The College of Life

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growth

The Graduate

It’s Never Too Late

The cases of Frank and Barbara hold up hope for all of us to grow, learn our lessons, and graduate from the college of life. It’s never too late to become who you were always meant to be. Barbara was in her mid sixties when she began this work, Frank in his late fifties. In both cases, when they cleared the toxicity from their systems, the next steps in their growth evolved in a natural and clear way. They didn’t have to exert a great deal of effort or willpower to try and make things happen. Instead, the things that needed to happen to accelerate their growth found them. All they had to do was stand up for themselves and rise to the occasion.
Barbara stood up for herself by rejecting the negative attacks that were intended to demean her and claimed her self-respect instead. When she stood up for herself, she found that she could laugh and be happy. Frank stood up for himself by coming out of his shell. He stopped hiding from life and was finally seen as the competent, responsible, and highly intelligent person he really was.

Consolidating Growth

Barbara furthered her growth and consolidated her inner center by rejecting the negative that had dominated her life since her early childhood. In standing up for herself, she broke the last vestiges of control, as well as the accompanying emotional deprivation, that her childhood conditioning had exerted over her. Frank achieved the same objectives by accepting the positive in his life. He stood up for himself by stretching beyond the limits of his past negative experience. He accepted his promotions. He went to Washington, and he allowed loving women into his life.

Barbara and Frank’s methods of standing up for themselves, while diametrically different, served the same ends. Both strategies allowed them to put the toxic shame that had dominated their childhoods behind them. Barbara found her strength in standing up for herself and expressing her feelings. Frank found his self-respect in accepting his professional opportunities and his self-worth in accepting unconditional love. By accepting love from decent, strong, and compassionate women, he proved his mother wrong. He was loveable after all.

Getting High in the Merchant Marine Part 3

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The Capitol Building, Washington D.C., USA

A Negative Feedback Loop

For most of his life Frank had been caught in a negative feedback loop. His poor self-image had been continually reinforced by negative life experiences. As long as that feedback loop existed, he was caught in a suffocating bind of his own making. Now however, the opportunities for advancement that came his way were proof that the negative feedback loop no longer existed. Good things were finally happening to him. New success was being built on the foundation of previous success. Reality was giving him a steady stream of positive feedback. The inner victim that had controlled his life for so long, buried him in deprivation and created the negative feedback loop had been defeated.

During the time Frank was in Europe, I was conducting daylong workshops for my advanced clients. These workshops were held once a month and helped my clients accelerate their growth by going even deeper into their unconscious material. When Frank returned, I invited him to the next workshop. He was happy to be included.

Positive Feedback

There were a large number of women in attendance at that month’s workshop. I introduced them all to Frank, who was the only first timer there. What happened during that day amazed me. All, and I mean all, of these women took to Frank immediately. They each wanted him to work on them. They couldn’t get over how much heat and healing energy came out of his hands. When it was Frank’s turn to get on the table, they all wanted to work on him. They could all sense he needed female approval, and they wanted to make sure he got it. They weren’t moved by a sense of pity to work on him. They were genuinely attracted to him. It was a breakthrough moment for Frank, a clear indication that he had overcome his mother’s cruel shadow and his real light was now shining. He was now pulling in positive and wholesome women. His mother would haunt him no longer. After that first experience, Frank always came to these monthly workshops when he was not at sea. When he wasn’t there, the women missed the hell out of him.

Lobbying Congress

About a year later Frank was asked by his union to go to Washington and lobby Congress on their behalf. He was shocked but very proud of the honor shown him and scared to death to go to the Capitol. I told him to forget about his fear and just do it. He had nothing to lose. It would be a great experience. However, he wasn’t so sure about that. Somewhere inside him still lurked the Frank who was too frightened to talk to strangers.

