Being able to set limits is especially challenging if you are attached to being a nice person. Others can manipulate your desire to be seen as good.
Let’s start with boundaries. A good boundary helps you be an integrated person — to be your authentic self. It honors you as an individual, as you may hope to honor others. But some people who have been overrun fight to make boundaries that sometimes seem sharp and inflexible. Setting a rigid boundary can keep out sweetness. It can become brittle and shatter your defenses.
The answer is to learn to set appropriately permeable boundaries. Think of a cell in the body. It needs to let nutrition in. It needs to let waste out. If it has no cell wall, it lacks integrity and will be overrun or fall apart. If it has too impenetrable a boundary, it will starve or be poisoned by its own toxins. It does not function without the other cells.
The first step to creating a useful boundary is a healthy self-regard. When this is very intact, there is no work needed — one regards transgressions as ridiculous: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Engagement with something unhealthy for the self is not an option.
Now this sense of self-worth is elusive to many people. So here is where you enlist the genuine part of your niceness — your empathy. You imagine the situation happening to someone you love. Is it OK with you? Probably not. So include yourself as a being who deserves love and respect “Just ’cause” we all do. Do not allow the transgressor to harm you — it is bad for them, too.
Some teachers from other cultures have been shocked at how much Westerners can disregard or even hate themselves. But “Love thy neighbor as thyself” imagines that we are able to love ourselves — or we can’t do a very good job for our neighbors.
So go meet the part(s) inside that have believed mean things about you. If there are words that were internalized that are not useful, give them a cartoon voice. Elmer Fudd is particularly useful.
Find where these feelings reside in your body. Breathe into them with compassion. Use the part of you that cares for others to care for yourself, too. You will find that it is easier to be genuinely kind to others if you start here.
The biblical injunction “Charity begins at home” means that love and compassion start with you, and the intimates around you. Charity, agape, signifies love, compassion, justice and from that, giving to others.
Don’t give away the self. Even a nice request that you don’t want to say yes to needs to be refused. You’ve perhaps heard the adage, “No is a complete sentence.” If we are “nice” rather than kind, we might fritter away our gifts fulfilling other people’s projects. If they are rowing in the direction you’re going, by all means have alliances. But being diverted can keep you from fulfilling what only you can offer. As a colleague’s Texas grandmother told her when she was a child, “Little girl, you can’t give from an empty basket.” Allow yourself to be filled, and then give from that abundance.
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