’t want before you know what you do want. That’s just as important. You might notice that a particular plan feels draining, while another leaves you interested or relieved. Those responses are information to explore. You don’t have to turn them into a final decision immediately.

Pay attention to resentment, too. Sometimes it points to an unfair situation or someone repeatedly disregarding you. Sometimes it reveals that you’ve been disregarding yourself and could have used a boundary. Ask, ‘What was I hoping someone would notice? Did I know what I needed? Did I give that need any weight?’ The purpose is to understand what happened well enough to respond differently next time.

Then try one small action that reflects what you’ve learned. Suggest the restaurant you’d actually enjoy. Make room for an activity that restores you. Tell someone you have a preference when you’d normally say you don’t mind. These ordinary choices give you opportunities to practice trusting that your experience deserves a place in your life. And life is made up almost entirely of ordinary choices, so it’s going to have the greatest impact when you start taking charge of your ordinary choices.

You Can Care About Others and Include Yourself
 

You still get to care about other people (of course!). You still get to receive their care, ask for reassurance, and be affected by what happens between you. Healthy relationships have room for mutual support. What changes is that you’re becoming someone you can count on to remember your needs, too.

That’s where we’re beginning this month’s exploration of personal boundaries. Before the difficult conversation, before figuring out what to say, there’s the practice of hearing yourself clearly enough to know what you want to communicate. Next week, we’ll look at how pausing can help you make room for that awareness when you feel pressure to respond.

For now, consider this: where in your life do you know everyone else’s preferences, but rarely ask about your own? Start there. You don’t have to figure out your whole life today. You can begin by letting yourself matter in one ordinary decision.

If you recognize this pattern and want support changing it, my online self led course, Boundaries That Hold, helps you understand what happens when you override yourself, then practice staying connected to yourself in real life. It’s a place to work on the Internal Safety that supports your choices, including the ones that feel uncomfortable at first. Explore Boundaries That Hold and begin practicing a different way of showing up for yourself.

This is part of The Hidden Mechanics of Boundaries, a limited series about what happens under the surface before, during, and after a boundary.

When someone you love is upset, something inside you shifts. Perhaps your partner’s disappointed that you’ve made plans without them. Or maybe a family member’s overwhelmed and telling you how much they have to do. It could be that your boss sounds irritated, and you immediately start wondering what you should’ve done differently.

Before you’ve considered what’s actually yours to address, you’re figuring out how to make their feelings go away. You offer to cancel your plans, take something off their plate, or do more work. What you need becomes less relevant as their discomfort becomes more urgent.

You might call this “caring.” For most of my life, I did too. I didn’t understand that somewhere between noticing someone’s feelings and responding to them, I made those feelings my responsibility. Their upset had become my assignment.

For years, I internalized the belief that caring for other people was the most important thing. It didn’t even occur to me to include myself among the people I cared about. And one of the most important ways to care for someone, I believed, was to make their life easier.

That meant taking tasks off their plate, not taking up too much space, and especially not upsetting them. I did everything I could to prevent that. If they were already upset, I felt like it was my job to make them feel better, and it didn’t matter what I had to do to make that happen.

I could exhaust myself, burn myself out, or compromise my health. I could use substances and compulsive overeating to manage my own difficult feelings, because managing my feelings wasn’t something I knew how to do. I was too busy managing other people’s feelings! That felt imperative. It was my job (unpaid, of course).

These were messages I internalized as a child. I didn’t even know how much they were running my life until I got into recovery and began taking a deep and profound look at my patterns.

To me, this is the crux of my codependence: I was so focused on what was happening inside other people that I wasn’t paying attention to what was happening inside me.

You might recognize this pattern and think, “I just care too much,” or “I’m too sensitive to other people’s feelings.” You might even worry that changing it would mean becoming selfish or cold. If you stop working so hard to make others feel better, wouldn’t that mean you don’t care?

That’s part of what makes this pattern so difficult to interrupt. When you’ve learned to measure your level of caring by someone else’s comfort, allowing them to remain uncomfortable can feel like you’ve failed at being loving.

If you grew up in enmeshment, where everyone was in everyone else’s business, having separate needs and limits can feel like betrayal. If you grew up with emotional abandonment, allowing someone to experience difficult feelings without stepping in can feel like leaving them alone the way you were left alone. If you grew up with both, like I did, it can be especially hard to imagine another way of relating.

You may know intellectually that you’re allowed to set a boundary. But emotionally, letting someone have their feelings can feel like withdrawing your love.

Healthy boundaries allow for healthy separation with connection.

You get to have your feelings, and they get to have theirs, while you remain in relationship with each other. But if you haven’t experienced that, you may assume your only choices are to take care of their feelings or abandon them.

Caring about someone’s feelings and taking responsibility for resolving them are two different things. You can listen to someone’s disappointment about what you’ve decided to do without caving on your decision. You can acknowledge that they’re overwhelmed without taking over their responsibilities. You can care that they’re hurting without making your own exhaustion the price of supporting them.

What changes is whether you’re allowed to exist in the interaction too.

I recently read something in ACA literature that helped me think about how completely we can disappear into this pattern. What stayed with me was the idea of pouring our energy into people who can’t love us in the ways we want, need, and deserve, while negating ourselves in the process.

It reminded me of reading Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger and encountering her concept of “de-selfing” through excessively accommodating the other person in all our relationships. The way I understand it is that we stop using ourselves as a reference point. We’re still physically there, still doing things, still participating in the relationship. But our feelings, preferences, limits, and needs aren’t guiding our choices. Everybody else is.

We’re asking, “What do they need? What will they think? How can I keep them from getting upset?” It may never occur to us to ask, “How do I feel about this? Do I have the energy? What do I actually want here?”

For me, this was especially powerful with family members, romantic partners, and authority figures at work. Of course I cared what peers thought too. But those close relationships and relationships involving authority carried a particular weight. Their feelings seemed to have a claim on me that my own feelings didn’t.

Here’s how that can unfold in an ordinary moment.

1. You notice a feeling in someone else. They sigh, sound frustrated, go quiet, or tell you they’re disappointed.
2. You interpret that feeling as something you need to address. Instead of simply noticing, “They’re upset,” you move into, “I need to do something about this.”
3. Your own discomfort increases. You may feel guilty, anxious, or afraid they’ll think you don’t care. You might feel an urgency to get things back to being okay between you.
4. You lose contact with your own experience. The fact that you’re tired, already committed, or uncomfortable with what they want fades into the background.
5. You act to change how they feel. You explain, reassure, apologize, volunteer, or say yes when you really wanted to say no.
6. Their relief gives you relief. If they feel better, you can settle down, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, the cost to you shows up later as exhaustion, resentment, or another commitment you don’t have the capacity to keep.

That last part really matters. Sometimes, in trying to manage another person’s feelings, we’re also trying to manage the feelings their upset brings up in us.