“Look,” I told him. “If you can command a large crew on a huge cargo ship going half way around the world, you can certainly sit down in a cushy office and talk to a congressman one on one. Your peers obviously hold you in high esteem and think you’re the man for the job. I think it’s high time you thought the same way about yourself.”

Frank just looked at me warily and grunted. It took him some time to adjust to the idea, but in the end Frank went and had a great time. He discovered that he really enjoyed talking to Congressmen and Senators. It did great things for his self-esteem. Frank was now a changed man. His determination to grow and his willingness to step into new possibilities that were both foreign to his experience and larger than his self-concept gave him something he had never had before, self-confidence.

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Getting High in the Merchant Marine Part 2

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Na Pali Coast - Kauai, Hawaii

An Unusual Catharsis

The next week, a lot of highly toxic material surfaced from his childhood. Frank didn’t cry or scream. He didn’t break wide open like most other people did. His deep reserve and shame wouldn’t permit it. In place of a complete catharsis, the internal pressure formed by the mobilized energy rumbling around inside him forced a kind of confession from his lips. He shared his secrets grudgingly. Brutal, stark memories from his childhood surfaced. His mother had been an alcoholic. She was mean when she wasn’t drinking and cruel when she was. She resented being married and having children and never let Frank and his siblings forget it.

Destructive Childhood Imprinting

When he was a child, he often went without food. Sometimes all he had to eat in a day was a small bowl of puffed wheat in the morning before he went to school. Around the age of ten, he remembered his mother screaming at him in a drunken fury that he was so ugly no woman would ever want him. That remark scarred him deeply. Several times during his childhood, she abandoned the family, leaving them at home in the islands while she went to live on the mainland by herself. His father wasn’t much better. He was distant, uncommunicative, and verbally abusive.

Frank grew up with little physical security and even less love. The arc of his emotional life as a child was narrow and limited, framed by uncertainty and insecurity at one extremity and by shame and abuse at the other. When he reached the age of eighteen, he left home and went to sea, hoping to start a new life and put his nightmare behind him. At the time he was a depressed kid with a big inferiority complex, too scared to talk to people he didn’t know. He had escaped from his mother but not from her toxic influence. She was to cast a long, heavy shadow over his life, no matter where he went or whom he was with.

When I met him some forty years later, he was still a depressed man with a big inferiority complex and still scared to talk to people he didn’t know. His relations with women had been a disaster. Nearly every woman he had gotten involved with had hurt and abandoned him. One of his wives had even told him before she left him that he was too ugly to be with. These women were all different in appearance and personality from one another, but they had one vital trait in common. Each of them, without exception, did to him what his mother had done to him. They mocked and belittled him. They shamed him, and they left him.
His mother was dead, decaying bones in a wooden box under six feet of heavy earth on an island a few thousand miles away, but she still owned him. Her face was their face. Their words were her words. Her feelings toward him were their feelings for him. Wherever he went, he drew women to him who were her reflection.

It was a good thing that Frank’s conscious intention to succeed in this work was very strong. As a category three, his subconscious toxicity was concrete and not at all ready to give up its controlling interest in his life. Thankfully, after several months, my work with him was finally accelerating. He was now vibrating after each consultation. He learned quickly that he had an hour after each session before the vibrating would start. Then he would feel very tired and need to sleep. During that down time his system processed the toxic energy that had been mobilized earlier. He would have strange dreams. Sometimes his body would feel like it was burning up. At other times it would feel ice cold. The next day there would be more memories for him to talk about.
I never forced it with Frank or tried to make him open up more completely than he could at the time. I knew he was giving it everything he had. I couldn’t ask for more.

Transformation

As our sessions advanced and Frank’s toxicity continued to clear, his life began to change in very dramatic ways. He was promoted from second mate to first mate. A short time later he was made captain. He hadn’t sought these promotions. They just came to him. After a few tours of duty as a captain, he was recognized as the best master in the fleet and during the Desert Storm campaign of 1991, he was assigned to take classified military cargo to Europe for the U.S. forces massing in the Arabian Gulf.
Every time Frank accepted an opportunity for advancement, he broke the mold in which he had been cast in as a child. By accepting these promotions, he was standing up to his childhood conditioning that said he would always be a failure and stepping into a new sense of himself.

