Tag: friendships

I was talking with my daughter recently and she shared with me that she is teaching my granddaughter about setting and respecting physical space limits.  My daughter didn’t use those specific words, but it is essentially what she was referring to.  It reminded me of the importance of setting clear boundaries with others and the important responsibility of keeping and respecting boundaries of others and of ourselves.  It is good to recognize that we all have limitations and recognizing that and putting healthy boundaries up helps us to thrive.

My granddaughter is learning about a physical boundary, but there are other areas we may want to consider when thinking of boundaries.  Areas that I have learned to value and protect with boundaries include financial, time, energy, and emotional boundaries.  These can change as our circumstances change, but it is good to know what boundary I need or want to be in place for the c ...

Spaghetti and Hurt Feelings

I am a pretty clumsy person. Like a keep-an-eye-on-me-around-closed-sliding-glass-doors, probably-should-never-eat-spaghetti-without-a-full-apron-on kind of person. Suffice it to say, my childhood nickname lauded my propensity to accumulate minor bumps and scrapes through incredible feats of un-coordination. I won’t tell you how old I was when I nearly broke my glasses walking into the corner of a doorway instead of through the doorway - although, to be perfectly clear, it was part of the transparent wall of a racquetball court…and that was the problem: it was perfectly clear.

Anyway, as my luck would have it, I’m also a pretty relationally-clumsy person. At times I completely miss that I have caused emotional discomfort or harm. I put my foot in my mouth routinely enough that I< ...

Somewhere along the way on my journey of life, I developed a belief that I was supposed to do life alone.  I absorbed a belief system from the movies I watched, the television I consumed, and the people who were closest to me, that the strong person was the one who was a rugged individualist and needed no one.  This kind of life protected me from hurt and loss because it kept people at arm’s length and made it impossible for anyone or anything to hurt me.  You see, I believed the worst thing that could happen to me was to be hurt, and I wanted to avoid that at all costs.  Since people will inevitably hurt you, I chose to let very few people in.

My approach to life worked into my mid-thirties, until it stopped working, and I entered a very dark period of my life where I realized that I had very few friends, I was emotionally drained, and most of the people in my life had become projects.  I believe w ...