We don’t know how to be with our guilt, so we change our answer. We don’t know how to tolerate uncertainty about what someone thinks of us, so we keep explaining. We don’t know how to remain connected to ourselves while someone’s disappointed, so we work to remove the disappointment.

That doesn’t mean we don’t care about them. It means our caring for them has become tangled up with our need for the other person to be okay before we can feel okay ourselves.

This is where Internal Safety becomes part of setting emotional boundaries. Knowing you’re allowed to say no may not help much in the moment if someone else’s reaction immediately pulls you away from yourself. You also need practice staying present with what happens inside you after you say it.

A place to begin is to notice the moment you turn someone’s feeling into your responsibility. You might silently say, “They’re having a feeling, and I’m having a feeling about their feeling.”

That gives you two experiences to pay attention to. They’re disappointed. You’re anxious. They’re frustrated. You’re feeling guilty. Both experiences matter, and they don’t require the same response. Their disappointment may need acknowledgment. Your anxiety may need your attention and some support. You don’t have to resolve their disappointment in order to care for your anxiety.

Before offering a solution, take a moment to notice what you’re feeling and what you’re afraid will happen if you don’t fix this. Then ask yourself, “Is there something in my behavior that I need to take responsibility for? What support am I willing and able to offer?”

That question about your behavior is super important. Having emotional boundaries doesn’t mean our behavior has no effect on other people. If I’ve broken an agreement, spoken harshly, or caused harm, I have a responsibility to acknowledge that and work toward repair.

But taking responsibility for my behavior doesn’t give me control over how quickly someone feels better. I can apologize sincerely and change what I do. They may still need time to be hurt or angry. Their continued feelings don’t automatically mean I haven’t done enough. And if their disappointment comes from a reasonable limit I’ve set, there may be nothing to repair.

Suppose you’ve told a family member you can’t help this weekend, and they respond, “I don’t know how I’m going to get all of this done.” You may feel an immediate pull to rearrange your life. Before you do, notice that pull. Feel your feet on the ground, take a breath, and remind yourself what led you to say no.

You could say, “I hear that you’ve got a lot to do. I’m still not available this weekend.” You can listen to their response and acknowledge that it’s hard without taking over. If you want to offer another kind of support, you can. But give yourself a chance to discover what you’re willing to offer before your guilt “volunteers” you to do something you don’t have the capacity to do.

That’s healthy separation with connection in practice. You’re acknowledging their experience and remaining honest about your own capacity. You haven’t stopped caring because you haven’t solved their problem.

They may still be overwhelmed after that conversation. You may still feel uncomfortable. That doesn’t automatically mean the boundary was wrong or that you need to go back and change it. This is often the part we haven’t learned how to do: allow someone to have a feeling without abandoning ourselves in response.

A pause won’t undo a lifelong pattern all at once. You may notice what happened only after you’ve already offered to help. You may hold your boundary during the conversation and spend the next few hours wanting to send another explanation. That’s useful information about where you need more support and practice.

When I first started setting boundaries, I had a group of women in recovery who were learning how to separate themselves from others in healthy ways too. They metaphorically and sometimes literally held my hand. They reminded me that I wasn’t a bad person for not responding immediately, that I could change my mind at any time, and that I got to choose how I spent my time.

I call these people boundary buddies. Their support mattered waaaay more than I understood at the time! I was learning that I could have limits and still experience connection with others. I didn’t have to figure out how to stay with myself entirely by myself.

You can begin by asking, “What was happening inside me right before I caved in and prioritized them?” Over time, you may recognize that moment sooner. You may also need to practice receiving support from others, naming your own feelings, and discovering what you want when you’re not shaping your choices around someone else’s reaction.

If you’d like more support with the guilt and shame that can come up as you practice, I’ve written about that in 10 Ways for How to Stop Abandoning Yourself When You Set Boundaries. It includes practices for building internal safety, finding support, and staying connected to yourself through uncomfortable feelings.

For me, recovery involved recognizing that I get to be included among the people I care about. My health matters. My energy matters. What’s happening inside me deserves my attention too.

You can care deeply about someone and still let their feelings belong to them.

You can stay connected, listen, and offer support while also using yourself as a reference point. The practice is learning to include yourself in the relationship, especially when someone else’s discomfort makes you want to disappear.

If you recognize this pattern, Boundaries That Hold: How to Stop Overriding Yourself in Real Time is designed to help you understand what happens in the moments when you override yourself and practice staying connected to yourself long enough to choose a boundary. It’s a place to work on the internal safety that helps you follow through, including when someone you care about has feelings about your choice.

If you’re ready to include yourself in the care you give to others, learn more about Boundaries That Hold here.

Photo Credit: Rizky Motion

See if this sounds familiar: you finish a meeting knowing you were prepared. You answered the questions, contributed something useful, and followed through on what you’d promised. But your boss seemed a little distracted when you spoke, and now that’s the part you can’t stop thinking about.

Did you say too much? Did you sound like you were complaining? Should you send a follow up email to make sure everything’s okay? Within minutes, the work you actually did has become less important than figuring out what someone else thinks of you.

Approval seeking at work can take up an enormous amount of energy. I know this from my own lived experience over decades. You’re doing your job while also monitoring whether everyone’s happy with you. And when their approval determines whether you can relax, there’s always something else to check, explain, fix, or volunteer for. I always felt like there was something hovering over my head, always one more thing I could be doing.

Throughout this month, we’ve looked at the cost of being the great employee who puts herself last, carrying more than one person can reasonably manage, and keeping the peace by abandoning yourself. As we close this workplace series, I want to look at something that can keep all those patterns going: the belief that you need other people to approve of you in order to be okay.

I had no idea I was an approval seeker until I got into recovery. What I did know was that I didn’t want anyone to think I was a bad person. And in my mind, a bad person was someone who said no, wasn’t helpful, or didn’t go the extra mile for others.

That definition didn’t leave much room for me to have limits. If being good meant helping, then acknowledging that I couldn’t help felt like admitting something terrible about myself. I said yes when I really wanted to say no because I cared so much about what my answer would make someone think of me. Again, all of this was subconscious at the time. Maybe that’s the case for you and you’re reading this and just now registering, “Oh shit! That’s me!”

One way I internalized this was through my father saying, “I’m disappointed in you.” I found those words devastating. His disappointment felt like something I absolutely had to prevent. I remember thinking that I’d rather hit me than told that he was disappointed in me: hitting stops; disappointment lasts forever.

Maybe you recognize that feeling. You can be a capable adult with decades of experience and still feel an urgent need to make everything right when someone in authority sounds displeased. You may know intellectually that you haven’t done anything wrong and still find yourself apologizing, offering more, or backing away from something you meant.

If you learned early that being agreeable helped preserve your connection to others or reduced conflict, it makes sense that you’d keep reaching for it. At work, that pattern can even earn you praise. People appreciate your flexibility, your responsiveness, and your willingness to take things on. Meanwhile, you may be getting further and further away from knowing what you actually have the capacity to do.