Part 3 coming tomorrow

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Getting High in the Merchant Marine

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Cargo ship in port of Antwerp

Merchant Marine Cargo Ship

Frank’s Story

During my years in Austin, Texas, one of my clients was a quiet and melancholy man named Frank. Frank had been in the Merchant Marine for nearly forty years. At the time of our meeting, he was the second mate on a large cargo ship and had traveled all over the world in his time at sea.

When Frank started to work with me, he was in a pretty bad way. His third wife had recently left him while he had been away at sea. She had drained his bank accounts, sold his car, coin collection, and home furnishings, and headed north to Indiana. When Frank came home from his voyage, all he had left was the house. There was virtually nothing in it.

Getting High

Despite Frank’s cool and non-emotional exterior, his underlying bitterness was quite apparent. We soon worked out a routine. When he was between voyages, he would come up to Austin from his home in Houston and work several times a week with me. At first, little happened in those initial sessions. Frank just soaked up the energy and felt great. He got to thinking that all he had to do was lie on my table and he’d feel light and happy for days.

I told him that with any luck, his experience of getting high would soon go away. He thought I was kidding. Why would I want him to feel any different from the way he was now feeling? Wasn’t the goal of healing to feel better? Sure, I replied, but to feel better on a long-term basis, you have to confront and clear your toxicity. Otherwise, all you’re doing is getting a temporary energy high and becoming addicted to being with me so you can get that high. That’s not the goal here.

“What is the goal then?” he asked.

“The goal is to transform your toxicity, become clear and whole, and outgrow your need of me.”

A Category Three

Then I told him that only people who were not connected to their toxic content got high at first. In my terminology, he was a category the and Bakeree. When he got wired to his pain and shame all that would change. If he kept coming, he would soon begin to feel all the dense and sluggish energy that was stuffed inside his body. Then he wouldn’t feel so good, but not to worry, I continued. That was real progress.

Shake and Bake

He gave me a funny look when I said that. I don’t think he knew whether to believe me or not. The following week, after one of his daily sessions, Frank was standing in line at the supermarket when his body began to vibrate without prior warning. He had no idea what was going on, but he was smart enough to get back to his motel room as soon as he could. By the time he got to his room, Frank was really shaking. Nothing remotely like that had ever happened to him before. Little did he know that the toxic energy in his system was becoming mobile. That’s what his shaking was about. He was about to burst. He just didn’t know it. He collapsed on his bed, fell asleep immediately, and slept for two hours.

To be continued tomorrow, January 22.

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Inside Out vs. Outside In

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a face in the crowd

Working From the Inside Out

Barbara’s progress, from eliminating her toxicity to setting effective boundaries and enforcing them, once again illustrates the importance of doing things in the right sequence. Since she had already cleared her toxicity, she didn’t really have to think about setting boundaries or de- veloping strategies to enforce them. She just did what she had to do in the normal course of her daily life without realizing until later what it was she had really done. Barbara didn’t fret or agonize over taking action. She didn’t force anything. She didn’t have to read a bunch of self-help books, or try to manage a difficult situation. She didn’t try to control or manipulate every facet of her life. She just acted from the inside out, allowing her intuition to lead her into action.

My unhappy face

Working From the Outside In

Most people haven’t cleared their toxicity in the way that Barbara has, and so they are stuck trying to cope with ongoing, persistent problems, rather than transforming the landscape of their subconscious and being in a position of wholeness in their lives. Without that transformation, the average person’s only remedy is to try to force his conscious will on his unconscious toxicity and its governing beliefs. This is working from the outside in. When we try to impose our conscious will on an unhealed subconscious, our chances of success are minimal. In most cases, working from the outside in is really a prescription for frustration and failure.

