Healing Boundaries (Gaslighting)
About why you sometimes don't feel your boundaries… https://youtu.be/7K7mMeiA8YU
Video Transcript (How to Heal Boundaries)
If some people are in the situation where they know what their boundaries are they know what they want but they're challenged to speak their truth there's a category of us that are struggling with the challenge coming right before this which is recognizing what those boundaries are so you might not like something and go along with it you might be in a relationship that you recognize as toxic or in a situation at work that you realize is not so healthy and yet you don't really know that that's the case for you you're kind of uh pushing through so if you're finding yourself pushing you through,
and recognizing that maybe you're getting fatigued or certain areas of your life are suffering as a result of being in the circumstance then you're probably not respecting your boundaries and the reason you're not doing that is because you're not recognizing what they are so when we are gaslights let's say in childhood meaning your truth your reality your emotional experience your desires your needs are invalidated they're put into question they're dismissed or they're even ignored and neglected whether it's an error or maliciously the limit that's rising up within you or the need that's rising up within you is going invisible it's going unseen and because it's not being mirrored back to you you're missing that validation pace and so your own internal construct of your identity and your limits and your preferences and your boundaries isn't being acknowledged and so you're not building that image within yourself of what your boundaries are so that's the first problem and the first Challenge and the second one that can get us into a lot of trouble is when our childhood experiences are actually painful and we adapt to the pain so when we adapt to the pain we're actually splitting off from it ignoring the part of us that is in pain and then we're going along with the story that is being presented to us as what we should like or what we should prefer and so we learned to contort ourselves around certain mistreatment until eventually it becomes unconscious and we forget that we're doing it and how that manifests in adulthood is confusion about what you want or what your boundaries are or even gaslighting your intuition because this whole process of undermining yourself gets internalized first you're undermined and then you undermine yourself that's the programming that gets plugged in so uh pain is actually very useful in terms of helping you build compassion when you can sympathize with the pain of another being that's seemingly perceptively external to you but it's also a mapping mechanism for your own limits and if you're gaslighting your own pain then it's going to be very very hard for you to recognize this is something that I don't like and that's when we turn in to gaslighting ourselves and that's when we end up convincing ourselves that we actually want to be in a situation that underneath if you peel back the layers of how you really feel you actually don't like or is causing you pain because you've learned to adapt to pain and to ignore it so you've uh you've acclimatized yourself to discomfort the same way that if you know the refrigerator is humming in the background eventually your nervous system is going to calibrate to that as being part of the environment and you won't recognize that it's humming so our pain can start humming in the background and we can adapt to that and then not use it as a signal that this is something that we dislike and take action according to that instead we replay the powerlessness of our childhoods in this example and and continue ignoring that we're actually in pain and that a flag has gone up that a limit has been signaled and It's tricky because it's very individual everybody has their own limits everybody has their own boundaries we're all unique in our configuration so something that's genuinely bothersome to one person or toxic for them could actually be very useful and helpful to another so you need to build your own template and if you were gasoline in your childhood or you find yourself today feeling confused about what you want or in situations that you don't want to be in but confused about why you're not getting out or having mixed feelings about it it could be this internalized gaslighter that's blinding into your pain and therefore blinding you to your boundaries.