Over time, “Did I do good work?” can get replaced by “Are they happy with me?” Those questions can lead to very different decisions.

You might do responsible, thoughtful work and still disappoint someone who wanted it sooner. You might make a useful contribution by disagreeing with a plan. You might need to explain that adding a new assignment means moving another deadline. None of those conversations guarantees a pleased expression on the other person’s face.

When approval becomes the measure of whether you’ve done the right thing, someone else’s reaction can outweigh your own judgment. You start adjusting your decisions to get relief from the possibility that they’re unhappy with you.

This is one reason workplace boundaries can be so hard to hold. You may know exactly what to say. You may even say it clearly. Then the other person pauses, sighs, or looks disappointed, and suddenly you’re offering to do the very thing you just explained you couldn’t do.

The words weren’t the only part you needed help with. You also needed support staying connected to yourself and your capacity while someone else had a reaction.

That’s a much bigger part of my teaching now. Internal safety includes developing the capacity to notice, “I’m uncomfortable. I want to make their disappointment go away. I can give myself a moment before I change my answer.”

You don’t have to pretend you don’t care. You can care deeply about your work and your relationships with colleagues while also giving your own limits a place in the conversation.

For years, I’ve said that the most important shift in developing healthy boundaries was coming to care more about what I think of me than what other people think of me. I still like getting approval. It feels good when someone appreciates me! But I don’t need people’s approval the way I used to. It no longer defines me.

What helps me approve of myself is living in alignment with my values. I value honesty, which includes being honest about what I can accomplish. I value being responsible, which includes communicating when competing demands need to be addressed. If I value kindness, I get to include myself in the people I’m kind to.

There’s something else I understand more clearly now: I can’t turn approval into another requirement to be perfect. Having my own approval can’t mean I only treat myself with respect when I’ve handled everything beautifully. I need to be able to make a mistake, take responsibility, and have my own back while I learn.

At work, that might sound like, “I missed that detail, and I’ll correct it.” The correction is necessary. Deciding you’re incompetent, replaying the conversation all evening, and volunteering for extra work to restore your standing may be part of the approval seeking pattern.

A useful place to begin is the moment you feel compelled to do something extra. Before you send the second explanation, offer to stay late, or take back your limit, ask yourself: “What am I hoping this will make them think of me?”

Then ask, “What actually needs my attention here?”

Maybe there’s a real problem to solve. Maybe you need clearer expectations or specific feedback. Or maybe the task is finished, your communication was adequate, and you’re trying to make certaint that nobody’s upset with you.

You might notice, “I’ve already answered the question, but I want to keep explaining until she sounds happy.” Recognizing that gives you a chance to let your original answer stand. You can ground yourself by feeling your feet on the floor, taking a moment to breathe deeply, and return to the work in front of you while the discomfort is still there.

Start with situations where the stakes are manageable. Express a preference about a meeting time. Ask which assignment takes priority instead of quietly promising yourself you’ll finish both. Let a straightforward email be straightforward without adding an apology you don’t mean.

Afterward, pay attention to what happened inside you. Did you want to check whether the person was annoyed? Did you start drafting a message to soften what you’d said? Were you able to give yourself a little time before acting on that urge?

That’s practice, too. Building self-trust happens both when you speak up and when you stay with yourself afterward.

Of course, approval at work can have real consequences. Your manager evaluates your performance, and some workplaces penalize reasonable limits. Your judgment needs to include those realities. Sometimes your next step will be clarifying expectations, documenting competing demands, or getting support before having a difficult conversation.

You can acknowledge those conditions while also examining what you bring to them. A different job may improve your circumstances, but if you still feel compelled to earn belonging by being endlessly available, that pattern will follow you into the next workplace.

As this month ends, consider what you’d like to use as your measure of a “good workday.” Alongside what you accomplished, could you notice whether you were honest about your capacity? Whether you asked for clarification when you needed it? Whether you allowed your own judgment to matter?

You may still wish your boss had sounded warmer. You may still feel disappointed when someone doesn’t appreciate your effort. The practice is learning that those feelings don’t have to decide what you do next.

You deserve to finish a workday with some connection to yourself still intact. Each time you let your needs, values, and limits inform a decision, you’re building a way of working that leaves room for you.

If you know what you need but lose sight of it the moment someone seems disappointed, my free Internal Safety Resource Pack offers a place to begin practicing. My work is about helping you stay connected to yourself long enough to choose a boundary, including when getting someone else’s approval feels much easier.

Originally published at https://higherpowercc.com on September 25, 2026.

This is part of The Hidden Mechanics of Boundaries, a limited series about what happens under the surface before, during, and after a boundary.

Someone asks whether you can help with something. You’re already tired. Your calendar is full, you have priorities of your own, and you may even feel your body quietly resisting the request.

But before the other person has finished explaining what they need, you hear yourself say, “Of course.”

They thank you and tell you how helpful you are. They may say they knew they could count on you. For a moment, you feel relieved. You’ve preserved their opinion of you and avoided the discomfort of disappointing them.

Later, you’re exhausted, resentful, anxious, or angry with yourself. You wonder why you agreed when you knew you didn’t have the capacity. You may even blame the other person for asking.

But the real question isn’t simply why you said yes. It’s why saying no felt like a threat to who you are.

When helpfulness becomes an identity

When I thought of myself as a helpful, supportive, responsible person, these weren’t simply qualities I had or things I did. They were who I was.

I was the person you could count on. I was reliable. I was nice. I was the one who would do whatever needed to be done. If there was a problem, I would help solve it, often without anyone asking me to.

Breaking the rules of that identity was incredibly disturbing. It felt fragmenting because subconsciously, I believed that identity was going to save me.

Being helpful got people to approve of me. Being responsible made me valuable. Being accommodating made me easy to have around. If other people saw me as kind, generous, and dependable, I believed I’d be safe.

I say “safe” because human beings are wired for connection and belonging. For most of human history, exclusion from the group could threaten survival, so disapproval and rejection can still register in the nervous system as danger. That’s why someone else’s disapproval can feel life threatening even when you know intellectually that it isn’t.

I didn’t consciously think, “I need everyone’s approval in order to survive.” But that was the belief operating underneath my behavior.

If my safety depended on other people identifying me as someone they could count on, then I had to protect that identity at almost any cost. It didn’t matter how tired, anxious, resentful, overwhelmed, or even sick I was. My capacity couldn’t be the deciding factor because their assessment of me mattered more than my experience of myself.

I didn’t want to abandon them by not showing up, disappointing them, or setting a boundary.

So I abandoned myself instead.

Saying no may not even feel like an option

People sometimes assume that someone who struggles with boundaries is standing there thinking, “I want to say no, but I’m not allowed.” But for many of us, it happens even earlier than that. Saying no doesn’t feel forbidden, it just doesn’t occur to us at all.