Resetting The Emotional Clock

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C.O - © Carl Westergren

Resetting Barbara’s Emotional Clock

The rapid vibrating of Barbara’s body was her system’s method of resetting her emotional clock and accelerating the energies in her emotional body so that they might catch up to her chronological age. When her body stopped vibrating, one part of her would no longer be in its mid- sixties, while the other part of her stayed stuck in shame at age six. Now her chronological age and her emotional life would be synchronized at the same level of maturity.

Venturing Outside the Box

As a child, she always had to be vigilant and on guard, constantly looking over her shoulder for the criticism that was sure to come her way if she dared to step out of the box into which her circumstances had forced her. She had had no choice but to be what someone else had wanted her to be. Now the compulsion to please, and the fear, shame, need, and rage that had been stuck in her body since early childhood were cleared from her system. She had ventured outside the box of her childhood conditioning and would never be the same again.

The “endure to survive” theme that had dominated her childhood and sabotaged her adult years would no longer control her. She was no longer firmly entrenched on the path of most resistance. Barbara’s healing experience taught her that change could happen at any age and that it was indeed possible to teach an old dog new tricks.

Signs of Transformation

The first outward sign of Barbara’s growth occurred in an interaction with an old friend. For many years, she had considered this particular woman her best friend. Yet this woman consistently irritated and upset her. Until now, Barbara had never really examined the source of that irritation. She had just thought that her feelings were due to a hidden flaw within herself, rather than to a problem with her friend. Instead of being able to look objectively at her friendship, she had internalized her feelings and blamed herself. The shame that her mother had instilled in her as a child had created low self-esteem and led her to blame herself whenever anything went wrong. Now that she was clearer and more confident in herself, she realized that the irritation she experienced whenever she was with this woman occurred because her friend routinely used her and treated her dismissively.

The next time her friend called and said something that upset her, Barbara told her exactly how she felt about being treated in this manner. The woman then became very nasty, berating Barbara and treating her even more contemptuously. Barbara was not about to put up with that kind of treatment ever again. She told the woman that their friendship was over and hung up the phone. When she told me about it a few days later she was still feeling very proud of herself and couldn’t believe that she felt no remorse.

“Why should you?” I asked her. “All you did was tell her the truth.”

“I know,” she said, “but the old Barbara would have felt terrible and scared and done everything under the sun to put it back together. Now I couldn’t care less. I feel terrifically empowered. I never knew I could feel so good about myself.”

“Think about what happened with this woman,” I continued. “There’s more here than meets the eye. This was a very significant moment in your growth. Your friend was very much like your mother. They shared the same essential characteristic. By standing up to her you also symbolically stood up to your mother. Congratulations are in order. You just broke the unconscious governing belief that had ruled your life.”

The same need to stand up for herself began to occur in all of Barbara’s important relationships. A few weeks after telling her former friend the truth, her sons called. They wanted her to come over and watch the Super Bowl with them and their wives and bring some food with her. She told them that she hated sports and wasn’t about to be used for free food. If they wanted to see her, it would have to be something she liked to do, and they could supply the food. After all, they were now grown men.
Their reaction surprised her. She expected them to be very upset, but they were not upset at all. They fully agreed with her position and apologized for their behavior. Since that conversation, their relationship is on an entirely different plane. They now have a mother they respect and are proud of. They even cook her dinner.

When Loss is an Advantage

For Barbara, the lesson in standing up for herself was clear and simple. She lost those people who were not her real friends, made new ones to replace them who were much more positive than the old ones, and gained the respect of those that really mattered to her. In terms of her growth, her losses were really gains. She lost what didn’t matter and was no longer relevant to her growth. By rejecting negative people she affirmed her own self-worth, increased her personal power, and protected her core self.

