How Not Setting Good Boundaries Can Hold You Back In Life

Believing someone who keeps lying to you. Still trying to reach a relative who won't budge. Loaning money to a friend you already know won't pay you back. These aren't kindness, they're what happens when boundaries slip. In this post, I use a classroom metaphor to explain why waiting around for someone else to learn their lesson keeps you stuck in it too, and the one phrase that finally helped me stop confusing loyalty with self-sacrifice.

WATCH HERE or READ below

Don't get stuck in someone else's classroom because they refuse to learn their lesson. Every adversity we deal with in life contains a lesson. When we're able to see the lesson, we move on. When we don't, we repeat it. And we'll continue to run into that lesson until we learn.

Life is a classroom. Sometimes the people in your life get stuck and they're not ready to learn their lesson. And we want them to come along, so we wait for them. Going back to my "Be the Lighthouse" dose, without good boundaries you can be holding yourself back in life.

So, what does that look like? Someone repeatedly lying to you and you keep believing them. Continually trying to get through to that one relative that just doesn't get it. Loaning money to your friend again, even though they never pay you back. Bad boundaries open the door to codependence, enabling, and dysfunction. This is really hard for helpers, caregivers, people pleasers to finally learn as a lesson.

So, what can you do about it? You've tried to help someone and they're just not helping themselves. You really only have two choices. You can move on so you can start experiencing new lessons of your own, or you can stay stuck in their classroom.

If you're following along, you know I love to create quick little phrases because my neurodivergent brain loves things it can repeat to help me learn. And one thing that really, really, really helped me with this was, "I'm throwing you a lifeline, not an anchor." It really helped me keep good boundaries while still living a life of service and helping others. If you want to go deeper on that, watch my "Be a Lighthouse" dose.

If you're feeling stuck in your own life, take a minute and think about where you might be sitting in someone else's classroom.

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