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

See the data.

Public opinion data come from the Yale Climate Opinion Maps (YCOM), which are based on a statistical model that employs nationally representative Climate Change in the American Mind (CCAM) surveys conducted between 2008 and 2024. The model combines geographic, census, socioeconomic, and political data with CCAM survey data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (combined n > 35,000). For more information about the survey question wording and methodology, please visit YCOM: climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us

Your nervous system and your thinking haven’t been updated yet.

Have you ever found yourself reacting to something and later wondered, Why did I get so upset about that?

Maybe someone misunderstood your intentions, and you immediately felt defensive. Someone didn’t respond to your text, and your mind filled in all kinds of stories. A coworker offered a suggestion, and it felt like criticism. Or your partner sighed, and suddenly you found yourself questioning the entire relationship.

Looking back, you realize your reaction seemed way out of proportion to the situation itself.

If you’ve ever had that experience, you’re not broken, overly sensitive, or incapable of handling your emotions.

Most of the time, your first reaction isn’t really about today.

For years, I talked about the importance of becoming less reactive and more responsive. I still believe that’s one of the most important shifts we can make. But today I understand something I didn’t years ago.

For years, I taught people how to set better boundaries. I still do. But today, I think about it differently.

Today, I help people stay connected to themselves long enough to choose a boundary. That may sound like a subtle difference, but it changes everything.

Reacting isn’t simply a habit we need to break. It’s often a survival strategy our nervous system learned long ago.

The Earthquake Is Over. The Fault Lines Remain.

Imagine there was an earthquake many years ago. Eventually, the shaking stopped. Buildings were repaired. Life moved on. From the outside, everything appeared stable again.

But beneath the surface, the fault lines remained.

Years later, something puts pressure on one of those fault lines. It isn’t another earthquake. In fact, it may be something relatively small. Yet because it touches an old fracture beneath the surface, everything inside begins to shake again.

I think that’s what unresolved emotional pain is like.

Many of us experienced emotional earthquakes growing up. We were criticized, rejected, ignored, controlled, shamed, abandoned, or made responsible for other people’s emotions. Our nervous systems adapted the best way they knew how.

Those adaptations weren’t weaknesses. They were brilliant survival strategies.

The problem isn’t that we developed those strategies. The problem is that our nervous systems keep using them long after they stop serving us.

When something in our adult lives touches one of those old fault lines, our bodies often react as though the original event is happening all over again. Intellectually, we know we’re in our adult bodies talking to our boss, our spouse, or a friend. Emotionally, our nervous system feels like we’re seven years old again.

That’s why our reactions sometimes seem so much bigger than the present moment actually calls for.

Why You React Before You Even Know You’re Reacting

One of the biggest insights I’ve had over the past few years is this:

Your nervous system and your thinking haven’t been updated yet.

As children, we didn’t get to choose the beliefs, coping strategies, and emotional patterns we developed. We simply adapted to the environment we were in. If pleasing people kept you emotionally safer, you learned to please people. If staying quiet reduced conflict, you learned to stay quiet. If becoming hypervigilant helped you anticipate danger, your brain became exceptionally good at scanning for problems.

Those strategies served an important purpose. They helped us survive. But what protected us then may be limiting us now.

The situation has changed. You’ve grown up. Yet your nervous system may still be responding as though your childhood environment is your present reality.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to stay that way. As adults, we get to update the programming. That’s what I mean when I talk about building internal safety.

The Moment Everything Changes

For a long time, I thought the goal was simply to pause before reacting. I still think pausing is one of the most valuable skills I’ve ever learned. In fact, it’s still my number one tool of recovery. But my thinking about why it’s so important has evolved.

I don’t think the pause is important because it gives us time to think. I think it’s important because it gives us time to reconnect with ourselves.

It gives us just enough space to notice that today’s situation has touched an old fault line before we automatically hand the steering wheel over to an old survival pattern.

Most reactive moments follow a pattern that looks something like this:

Something happens today

↓

It touches an old emotional fault line

↓

Your nervous system believes the original earthquake is happening again

↓

You lose access to yourself

↓

You make decisions from survival instead of your values

↓

Later you wonder, “Why did I do that again?”

↓

You pause. You reconnect with yourself. You choose differently next time.

That process can happen in a matter of seconds.

• You say yes when you wanted to say no.
• You overexplain.
• You apologize unnecessarily.
• You shut down.
• You become defensive.
• You ignore your own needs because someone else’s emotions suddenly feel more important than your own.

From the outside, it looks like a boundary problem. But boundaries usually don’t collapse because we don’t know what to say. They collapse because, in that moment, we lose access to ourselves. That’s why I believe most boundary problems are really internal safety problems.

The Pause Isn’t About Self Control

When we pause, we’re doing much more than interrupting a reaction. We’re giving ourselves the opportunity to remember ourselves. Instead of letting old programming automatically take over, we can begin asking different questions.

What’s actually happening right now?

Did something just touch one of my old fault lines?

Am I responding to today, or am I reacting to something from long ago?

What do I want?

What do I need?

Those questions help us come back to the present, where we actually have choices.