I recently spoke with a woman in her fifties who said she’d had to be told that she could say, “I’m going to pass on that,” or “I don’t have time for that.” I remember feeling the same way. It wasn’t that I thought, “I can’t say no.” Saying no simply wasn’t an option for me. It just didn’t occur to me.

The available option was to abandon myself. Not showing up for someone else wasn’t an option because their opinion of me was what mattered. The idea of standing up for myself or having my own back had literally never occurred to me.

I didn’t know any of this was happening. I thought I was simply being a good person.

That makes the pattern especially difficult to recognize. You may not see yourself as someone who’s afraid of disapproval. You may see yourself as generous, responsible, caring, and committed. Those qualities are real, but they may also be carrying the enormous responsibility of keeping you safe.

This isn’t a kindness problem

When you begin to recognize this pattern, you may think the problem is that you care too much. You may conclude that you need to become tougher, less generous, or less available.

You may also decide that people are taking advantage of you. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they’ve learned to expect your help because you’ve consistently offered it, often before they’ve even asked. Without realizing it, we teach people what they can expect from us. If you’ve always made yourself available, other people may reasonably come to expect you’ll continue to be available. Their expectation doesn’t obligate you to continue the pattern, but it helps explain why they may resist when you change it. It worked for them the old way.

The problem isn’t that you’re kind, responsible, or helpful. The problem is that you’ve come to believe these qualities have become requirements for your belonging.

When being a good person means always being available, every limit feels like evidence that you’re selfish. When responsibility means preventing every problem, allowing someone else to experience the consequences of their choices feels negligent. When kindness means keeping everyone comfortable, another person’s disappointment feels like proof that you’ve done something wrong.

You’re no longer free to decide when or how you want to help. You have to help because your identity and your sense of safety depend on it.

Being needed feels safer than having needs.

The hidden rule beneath the behavior

The hidden rule often sounds something like this:

“If I’m helpful enough, responsible enough, agreeable enough, and easy enough to rely on, people will value me. If they value me, they won’t reject, criticize, abandon, or turn against me. If they approve of me, I’ll be safe.”

Once that rule is operating within you, your capacity becomes almost irrelevant. Your attention goes immediately to the other person.

What do they need? What will happen if I don’t help? Will they think I’m selfish? Will they be disappointed? Will they stop seeing me as reliable? Will they still want me around?

You may be extremely skilled at anticipating other people’s needs while remaining almost completely unaware of your own. You notice that someone else is overwhelmed before you notice that you’re exhausted. You recognize their anxiety before you acknowledge your resentment. You see what they need from you but don’t stop to ask what helping will require you to give up.

For years, I’ve said that the core thing that enabled me to go from more than 50 years without boundaries to teaching boundaries was that I came to care more about what I thought of myself than what other people thought of me.

That’s still true, but now I understand the shift even more deeply. I came to care more about what was happening inside me than what was happening inside the other person. That doesn’t mean I stopped caring about other people or what they were experiencing. It means I stopped allowing their feelings, needs, and opinions to automatically become more important than my own.

Instead of immediately “leaving myself” to monitor what was happening inside someone else, I learned to stay connected to myself long enough to ask what I thought, what I felt, what I needed, and what I was actually available for. I stopped giving other people’s internal experience authority over my choices.

This is one of the ways self-abandonment can disguise itself as virtue.

How the pattern unfolds in real time

The process often happens so quickly that your yes feels automatic. But there’s usually a sequence:

1. Someone needs help, expresses distress, or leaves something undone.
2. You immediately recognize what you could do to solve the problem.
3. Your identity as the helpful, capable, or responsible person kicks in.
4. You imagine what the other person might think or feel if you don’t step in.
5. Your attention has just moved away from your capacity, priorities, and internal experience.
6. You agree to help, take over, offer more than was requested, or quietly do what someone else was responsible for doing.
7. You feel immediate relief because you’ve preserved your identity and avoided the possibility of disapproval.
8. The cost appears later as resentment, exhaustion, anxiety, physical symptoms, neglected priorities, or anger at the person you helped.

The immediate relief is important. Your nervous system learns from it. Stepping in appears to have protected you from conflict, guilt, uncertainty, and the possibility that someone might think badly about you.

The cost of abandoning yourself arrives later, so your nervous system may continue choosing the behavior that creates immediate safety even when the long-term consequences are painful.

Commitment and overresponsibility aren’t the same

Part of changing this pattern is learning to distinguish genuine responsibility from overresponsibility.

Commitment says, “I’ll do my part.”

Overresponsibility says, “I have to prevent every failure.”

Responsibility allows other adults to have responsibilities of their own. Overresponsibility assumes that if something goes wrong and you could have prevented it, you’re somehow at fault.

You may step in because you’re the most competent person in the room. But being capable of doing something doesn’t automatically make it yours to do. Competence doesn’t mean you consent to giving unlimited labor, whether it’s physical, mental or emotional labor.

When you repeatedly rescue, fix, remind, manage, or compensate for other people, you may (unintentionally) hide problems that need to become visible. You may prevent others from experiencing the consequences that would help them learn, change, ask for support, or take responsibility.

Your helpfulness may keep the immediate situation functioning while making the larger pattern possible.

That can be very hard to accept when being the one who holds everything together has become part of who you believe you are.

The difference between generosity and self-abandonment

Not every inconvenient or tiring act of service is self-abandonment. Sometimes we consciously choose to help someone even though it costs us time, energy, or comfort. We may decide that the person or situation matters enough that we’re willing to make a sacrifice.

The difference is whether you remain part of the decision.

Generosity includes your values, capacity, priorities, and freedom to choose. Self-abandonment removes you from consideration.

You might still decide to help after asking yourself what you need. You might decide that this is a moment when you genuinely want to show up, even though doing so will be inconvenient. But that choice is different from automatically sacrificing yourself because you’re afraid of what saying no would mean about you.

What’s driving the decision matters. Ask yourself, “How much of this choice reflects my values, priorities, and capacity, and how much is being driven by fear of losing someone’s approval?”

Both may be present. You don’t have to wait until your motives are perfectly pure before making a decision. The purpose of the question is to bring you back into the decision.

What to do before helpfulness takes over

The first intervention isn’t refusing every request. It’s slowing the process down long enough to discover whether you actually want to say yes.

Before agreeing, ask yourself:

• What am I actually being asked to do?
• Is this mine to handle?
• Do I have the capacity to help without abandoning something important to me?
• What am I afraid this person will think or feel if I don’t help?
• If no one knew what I decided, would I still choose to do this?
• Is there a smaller or different way I’d genuinely like to help?

You may need a sentence that gives you time to consider those questions:

• “Let me look at what I have going on and get back to you.”
• “I’m not sure I have the capacity for that.”
• “I can help with this part, but I can’t take on the whole thing.”
• “I’m going to pass on that.”
• “I don’t have time for that right now.”

