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  • ✋#32: Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

✋#32: Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

What are Boundaries and why are they so important? What is healthy or unhealthy? What do boundary violations look like? How do we go about setting better boundaries?

Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 32.

This week, we are reading 📚 Set Boundaries, Find Peace 🖋 by Nedra Glover Tawwab.

Boundaries have become much more mainstream over the past few years and people advocating for setting and enforcing them, but to be honest I still struggled to be able to fully wrap my head around the concept and the how.

Not anymore!! This book provides EXACTLY what we need, all packaged up to be able to create healthy boundaries and improve our relationships along the way.

Nedra Glover Tawwab is an absolute force, and her body of work on boundaries has earned her a massive 1.5 million followers on instagram - so we are guaranteed that she knows what she is talking about and can deliver it to an audience in a compelling, easy to understand way.

So let’s jump in! All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.

👊 Why are boundaries so important?

I think this quote sums it up perfectly:

“People don’t know what you want. It’s your job to make it clear. Clarity saves relationships.” - Loc 156

People can’t read our minds, and boundaries really come back to communication. We cannot honour ourselves, our needs or others’ needs if we cannot speak those things aloud.

Here is Nedra’s definition of Boundaries:

“Boundaries are expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships. Expectations in relationships help you stay mentally and emotionally well. Learning when to say no and when to say yes is also an essential part of feeling comfortable when interacting with others.” - page 5

Boundaries keep us well. This was a revelation to me.

For example, if we can’t find five minutes to eat a healthy meal or ten minutes to take a walk, but we spend hours and hours every week serving the needs of others this is a red flag that we have issues with boundaries.

By recognising and enforcing boundaries, it is the life equivalent of putting our own oxygen mask on first when the plane is crashing.

“You’ll have more energy for others if you apply it to yourself first. If you think about it, the root of self-care is setting boundaries: it’s saying no to something in order to say yes to your own emotional, physical and mental well-being.” - page 6

🤔 How can I tell whether I have healthy boundaries in my relationships or not?

The most common signs that someone needs better boundaries are:

But, it is also possible that we can go in the other direction and have boundaries that are too inflexible.

In fact, there are in fact three levels of boundaries:

😬 Porous

“Porous boundaries are weak or poorly expressed and are unintentionally harmful. They lead to feeling depleted, overextending yourself, depression, anxiety, and unhealthy relationship dynamics.

Porous boundaries look like oversharing, codependency, enmeshment (lacking emotional separation between you and another person), inability to say no, people-pleasing, dependency on feedback from others, paralyzing fear of being rejected, accepting mistreatment.” - page 10

Porous boundary setting can manifest in things like saying yes to sonething that you don’t want to do, or feeling obligated to loan money to people even if you don’t have enough to be able to do so.

😒 Rigid

“At the other extreme, rigid boundaries involve building walls to keep others out as a way to keep yourself safe. Whereas porous boundaries lead to unhealthy closeness (enmeshment), rigid ones are a self-protective mechanism meant to build distance. This typically comes from a fear of vulnerability or a history of being taken advantage of. People with rigid boundaries do not allow exceptions to their stringent rules even when it would be healthy for them to do so.” - page 11

🤩 Healthy

Finally, the place where we all want to be: having healthy boundaries.

In order to have successful boundaries, we need to be aware of our emotional, mental and physical resources and combine them with very clear communication.

Healthy boundaries can look like:

🖥 Feeling unsure about what kinds of boundaries you have in your life? Take the free Self Assessment Quiz here.

✋ Understanding the 6 types of boundaries and what violations can look like

🤝 Physical boundary violations:

👩‍❤️‍👨 Sexual boundary violations:

🧠 Intellectual boundary violations:

😢 Emotional boundary violations:

🧢 Material boundary violations:

⏰ Time boundary violations:

🚀 How do we communicate, honour and enforce our boundaries?

So far we have learned that we can have porous, rigid or healthy boundaries across realms of our lives including physical, sexual, intellectual, emotional, material and time.

Once we have learned to differentiate these types and areas, how do we actually go about enforcing and practicing our boundaries? Especially within the different contexts of our relationships.

❤️ Family

One of the most challenging areas to start changing our boundaries is within our families, especially between parents and children.

Take James and Tiffany for example, a married couple who were Nedra’s clients because their relationship was being so heavily impacted by James’ mother Debra.

She would have input on every decision big or small. The tension came in because:

“James adored her and from his point of view, Debra was smart, successful, reliable and offered great advice.

Tiffany, on the other hand, saw Debra as manipulative, overbearing and passive aggressive.” - page 171

With Nedra’s help and guidance, they were able to identify that the boundaries that James needed to work on with his mother were intellectual and emotional.