The Healing Cycle: From Grief to Relief Part 2

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Grief

Carrying Karma Forward

“Besides,” I continued, “while you might feel out of sorts as you clear the heavy energies of grief from your system, just imagine having to carry that weight forward in your life. When you experienced your grief in its raw and elemental state last week, you felt exactly what you had been carrying around with you for years. It wasn’t hidden anymore or hanging over your life like a cloud of low-level depression and unhappiness, poisoning your existence and sapping your spirit of its vitality. Instead, you felt the entire weight of what had been buried in your heart and you embraced it. In choosing to face and clear  your grief, you chose expansion over confinement, happiness over depression, and a better future for yourself. So don’t worry about what you may feel in today’s session and in the days that follow. Focus instead on where you’re going and hope that even more toxic emotion comes out of you today than it did last week. If that should happen, it will only free you more.”

A Toxic Childhood

That week, more grief did pour out of her, but it was not all related to the death of her husband. Behind the grief of her husband’s passing was the sullen grief of her childhood. She had grown up in a cold house with a critical mother and an emotionally absent father. She had never felt safe in expressing her feelings in her family environment. To say what she felt or to stand up for what she wanted was to invite a withering attack from her mother. Her mother regularly shamed and humiliated her, making her feel small, inadequate, unwanted, and unloved. Given her background, it was not surprising that her whole strategy as a child was simply to survive. Her strategy for survival was anchored in pleasing her mother in order to reduce her exposure to more shame and verbal degradation.

A Self-defeating Strategy

When she became an adult, Barbara’s childhood strategy of pleasing others did not disappear. It had become too ingrained in her behavior. Although she had a new cast of people to relate to as an adult, the childhood pattern of how she related to them endured. It had become her unconscious governing belief. Her experience of being shamed by her mother had led her to conclude that she was unlovable. If I’m not loveable, her subconscious reasoned, then I have to work extra hard to get people to like me. Instead of trying to please her mother, she now tried to please her husband and sons.

As a result of Barbara’s childhood conditioning, she was unable to say how she really felt as a grown woman. She lacked the courage to stand up for herself and express her real needs. Her childhood survival theme of “hide your real feelings and don’t rock the boat under any circumstances” had become a constant form of unconscious oppression dominating her adult life. One of the problems in trying to please her own family was that she wasn’t getting love and respect from her husband and sons in return. All the giving went one way from her to them. There was nothing coming back to her, except more demands for her to do more things for them. She wasn’t being seen or respected for who she was. Underneath it all, she burned with unexpressed resentment, a resentment she could not even admit to herself. She was too focused on being a “lady.” In her case, being a lady was a cover for not facing her hidden rage, as well as a way to avoid facing her real feelings.

Release and Relief

As her second session progressed, Barbara’s tears of grief at her husband’s death turned to screams of rage at her mother for her coldness, her lack of love, and her failure to nurture and approve of her daughter. After a time, her rage turned to sobs, as she felt the grief of her childhood shame and humiliation. With her grief came the searing realization that she felt lost in life and had no idea of who she really was. As that insight hit her, Barbara’s sobs deepened and a plaintive scream arose from that deep, lost place inside her. The scream started out loud and fierce and long, running slowly out of steam until it became a whisper, then a sound no more. She took a moment, gathered the breath back into her body, and resumed her screaming. As her screams dwindled and died, her sobbing resumed. This time the sobs were soft, low, and rapid, one following after the other in a steady, constant rhythm. When her sobs ended, her body became ice cold and began to vibrate.

The session was now nearly concluded. Barbara was absolutely exhausted. However, I became quite excited for her when she told me that her body was vibrating all over and she was feeling ice cold. These symptoms were important markers in her healing just as they had been for Sean. The coldness that she was feeling represented the melting of the shame and loss of identity that had been frozen inside her as a young child and had plagued her ever since. As long as that frozen energy remained in her core she was powerless to move beyond it. The pattern of trying to please others to get their love would remain intact. Now that frozen energy was melting. It was a moment of great significance for Barbara. It meant that she was no longer trapped in the emotional context of her childhood. (To be continued.)