When we’re emotionally activated, it often feels as though we don’t have any choices. That’s one of the hallmarks of living from old survival patterns. We automatically do what we’ve always done because it doesn’t occur to us that another response is available.

Building internal safety gradually changes that. Little by little, we begin realizing, I don’t have to do what my nervous system first tells me to do.

Building Self Trust One Decision at a Time

I think many people misunderstand what self-trust really is. They think trusting themselves means making the perfect decision every time. I don’t believe that’s true.

Self-trust means trusting yourself to recover from imperfect decisions.

It means believing that even if you say yes when you really wanted to say no, you can recognize it, learn from it, and make a different choice next time.  It means believing that even if you overreact, you know how to repair. It means knowing that even if you lose yourself for a moment, you also know how to find your way back.

That’s real self-trust.

Every decision gives us information. Every boundary we try teaches us something. Sometimes we’ll discover that our response felt exactly right. Other times we’ll realize we’d like to handle it differently next time.

Neither outcome means we’ve failed. Both are helping us update the programming. It’s info, not ammo.

Updating the Programming

One of the things I love most about recovery is that it reminds me change is possible. We aren’t stuck in our childhood survival patterns forever.

Every time we pause before automatically saying yes…

Every time we notice resentment before pushing it aside…

Every time we ask ourselves, What do I actually want here?…

Every time we choose to stay connected to ourselves instead of abandoning ourselves…

We’re teaching our nervous systems something new. We’re teaching them that today’s situations aren’t yesterday’s earthquakes. We’re teaching them that…

• disappointment isn’t danger
• conflict isn’t catastrophe
• someone else’s emotions aren’t an emergency
• discomfort doesn’t mean we’re unsafe

Building internal safety doesn’t mean you’ll never get triggered again. It means that when life touches one of your old fault lines, you know how to find your way back to yourself. And every time you do that, your nervous system learns something it may have never known before:

I’m safe enough to stay with myself now.

Want to go deeper?

If this resonates with you, here are a few places to continue the conversation:

 If you’re looking for support applying these ideas to your own life, learn more about coaching and my current programs.

 Listen to this week’s podcast episode for additional stories and examples.

 Learn more about building internal safety in my course, Boundaries That Hold: How to Stop Overriding Yourself in Real Time.

 Explore my free boundary resources for practical tools you can start using today.

Photo Credit: Gantas Vaiciulenas

One of the phrases I hear most often from clients is some version of “I have to.”

• I have to stay in this job.
• I have to help.
• I have to keep the peace.
• I have to say yes.
• I have to take care of everyone else first.

Sometimes the language is a little different. People tell me they “need” to do something or that they “should” do something. But underneath those phrases is often the same experience. It feels as though life is happening to them and they don’t really have much say in the matter.

For years, that’s how I lived too.

I didn’t realize how many times and in how many areas I felt compelled to do things. I thought I was making decisions, but many of my choices were actually being driven by fear, guilt, obligation, old conditioning, and a overriding desire to avoid disappointing other people. I wasn’t consciously choosing how I wanted to live. I was reacting to what felt safest, most familiar, or most likely to maintain my connection to others.

One of the biggest shifts in my recovery happened when I began to recognize that many of the things I believed I “had to” do were actually choices.

Now before you get annoyed with me, let me acknowledge something important. Sometimes our options are shitty. Sometimes we’re choosing between options we don’t like. Sometimes we’re choosing what feels like the lesser of two evils. But that’s very different from having no choice at all.

I’ve come to believe that one of the reasons people struggle so much with self-trust is that they don’t realize how many choices they’re making every day. When we tell ourselves we have no choice, we stop looking for alternatives. We stop evaluating options. We stop asking ourselves what we actually want. We resign ourselves to the story that this is simply the way things are.

And when we do that, we give away a tremendous amount of our power.

The Difference Between Having No Choice and Not Liking Your Choices

Several years ago, I spoke with someone who told me she had no choice but to continue running a family business she hated.

She inherited the business when she was a single mother with young children and felt trapped. At the time, she believed she had to keep it running because she needed the income to support her family. What struck me wasn’t the decision she made. What struck me was that more than 20 years later, she was still telling herself the same story.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

The reality was that she did have choices. She could have sold the business, closed it, brought in a partner. She could have hired someone else to run it. She could have taken a completely different path. Instead, she gave her the daughters the message, “When you grow up, I’ll be leaving this business to you, and you won’t have a choice either.” 

Interestingly, after we had this conversation, she revealed that the same exact thing had happened to her father: he inherited the business and he didn’t want it either! So the legacy of “you don’t have choices” continued.

Would any of those choices have been easy? Probably not. They may have felt risky, uncomfortable, or financially frightening. But difficult choices are still choices.

One of the hallmarks of victim mentality is the belief that we don’t have options. We start seeing our circumstances as fixed and ourselves as powerless. Once that happens, we stop looking for alternatives because we don’t believe they exist.

What’s fascinating is that when we don’t perceive that we have choices, it’s almost as if we don’t. We behave as though we’re trapped. We stop asking questions. We stop imagining possibilities. We stop considering what we actually want. The result is that we end up living lives shaped more by obligation than intention.