The changes they made were:

“…creating boundaries around what topics they’d like to keep between themselves, when they’d like to share certain information with others, and how they would talk about their marriage to other people.

At first this was hard for James, because he was used to sharing everything with his mother. In the beginning he gave in to Debra as she demanded more information in order to push her agenda. After a few slip-ups, James started to prepare himself for his mother’s tactics. Over time he became firm in his expectations.” - page 172

There is an entire section that goes on to detail the many other challenges and strategies there are when we navigate the complex shift from a child-parent relationship to an adult-parent relationship.

👬 Romantic Relationships

“We don’t naturally fall into perfect relationships; we create them.” - page 189

Malcolm and Nicole had been together for three years before they found themselves constantly arguing. Malcolm would leave the house for hours and then ignore Nicole when he did come back. Nicole would nag Malcolm and be passive-aggressive in her requests.

Nicole would try and talk about things and Malcolm would shrug things off, never to be resolved.

It turns out that,

“Beyond “I love you; you love me,” Malcolm and Nicole had never talked about what each considered acceptable behaviour in the relationship. They hadn’t discussed each person’s expectations.

For three years they existed with unspoken boundaries and anger about violations that were unknown to the other person.” - page 190

And this makes having a successful relationship extremely difficult.

We cannot assume people know how to conduct themselves in a relationship with us. We cannot assume that people will meet our needs if we do not tell them what they are.We cannot assume people know what our expectations are.

Instead,

“Let’s assume that people know only what you tell them, honour only what you request, and can’t read your mind.” - page 192

Imagine if we began all of our relationships like that?

👯‍♀️ Friendships

Kevin and Dave had been friends since high school. Twice a week they would talk on the phone.

Those phonecalls usually ended up being dominated by Dave complaining about his job, and Kevin was getting more and more frustrated over time.

After talking to Nedra, Kevin tried making a couple of experiments before asserting a completely new boundary.

  1. He tried to steer the conversation towards more positive topics by asking Dave what good things had happened to him that day.

  2. Kevin tried to take up more space in the conversation to make it more even between the two of them.

Despite trying these strategies, they didn’t really work. So the new boundary that Kevin decided to enforce in order to protect his energy was decreasing his contact with Dave to one 15 minute phonecall per week, instead of two 30 minute calls.

👩‍💻 Work

At work every day, Janine’s co-worker Sammie would come over to her cubicle to gossip about other people in the office. Janine didn’t want to seem rude by not talking to Sammie, so she went along with the conversation.

Soon after Sammie started asking Janine to go our for a drink after work. Janine didn’t want to go, but she always used an excuse like “I can’t tonight, I have plans”.

Because Janine wasn’t saying no clearly, Sammie kept asking. Eventually the work environment started to feel toxic to Janine and she felt as though she had no other choice than to get a new job.

Nedra challenged her by asking, “Instead of getting a new job, maybe you should try setting boundaries at work first?”

They were able to come up with new, clear boundaries that addressed all of Janine’s areas of frustration and resentment. This was their list:

None of these boundaries were easy to implement, nor did they happen overnight but one thing became abundantly clear:

Janine could either go through the short term discomfort of setting the boundaries and emerge the other side more peaceful, calm and happy; or she could remain in the status quo which was just as (if not more) uncomfortable.

Both options hurt. But only one of them leads to resolution.

🔑 When setting boundaries, be Assertive

There are many strategies, stories and examples throughout the book that can cover for just about any situation in life. But they all have one thing in common:

When people are encouraged to put boundaries in place, Assertiveness is the only way to go:

“Assertiveness involves communicating your feelings openly and without attacking others. It isn’t demanding. Instead, it’s a way of commanding that people hear you.” - page 103

Here are some examples of how we can be assertive when setting boundaries:

Well I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel like I have some work to do in setting better boundaries in my life! All with the goal and intention of having better relationships.

I hope this has been useful to you, and as always I am happy to answer any questions you might have or try to at least point you in the right direction!

Until next week my friends,Eleanor ❤️🙏

🧠 Resources & Links

📕 Next week’s book

Coming out next Wednesday 14th September 2022 is #33:📚 Noise: A Flaw In Human Judgement🖋 by Daniel Kahneman (the same author of Thinking Fast and Slow)

“We like to think we make decisions based on good reasoning – and that our doctors, judges, politicians, economic forecasters and employers do too. In this groundbreaking book, three world-leading behavioural scientists come together to assess the last great fault in our collective decision-making: noise.

We all make bad judgements more than we think. Noise shows us what we can do to make better ones.”