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The Healing Cycle: From Grief to Relief

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THE GRIEVING JAYNE

Barbara’s Story

Barbara is a former client from Florida. She is a charming, sophisticated, and intelligent woman in her mid-sixties. Several years ago, Barbara’s husband passed away. At the time of his death, she had been married to him for nearly forty years. When she called to arrange a series of telephone consultations, she was certain that she had completed her grieving over her husband’s death and that it was no longer an issue in her life.

Hidden Residual Grief

When Barbara had her first consultation over the phone some weeks later, I could see that the energy from his death still lingered in her chest and heart. Accordingly, I directed her attention to her chest area and asked her to make guttural sounds as if they were coming out of her heart. When she started to make these non-verbal sounds, I directed the healing energy pouring out of my hands over the phone into her chest. After a few minutes of making half-hearted grunts and sighs and getting nowhere, she wanted to stop. She complained that making these sounds just wasn’t lady-like, and didn’t feel right.

Feeling Uncomfortable

“Barbara,” I said gently, “there’s no one here but you and me, and it’s okay to feel uncomfortable. It really is. You don’t have to be a lady in this context, just someone who wants to heal her life and stop her pain. No one feels very comfortable when they’re stirring up their toxicity anyway. For the first time you’re stepping out of the box you’ve been trapped in your whole life. Give yourself a chance to succeed. You’ll like how success feels, I promise.”

“Okay,” she said cautiously. “I’ll give it another shot. But how long do I have to make the sounds for?” She was still obviously in resistance.

From Resistance to Ignition

“Until a wall inside you breaks,” I replied, “and the toxic material that has been sealed off behind that barricade pours out of you. Then you won’t have to force the sounds anymore. You won’t have to make yourself grunt, sigh, and scream. You’ll just erupt. Your unconscious material will rise to meet your conscious mind. In all real healing, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind temporarily become one. When that happens, your conscious mind will be unable to censor and repress your unconscious pain. As the conscious mind and the unconscious material become joined, the pain will just pour out of you until it no longer exists. When the two become one, your toxicity will be ignited. After you complete that specific layer, your conscious and unconscious will separate and return to their normal stations. Only you will be freer, more balanced, and filled with more light.”

“That last part is what I’m after. How long will it take before that happens?”

“No one really knows. Hopefully, not long. But it certainly isn’t going to happen while we’re talking and you’re not making the sounds I have asked you to make. Do you think you can go forward now?”

A Necessary Eruption

“Yes,” she answered resolutely. We were lucky that first day. The blockage in her heart proved to be very mobile, and it broke easily. Within a matter of minutes the pain rose out of her chest and into her throat. As the toxic energy burst out of its hiding place, the painful emotion it contained flooded her conscious mind. She was no longer in control of herself. What needed to come out of her was stronger than her capacity to control it. She broke down and cried uncontrollably for the rest of the session.
At the end of the session, Barbara noted that this was awfully hard work. She was hoping to feel better, not worse, as she did now. I told her not to worry about how she felt. That was temporary and would pass. The important thing for her to focus on was what had just happened. The toxicity had surfaced, broken, and poured out of her system. Many layers of grief had been cleared in an hour. That was most impressive.

Processing Grief

“Processing grief is always hard work,” I said. “Nothing about it is easy. No one wants to feel the pain it brings up, and besides, the energy of grief itself is very heavy. That’s why processing the psychic weight of grief is exhausting. For the next few days you can expect to feel a bit low and tired. The healing energy I channeled into your body is extremely potent and will continue to work on you for several more days. Don’t be surprised if you cry and clear more toxic emotion between sessions. That’s normal in this work. You’ll feel better in a few days.”