Why We Don’t See Our Choices

For a long time, I thought people struggled with boundaries because they didn’t know how to set them. While I think that’s sometimes true, I no longer believe it’s the primary issue. More often, I think people struggle because they don’t feel safe enough to choose differently.

The options are there, but the emotional cost of exercising those options feels too high. 

• You could say no, but someone might be disappointed.
• You could ask for what you need, but someone might think you’re selfish.
• You could speak up, but someone might disagree with you.
• You could leave the relationship, but then you’d have to face being alone.
• You could stop rescuing people, but then they’d have to experience the consequences of their choices.

From the outside, it looks like there are plenty of options. From the inside, those options can feel terrifying.

That’s why I’ve become so interested in the concept of internal safety. Internal safety is what allows us to tolerate the discomfort that often comes with making choices that are right for us. When we don’t feel safe inside ourselves, we tend to default to whatever option creates the least amount of immediate emotional discomfort.

The problem is that avoiding discomfort and making wise choices are not always the same thing. In fact, many of the most important decisions we make require us to tolerate temporary discomfort in service of a healthier long-term outcome.

What Boundaries Taught Me

When people think about boundaries, they often think about saying no. While that’s certainly part of it, boundaries taught me something much more profound. They taught me that I have choices.

Before recovery, I spent a lot of time acting as though I didn’t. I said yes when I really wanted to say no. I focused on what other people wanted while not even considering what I wanted. I overrode my preferences, dismissed my needs, and subconsciously believed that keeping other people happy was more important than being honest with myself.

What boundaries helped me understand is that I had a say in how my life unfolded.

• I could say yes or I could say no.
• I could stay or I could leave.
• I could speak up or I could remain silent.
• I could continue doing what I’d always doneor I could choose something different.

That realization was incredibly freeing. It’s one of the reasons I often describe boundaries as living on purpose. Boundaries require us to ask questions many of us were never encouraged to ask:

What do I want?

What matters to me?

What do I need?

What do I prefer?

What kind of life am I trying to create?

Those questions shift our attention away from obligation and toward intention. Instead of asking, “What am I supposed to do?” we begin asking, “What choice aligns with who I want to be?”

The Language Shift That Changed Everything

One of the simplest tools I use with clients is helping them pay attention to the language they’re using. When someone tells me they have to do something, I reframe it as something you “get to” do.

At first, that distinction can sound like semantics. But it’s much deeper than that. When we say, “I have to stay in this job,” we create the experience of being trapped. We position ourselves as someone who has no agency and no alternatives.

But what if we said, “I’m choosing to stay in this job because financial stability is important to me right now”? The circumstances haven’t changed. The job is still the same. The paycheck is still the same. The challenges are still the same. But when we realized we’ve making the choice to stay, we get to stop complaining about the job, the boss, the industry, the company. And we get to do the job the best we can under the circumstances, and put our energy into that instead of bitching and complaining. We feel more powerful when we realize, “I’m choosing this.”

What has changed is our relationship to the situation. We’re no longer pretending we have no choice. We’re acknowledging that we’re making one.

The same thing happens when we replace “I should” with “I could.” “I should go to that event” feels heavy and obligatory. “I could go to that event” reminds us that it’s an option.

Likewise, replacing “I need to” with “I’m choosing to” helps us remember that we’re participating in our lives rather than being dragged through them.  The reason these shifts matter isn’t because language magically changes reality.

It’s because language reveals reality. And the reality is that most of us have far more choices than we think we do.

How Self-Trust Is Built

Many people think self-trust is something you either have or you don’t. My experience has been very different. Self-trust is built one choice at a time. Every time you pause and ask yourself what you actually want, you strengthen self-trust. Every time you pay attention to your needs, preferences, values, and limits, you strengthen self-trust. Every time you make a conscious decision rather than operating on autopilot, you strengthen self-trust. Every time you tell the truth instead of abandoning yourself, you strengthen self-trust.

Over time, those small moments create something powerful. They create a secure relationship with yourself.

You begin to trust that you’ll listen when something feels wrong. You begin to trust that you’ll take your own experience seriously. You begin to trust that you won’t automatically abandon yourself in order to gain approval, avoid conflict, or keep other people comfortable.

And once that trust starts to develop, decision-making becomes much easier. Not because every decision is obvious, or because life stops being complicated. But because you’re no longer looking outside yourself for all the answers. You’ve started building a relationship with the one person you’ll spend your entire life with: YOU!

A Different Way to Live

One of the greatest gifts boundaries gave me wasn’t better communication, healthier relationships, or less resentment (although all of those wonderful things happened too). The greatest gift was realizing that I had choices. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.

I could say yes.

I could say no.

I could stay.

I could leave.

I could continue living according to old patterns and expectations.

Or I could choose something different.

That realization changed everything because it moved the center of gravity in my life. My attention became less focused on what everyone else wanted, expected, or needed from me and more focused on understanding what was true for me.

And thatnis where self-trust begins.

It begins when we stop asking, “What do I have to do?” and start asking, “What am I choosing?”