If the request wasn’t spoken and you’re preparing to volunteer, you might ask yourself, “Has anyone asked me to take responsibility for this, or am I automatically becoming the solution?”

Notice what happens in your body while you consider not helping. You may feel tightness in your chest, sweaty palms, urgency, guilt, anxiety, or a powerful need to explain why you can’t do it. You may begin rehearsing how to prove that you’re still a good person.

Feel your feet on the floor or your butt in your chair (i.e., ground yourself in the present moment) and remind yourself “I’m allowed to consider myself before I answer.”

The goal isn’t to eliminate the discomfort. It’s to keep the discomfort from making the decision for you.

When guilt doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong

As this pattern begins coming into your consciousness, you may have a hard time believing it. Then you may start asking, “Am I still a good person if I set limits with these people?”

That question makes sense if, like me, you’ve defined a good person as someone who always says yes, remains helpful and accommodating, and notices what everyone needs before they have to ask.

When you stop performing that role, you may immediately feel guilty. But feeling guilty doesn’t mean you are guilty. Sometimes it’s what it feels like to break an old rule, such as, “I’m a helpful person, so I should always help.”

You may be following a new, healthier value while your body is warning you that you’re violating the identity that once helped you belong.

Internal safety doesn’t mean convincing yourself that everyone will approve of your choices. It means learning that someone can be disappointed and you can remain connected to yourself. Someone can decide that you’re less helpful than they thought, and you can survive their assessment. Someone can be inconvenienced by your limit without your limit becoming unkind.

You’re learning that another person’s opinion of you is information about their experience. It isn’t the final authority on who you are.

Why one pause isn’t enough

Asking yourself a few questions before saying yes can interrupt the pattern, but it can’t resolve everything underneath it.

A prepared sentence can’t instantly dismantle an identity you may have spent decades constructing. It can’t erase the fear that you’ll become unlovable if you’re no longer endlessly useful. It can’t guarantee that people who benefited from your overfunctioning will welcome the change.

Some people may call you selfish, difficult, or unreliable when you stop doing what they’ve grown accustomed to receiving. Others may be confused because you’ve rarely (if ever) allowed them to see that you had needs or limits.

There will also be times when you consciously choose to pitch in even though you’re tired or would rather not. Having boundaries doesn’t mean abandoning your commitments whenever they become inconvenient. It means discerning what’s truly yours, what you’ve genuinely agreed to, and what you’re taking on to manage someone else’s feelings or preserve their opinion of you.

The work isn’t becoming someone nobody can count on. It’s becoming someone who can count on herself, too.

How boundaries learn to hold

This is part of the larger process I teach in Boundaries That Hold. A boundary doesn’t begin when you say no. It begins when you recognize that you’re a person who’s allowed to have preferences, priorities, needs, and limits of your own.

You learn to notice the moment your identity as the helpful or responsible one begins taking over. You recognize the fear underneath the urgency to step in. You create enough safety inside yourself to pause, consider what’s actually yours, and allow the other person to have whatever response they have.

You also learn how to recover when you realize you’ve agreed to something that requires you to abandon yourself. Instead of deciding it’s too late and resenting everyone involved, you can revisit the agreement, change what you’re available for, ask for support, or make a different decision next time.

Each time you pause before volunteering, tell the truth about your capacity, or allow someone else to carry their own responsibility, you teach yourself something new.

You teach yourself that kindness doesn’t require self-erasure. Responsibility doesn’t require you to prevent every problem. Being a good person doesn’t mean making yourself endlessly available.

You don’t have to stop being helpful, responsible, or kind. These qualities can remain important parts of who you are. But they no longer have to be the price you pay for safety, approval, or belonging.

When your helpfulness becomes a choice rather than a requirement, it becomes more honest. When your kindness includes you, it becomes more sustainable. When people can count on you without requiring you to disappear, your relationships become more mutual.

You can finally include yourself among the people you’re willing to show up for.

Knowing intellectually that you’re allowed to have limits doesn’t mean you’ll be able to hold on to that knowledge when guilt, urgency, or another person’s disappointment appears.

Boundaries That Hold: How to Stop Overriding Yourself in Real Time will help you recognize the moment you begin disappearing into an old role, create greater safety inside yourself, and choose how you want to respond without abandoning yourself to preserve someone else’s approval.

If you’re ready to remain kind, generous, and responsible without negotiating yourself away, learn more about Boundaries That Hold here.

Photo Credit: Fellipe Ditadi

For years, I described myself as conflict-averse. I didn't like conflict, and I assumed avoiding difficult conversations was how I “kept the peace.” But I wasn't actually avoiding conflict. I was allowing it to take place entirely inside me. I didn’t realize that “keeping the peace” could actually include me.
 

I would replay what had happened, rehearse what I might say, imagine every possible reaction, and then say nothing. I’d keep doing more than I could reasonably do. I’d agree to deadlines I knew weren't realistic and then I’d tell myself something wasn't a big deal. Meanwhile resentment, anxiety, and exhaustion accumulated in my body, mind and spirit.
 

Silence doesn't eliminate conflict. It often turns an interpersonal problem into an internal one.

This is especially common at work, where the stakes can be high. Your income, reputation, opportunities, health insurance, and sense of belonging may all feel tied to how you're perceived. A conversation with a friend can feel risky. A conversation with a supervisor, client, or influential coworker can feel as though your livelihood is on the line.
 

That doesn't mean every fear is accurate, and it doesn't mean every workplace is safe. It means that having difficult conversations at work requires more than finding the perfect words. It requires enough internal safety to remain connected to yourself while you say something another person may not want to hear.
 

When people ask me, “What do I say?” they're often hoping there is a sentence so skillful that it will guarantee a good response. They think something like, “If I just had the right words, they’d hear me, agree, and all would be well.”  They don’t want the other person to be disappointed, defensive, angry, or dismissive.
 

Of course, words matter. Timing matters. Tone matters. Preparation matters. But no script can control another person's response, and the attempt to find one often becomes another form of avoidance. You keep refining your language because you're trying to remove all risk before you speak.
 

The deeper task is to know what’s true for you, communicate it responsibly, and stay true to yourself when the outcome’s uncertain. That’s where workplace communication becomes a matter of self-trust and agency, not just a technique.
 

A difficult conversation might cover a variety of topics and relationships:

• telling your manager that your workload is no longer sustainable

• correcting an inaccurate assumption

• asking a coworker to stop interrupting you

• addressing a pattern of last minute requests

• negotiating compensation

• saying you need clearer priorities

• acknowledging that you made a mistake

The subject changes. The inner challenge is pretty much the same: Can I tell the truth without disappearing, attacking, overexplaining, or taking responsibility for everyone's emotions?
 

