Unfuck Your Boundaries: Build Better Relationships through Consent, Communication, and Expressing Your Needs

Try this when communicating to someone else when you are all kinds of hacked off (or all kinds of thrilled, for that matter): I feel when you What I want

Limited Emotional Self-Control: HCPs feel emotions very strongly and are almost entirely dominated by their negative emotions. Their responses often appear out of proportion to the event at hand. We are all hardwired to pay more attention to negative emotions because doing so is a survival instinct. We all have histories that inform our emotional r

Externalizing: HCPs see problems as external to them. They see that they are the ones who are being hurt, and not when they are the people doing the hurting. They do not take responsibility for their part in the interaction and blame others for their problems. It’s an extreme reaction to the same fundamental attribution error that’s wired into all

If your past experiences have shown you that having your needs met is always a fight, then you are always primed to fight.

empathic can end up feeling attacked and manipulated by high conflict, but that’s not the end goal of the person engaging in conflict.

shenpa. The Tibetan word is usually translated as “attachment” but I prefer Chodron’s translation, which means “hooked.” It’s that feeling of going down a well-worn path or getting caught in a record scratch that creates a continuous skip. Chodron describes it as that feeling of being trapped in a situation that doesn’t feel good, causing us to tig

Is jealous of attention you pay to others

“No, I’m not comfortable with you borrowing my car” turns into an over-explanation, or even falsehoods, to justify your no. “I’d totally let you use my car, but I have errands to run/the brakes are spongy/etc, etc.” Because we don’t feel comfortable with our own boundary and don’t want to upset the other person or have them think we’re being shitty

To say something in the vein of: I’m having a hard time respecting your boundaries right now because I’m really worried about you. I don’t want to start bossing you into doing what I want you to do. It might be better if we don’t discuss this particular issue because I can’t really be impartial. It’s the nicest way I can think of it to avoid a “You