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

Picks fights so you feel obligated to make things up to them • Always

There’s something all our brains are wired to do called the fundamental attribution error. When we mess up and violate someone else’s boundaries, we attribute our actions to the situation at hand (whether this is a reasonable justification or not). When other people mess up and violate our boundaries, we attribute it to them being a fundamentally t

When this process gets out of hand and the amygdala is on a hair-trigger and freaks out all the time about things that aren’t actually a threat, that’s a trauma response.

“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

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that talks about how what we think informs how we speak (and we all get that part) and also how the way we speak starts to change how we think. Someone exposed to racist language, who starts taking on some of those linguistic tendencies, will eventually code themselves into overtly racist actions.

Keeps you from work/makes you late to work/disrupts your workday/gets

visceral afferent messaging. This just means an inward feeling from the body, telling the mind what to do, instead of the mind making a decision telling the body what to do. This information

Advocating for ourselves can feel really uncomfortable, and a lot of people get an urge to justify their self-advocacy.

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