The goal of preparation isn't to make yourself invulnerable. It's to create enough steadiness that you can act with intention while you’re still vulnerable. These ten practices can help.
 

Before you plan what to say, identify the “job” of the conversation. Are you sharing information, making a request, correcting the record, setting a limit, addressing an impact, or asking for a decision? If you don't know what you want the conversation to accomplish, fear can pull you into every grievance you've ever had.
 

A clear purpose might sound like this: “I want us to agree on which project takes priority,” or “I need to address how work is being assigned so we can prevent this from continuing.” You aren't scripting the whole exchange. You're giving yourself a place to return when the conversation becomes emotionally charged.
 

Write down what you directly observed before you interpret it. “The deadline moved from Friday to Wednesday” is a fact. “They don't respect me” is a conclusion. Your conclusion may eventually prove accurate, but leading with facts gives the conversation firmer ground.
 

Then notice the story your nervous system is adding. You may be telling yourself that speaking up will make you difficult, ungrateful, disloyal, or expendable. Those fears deserve compassion, but they don't automatically deserve decision making authority.
 

Difficult conversations become more manageable when you know what you're standing for. Maybe it's accuracy, fairness, sustainability, respect, quality, health, or integrity. Your values aren't ammunition to use against someone else. They're the ground beneath your own feet. Stand your ground.
 

This is one reason boundary work is inseparable from self knowledge. If you don't know what you want, like, need, prefer and will tolerate, every conversation becomes a referendum on whether the other person approves of you. When you do know, you can listen and remain flexible without surrendering your center.
 

Advice about speaking up at work can become irresponsible when it ignores power. A conversation with a trusted peer isn't the same as a conversation with someone who controls your schedule, evaluation, income, or access to opportunities. A healthy response is not always to walk into the office and say exactly what you feel.
 

Ask yourself what authority this person has, what the workplace culture rewards or punishes, what documentation you may need, and whether you should consult a policy, representative, mentor, or other appropriate resource first. You can be courageous and strategic at the same time. Internal safety doesn't mean pretending the environment is safe. It means seeing the environment clearly enough to make a conscious choice.
 

Bookending is a practice I learned in recovery. You connect with an emotionally healthy person before and after doing something difficult. For workplace conversations, choose someone who can be objective and who won't create additional risk by being drawn into workplace gossip. That person might be a coach, therapist, sponsor, mentor, or trusted friend outside the organization. Let’s call this person your Boundary Partner.
 

Before the conversation, talk through what happened, what you want, what you're afraid of, and what you intend to say. Let the other person help you distinguish preparation from catastrophizing. Arrange to reconnect afterward so you don't have to carry the emotional aftermath alone.
 

This isn't asking someone else to decide for you. It's receiving support while you make your own decision. That distinction matters. Self-trust doesn't require isolation. And it’s helpful to get an objective perspective.
 

If your body believes you’re in danger, you may lose access to the thoughtful, capable part of yourself. You may freeze, become overly agreeable, talk too much, forget your main point, or escalate in an attempt to protect yourself.
 

Before the conversation, slow down enough to notice your body. Feel your feet on the floor or your body in the chair. Let your exhales become longer than your inhales. Look around the room and name what you see. Remind yourself of the date, your age, your role, and the choices available to you now. In other words, ground yourself in the present moment – you’re an adult in an office, not a 7-year-old on the playground being bullied. The purpose isn't to make anxiety disappear. It's to help your nervous system recognize that anxiety can be present without running the meeting.
 

A vague “We need to talk” can create unnecessary alarm. A more respectful opening gives the other person enough information to prepare: “I'd like to talk about the new reporting expectations and what they mean for my current deadlines. Is there a time today or tomorrow when we can spend 20 minutes on that?”
 

Getting agreement about timing isn't the same as asking permission to have a legitimate concern. If the person repeatedly avoids the conversation, decide when you will follow up and what you will do next. Their avoidance doesn't require you to abandon the issue. Putting a boundary around the amount of time for the conversation (in this case, 20 minutes) lets the other person and your nervous system know this isn’t going to be an endless conversation.
 

Choose one finite topic. Describe what has been happening, explain its impact, and state what you need. If the other person introduces every past frustration, you can say, “I'm willing to talk about that, but I'd like to finish this issue first and schedule another conversation for that topic if we need one.”
 

Concrete language is often kinder than vague language because it gives the other person something they can respond to. It’s easier to wrap your mind around and respond to clear language. For example: “Since the client review was added, I have three priority assignments due Friday. I can complete the review and the budget by then, or I can complete the presentation and the budget. Which two would you like me to prioritize?” That isn't a complaint. It's operational clarity.
 

Sometimes the most powerful way to begin is to acknowledge your contribution. You might say, “I agreed to this timeline without reviewing my existing commitments, and I need to correct that,” or “I realized I didn't communicate the risk clearly enough last week.” Owning your part can lower defensiveness and demonstrate integrity.
 

But be careful. People who chronically overfunction often use accountability as a socially acceptable way to take all the blame. Owning your part doesn't mean explaining away someone else's behavior, apologizing for having a need, or accepting responsibility for a system that has been understaffed for years. Your part is your part. Their part is still theirs.
 

If success means the other person agrees, approves, changes immediately, and feels pleased with you, your well being remains in their hands. A more grounded measure of success is that you communicated honestly, stayed as connected to yourself as you could, listened for useful information, and followed through on what you said you would do.
 

The other person's response is data. A thoughtful response tells you something about the relationship or workplace. So does dismissal, retaliation, avoidance, or repeated failure to change. The conversation may resolve the problem, begin a longer process, or clarify that communication alone cannot make the situation healthy. All three outcomes give you information you didn't have while you were silently carrying the conflict.
 

Reconnect with your Boundary Partner (the person who supported you before the conversation), and let your body come down from the experience. Ask them for emotional support and affirmation if they don’t automatically give it. If things went really well, this can just as important as if things didn’t go the way you hoped. That’s because the conversation can help you integrate the experience so your body gets, “I had a difficult conversation and I didn’t die.” 
 

If things didn’t go as well as you’d hoped, they might say things like, “That sounds like it was difficult, and I’m here for you. You don’t have to deal with this alone” or “You deserve to be heard, and didn’t do anything wrong.” 
 

Be sure to write down what was decided, what’s still unclear, and any follow up you need to do. If the conversation involved commitments, a brief written summary that’s emailed to all involved will help everyone remember the same next steps and make sure you’re all on the same page.
 

Also notice the urge to grade yourself. You may replay every sentence and decide you said too much, too little, too softly, or too firmly. Reflection can be useful, but rumination is often your nervous system trying to regain a sense of control. Ask a better question: What did I learn about myself, this person, and this workplace?
 