Her next appointment was a week later. When she called in she reported that she had indeed felt depressed and tired, and had cried for a few days after our first session. I asked her how she felt today. She replied that for the last two days she had been feeling really good and much, much lighter, but now she was afraid to do another session because she didn’t want to feel bad again.
I said that I didn’t blame her for feeling that way.

“No one likes feeling low,” I continued, “but the thing to remember is that every time you go through a cleansing experience, and work your way through un- conscious toxic emotion, you will tend to feel a bit depleted. Feeling that way is a sign that real healing has taken place. When you recover you will feel lighter, freer, and more energized than before. That’s just how the healing process goes. Every layer you peel away opens the way to more inner light, connects you more to your real self, and restores you to more of your personal power. You go through a little to gain a lot. You suffer some sadness and exhaustion that is short-lived, but you gain a happiness and clarity that will be long-lived. As you move forward, your highs will become higher, and your lows will also become higher.”

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Overcoming Victimization

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victimization

Standing Up For Ourselves

If we do not learn to stand up for ourselves, old patterns of victimization will continue to plague us and we run the risk of being repeatedly mistreated, used, and shamed. If the chronic recurrence of our patterns of victimization occurs, they will siphon off our power and cause further distortions in our psyche. Whatever imbalances we have will become more severe, and the unconscious beliefs that govern much of our experience will become more oppressive. Our sense of victimization will increase.

If we can find and face our repressed emotion and the events that caused them it makes it much easier to stand up for ourselves and release our patterns of victimization. When we do the right things in the right sequence, taking the next step is always much easier because we are building upon an established structure of accomplishment. Standing up for ourselves is very different when we have freed ourselves from our victimization complex than it is when the victim mentality still controls us. In the first case, we have eliminated our toxicity, regained our power, and become whole. In the second case, we are still toxic and powerless, and the our pattern of victimization will be as self-destructive as ever. Patterns of victimization are not easy to overcome. But with discipline and consistent effort they can be cleared and overcome. To heal your patterns of victimization you must find them, face them, feel them and forgive yourself and all others in involved in their creation.

Setting Effective Boundaries

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boundaries

Stabilizing The Psyche

The purpose of the Integration Zone is to stabilize our system, build effective boundaries, protect our psyche from psychological and emotional exploitation, and guard our energies from being drained by others. In the Integration Zone, we consolidate our strength, develop our self-worth, and focus on building a positive future.

As we enter the Integration Zone, our first task is to establish healthy and effective boundaries. We create effective boundaries when we construct a psychological “line in the sand” that allows us to maintain our wholeness and protect our sense of self. In effect, effective boundaries are similar to a “Do Not Enter” sign, a warning of what will happen if you trespass. One of the boundaries by which I live has six words: Abuse me, and you lose me.

The Big Stick

Effective boundaries allows us to be kind, decent, pleasant, and thoughtful most of the time, but when conditions warrant, effective boundaries will prod us to have some sting to our voice and a measure of bite to our bark. Teddy Roosevelt put this idea in very succinct language when he said, “Speak softly but carry a big stick.”

What Won’t Save You

Being nice all the time will not save us from being exploited or abused. A bully usually picks on someone nice and meek who won’t offer much resistance or fight back. That’s what makes him a bully. He instinctively knows that the nice, meek person doesn’t have good boundaries and is too afraid to stand up for himself. However, when we are whole and in our power, we will be able to establish healthy boundaries that allow us to calibrate our responses to other people’s behavior. We will be nice and decent when people are decent to us. When people are abusive or manipulative to us, we will modulate our response accordingly. Instead of being nice and compliant, we will be firm and formidable. A strong boundary requires a strong backbone to defend it.

Imbedding Shame

We should never permit anyone to abuse us. Suffering ongoing abuse destroys our self-esteem and wounds us deeply. Once the shame of being abused is imbedded into our system, it will draw more shaming experiences into our life. If we are to be free of toxic shame in the future, it is important to set clear boundaries and stand up for ourselves.