You may learn

• you can tolerate discomfort without collapsing (i.e., discomfort doesn’t mean danger)

• a relationship is more resilient than you thought

• your manager needed information you’d never provided

• the organization depends on your silence and over functioning

If the organization depends on your over functioning, the next boundary may not be another beautifully worded conversation. It may be documentation, escalation, a change in what you are willing to carry, or a decision about whether you can stay in that job.
 

Having difficult conversations at work isn’t about becoming fearless, blunt, or endlessly confrontational. It's about becoming someone who no longer requires herself to internally absorb every conflict in order to keep everyone else comfortable.
 

Sometimes the conversation will be awkward. Sometimes you'll wish you had said something differently. Sometimes the other person won't respond the way you hoped. None of that means you failed. You’re learning to remain in relationship with yourself while you participate honestly in your relationships with other people.
 

The deepest measure of success isn’t whether they liked what you said. It's whether you stayed connected to yourself and your truth long enough to say what needed to be said.

For years, I believed avoiding conflict protected my relationships. What it actually protected was the pattern: everyone benefitted from my silence and my over giving pattern, and I paid the price internally. Learning to have difficult conversations didn't make every situation turn out the way I wanted. It gave me a way to stop abandoning myself while I waited for other people to make my life workable (which never happened).
 

That is the larger practice: acting on your life instead of only reacting to what happens around you. The conversation is one moment. The agency you build by having it belongs to you long after the meeting ends.

City Gallery is excited to be part of OPEN STUDIOS NEW HAVEN being held throughout New Haven during the month of October. All 15 City Gallery artists will participate in OPEN STUDIOS @ CITY, on view from October 2 through October 25. There will be an Opening Reception on Saturday, October 3, 2-4 p.m., with Artist Talks by William Frucht and Beatriz Olson. 

For more than 20 years, City Gallery has served as a collective of innovative contemporary artists from the New Haven area. It is a member-run gallery featuring a wide range of visual media: painting, sculpture, photography, papermaking, fiber art, printmaking, and mixed media. 

OPEN STUDIOS @ CITY is a chance to meet and see the work of all of the City Gallery members:

Amy Arledge - encaustic/mixed media artist
Judy Atlas - painter
Meg Bloom - sculptor
Phyllis Crowley - photographer
Jennifer Davies - fiber artist
Roberta Friedman - painter
William Frucht - photographer
Rita Hannafin - textile artist
Barbara Harder - printmaker
Rob Jacoby - painter
Sheila Kaczmarek - sculptor
Kathy Kane - painter
Catherine Lavoie - textile artist
Beatriz Olson - painter
Tom Peterson - photographer

City Gallery’s exhibits rotate on a monthly schedule, giving the community an opportunity to see works by many artists in a variety of styles throughout the year. In addition, the gallery occasionally hosts special events and shows by guest artists who help to make New Haven a vibrant regional center for the arts. These shows include the critically acclaimed SERVED: Wrongful Convictions & the Death Penalty with guest artist Toby Lee Greenberg, MOSAIC, featuring Yale School of Architecture graduates; and the recent exhibit of Muriel Stockdale’s renowned mixed-media United States flag series, E Pluribus, celebrating the country’s 250-year anniversary.

The members of City Gallery are carefully selected for their accomplishments as artists, their ability to commit to maintaining a successful member-run gallery, and their fit with the group. All have distinguished resumes and have exhibited widely, and many also teach in the New Haven artistic community.

Additional OPEN STUDIOS NEW HAVEN events are being held throughout the city all month long, including Creative Arts Workshop, Eli Whitney Museum & Barn, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Erector Square, Institute Library, Kehler Liddell Gallery, Marlin Works, NXTHVN, and in West Haven and Westville. Information on all the events can be found at OpenStudiosNHV.org.

The Open Studios @ City exhibit and events are free and open to the public. City Gallery is located at 994 State Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Gallery hours are Friday - Sunday, 12 p.m. - 4 p.m. or by appointment. For further information please contact City Gallery, info@city-gallery.org, www.city-gallery.org.

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.

“Make them look. Make something new.”

Follow artist Robert Jacoby on his recent exploration of abstraction and the phases of creative dialogue in his new exhibit DIVERSE ARRAY. The show will be on view at City Gallery from September 4 - September 27 with an Opening Reception on Sunday, September 6, 1-4 p.m.

Regardless of style — abstract or the artist’s continuing affection for portraiture — Jacoby’s approach to painting moves through several phases. As he explains: “It begins with extensive silent dialogue with a blank canvas, searching for direction, emphasizing instinct and advice Mark Rothko gives to his apprentice in the biographical play Red, ‘Make them look. Make something new.’”

A promising idea begets commitment, assessment, and modification until his intuition says Stop. At which point, he says, there are four possible outcomes, “one, completion is confirmed; two, modification is explored, which may include helpful critiques from my colleagues at City Gallery; three, a selected passage is extracted (by knife) and mounted as a revised piece; or four, the entire work is discarded.”

Welcome to the mind of an artist!

Robert Jacoby is an academic veterinary pathologist, retired from the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine since 2004. He also has been an active artist since the mid-1980s. He moved from figurative drawing and painting to abstraction in 2010 to explore “duende,” the Dionyssian force driving flamenco dancers, singers and intrumentalists to inspired performance. This change favored stylistic diversity over consistent “voice;” a priority he has followed ever since. He has exhibited throughout Connecticut and is a member of City Gallery, the Guilford Art League, and a Director-at-Large of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club. 

The exhibit DIVERSE ARRAY and the Opening Reception are free and open to the public. City Gallery is located at 994 State Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Gallery hours are Friday - Sunday, 12 p.m. - 4 p.m., or by appointment. For further information please contact City Gallery, info@city-gallery.org, www.city-gallery.org.

The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven is seeking a qualified candidate for the position of Director of Charitable Planning.

The application deadline is August 14, 2026.

For more information and to apply, click here.

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.

City Gallery Exhibit E PLURIBUS Celebrates the Many Colors of Patriotism

Featuring Art Flags that Celebrate Diversity by Fiber Artist Muriel Stockdale

Muriel Stockdale’s renowned United States flag series, E PLURIBUS, celebrates the many colors of patriotism found every day in the United States. A special showing of her work, including a new flag to honor our 250-year anniversary, will be on view at City Gallery, August 7 - August 23. The Opening Reception will be held on Friday, August 7, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., with an Artist Talk starting at 4 p.m.

The E PLURIBUS flags are exquisitely hand crafted in the U.S.A. from typical fabrics representing diverse cultures that make up this American mosaic. As an immigrant, Muriel is awed by the harmonious co-existence of Americans who celebrate their freedom in all possible ways. “This country was created by dissension and protest against oppression, and out of that the people forged superb documents and mandates that guarantee freedom and hope for all people,” she says. “In the United States, patriotism is multifaceted, multicolored, and multidimensional.” Her series of surprising U.S. Flags invites a broader look at what patriotism is and can still be in the future.

Since 2003, Muriel has continually created additions to her culturally celebrative art series of USA flags. Currently, 16 E Pluribus flags are installed permanently in the lobby of 315 Hudson Street, New York City. Installations of her flag series have been presented at BRIC Media Arts (Brooklyn, NY), the Cultural Alliance of Western Connecticut (Danbury), the Monroe C. Gutman Library Gallery of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Boston, MA), ARC Fine Art (Fairfield), Martha Stewart’s American Made Summit, and at Charlotte’s Place, a Trinity Church Community Center where she was commissioned to oversee construction of a community art flag to honor the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The flags have been seen in over 30 venues and galleries in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, and the New Britain Museum of American Art now owns the original E Pluribus African flag as part of its permanent collection. 

Originally from the United Kingdom, Muriel Stockdale earned her BS from the University of Vermont with a BS in Nutrition, and her MFA New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Design Department. Over the last 40 years, while maintaining a successful career in costume design, she has directed shows in NYC and in New England, performed onstage, crewed backstage, managed costume shops, designed and painted scenery, and taught aspiring designers. She is a Reiki healer, a writer, teacher, media consultant, and artist.

Muriel has enjoyed an extensive and varied career in the entertainment industry, creating scenery and outstanding costumes for film, TV, and live entertainment including Disney, Children’s Television Workshop, NBC, CBS, PBS, ABC, Universal Television, and dozens of US and European regional theaters. Muriel has worked with world-renowned, award-winning performers, directors, writers, and composers such as Richard Adler, Colleen Dewhurst, Adriana Trigiani, Kermit the Frog, Tony Roberts, S. Epatha Merkeson, Lynn Redgrave, and Edward Albee. She has spent over 20 years working with Jim Henson Productions, building and designing costumes for puppets and people.

The exhibit E PLURIBUS and the Opening Reception and Artist Talk are free and open to the public. City Gallery is located at 994 State Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Gallery hours are Friday - Sunday, 12 p.m. - 4 p.m., or by appointment. For further information please contact City Gallery, info@city-gallery.org, www.city-gallery.org.

I have a quote taped to my bathroom mirror. It’s been there for years. The paper is faded. It’s covered with water spots. At this point, it’s held together as much by tape as by paper.

I keep it because it reminds me of one of the hardest truths I’ve ever had to learn:

“It’s a delusion that the outside world could
give us satisfaction if only things went our way.”

Another way of saying that is this:

There is no external solution to internal pain.

For years, I believed that if I could just get enough things under control, I’d finally feel peaceful.

If people behaved differently…

If work became easier…

If my relationships improved…

If everyone would just do what made sense…

Then I’d finally be okay.

What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t really looking for control. I was looking for safety.

Control feels like safety, but it isn’t.

This is something I’ve come to understand much more deeply over the last several years. When we try to control other people, predict every outcome, prevent disappointment, or manage everyone’s emotions, we’re usually trying to protect ourselves from discomfort.

We believe that if we can make life predictable, we won’t have to feel anxious, rejected, disappointed, guilty, or afraid. In other words, we’re outsourcing our sense of safety to circumstances we don’t actually control.

That’s exhausting.

It’s also impossible. You can’t control how your spouse loads the dishwasher, how your coworkers communicate, whether someone appreciates your efforts.

You can’t control whether your adult child follows your advice, traffic, the economy, or other people’s opinions.

You can influence some of those things.

You can make requests.

You can have conversations.

You can set boundaries.

But ultimately, you cannot make other people behave the way you want them to.

And here’s the part that surprised me. Even if they did, you probably wouldn’t feel the lasting relief you imagine because the discomfort wasn’t really about the dishwasher, your child, or your coworker.

It was about how unsafe you felt when life wasn’t unfolding the way you wanted.

We spend so much energy trying to “carpet the world.” 

I say it like that because one of my favorite proverbs is this (I believe it’s Chinese):

“It’s easier to put slippers on your feet than to carpet the whole world.”

When I first heard that years before recovery, I thought I understood it, but I didn’t really get it. Now I get it, and I think it’s profound. In fact, this idea has become so central to my work that I built an entire module of my curriculum around it.

Most of us spend enormous amounts of emotional energy trying to “carpet the world.” We want people to become more considerate. We want situations to become more predictable. We want everyone around us to make choices we approve of, and we want life to stop surprising us.

Meanwhile, we’ve spent very little time figuring out what our “slippers” actually are. What helps me feel grounded? What helps me return to myself when I’m disappointed? What allows me to stay connected to myself when someone else doesn’t behave the way I’d hoped?

Those are very different questions. They’re also the questions that build self-trust.

Self-trust isn’t believing life will go your way.

Many people think self-trust means becoming confident you’ll always make the perfect decision. I don’t believe that’s true.

Self-trust is knowing that even when life doesn’t go your way, you won’t abandon yourself. You’ll stay. You’ll listen to yourself and honor what you hear. You’ll take your own experience seriously and won’t dismiss it because “it’s just easier.” You’ll remain connected to your values instead of letting someone else’s emotions become the deciding factor in how your respond to life.

That’s what gives you confidence in your decisions. Not certainty, but connection to yourself.

This is one of the biggest shifts in my work over the past several years. People often come to me wanting help with boundaries. What they discover is that boundaries become much easier once they learn how to stay connected to themselves under pressure. Because when you can hear yourself clearly, decisions become clearer too.

Here’s what this looks like in everyday life.

I’ve coached many women who have adult children. They’re generous, loving, wise, and they desperately want to help. So they offer advice. LOTS of advice. Usually unsolicited.

What often happens?

Their children pull away. They stop listening. They become defensive.

Then something fascinating happens. As these women begin focusing less on managing their children’s lives and more on staying grounded in their own, they naturally stop offering advice every time they think of it.

And over time, many of those same adult children begin asking for their mothers’ opinions. Nothing magical happened to the children. The mothers changed where they were investing their energy. They stopped trying to control another person’s decisions. They started trusting that they could remain okay even if their child chose differently. Ironically, that often gave them more influence, not less.

A question worth asking yourself

Where are you spending energy trying to change someone else’s behavior because you believe it will finally help you feel okay?

What might change if you became just as invested in creating internal safety as you’ve been in managing external circumstances?

You don’t have to stop caring about people. You don’t have to become detached or indifferent. You simply begin shifting your attention from controlling life to staying connected to yourself within it.

Because the goal isn’t to make life predictable. The goal is to trust yourself enough to handle whatever life brings. And that kind of self-trust doesn’t come from carpeting the world. It comes from putting on your own slippers.

Linked below you will find clear information about the recent Supreme Court decision on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and what it means. You will also find what your rights are under the Constitution, resources to help you and your family prepare, and organizations working closely with the Haitian community in Connecticut that can offer support. We will keep this page updated with the latest news.

https://ctimmigrants.base44.app/ResourceList?language=ht

_________________________

Pastor Martin Niemöller