Setting Self-Focused Boundaries

Does anyone else feel like they could benefit from having a few more boundaries with themselves? I’m not great with boundaries in general, but at least I maintain some boundaries with the people in my life. I may not always stand my ground, but a basic level of respect and decency is required to maintain a meaningful relationship with me. Meanwhile, in my relationship with myself, there are almost no boundaries. I walk all over myself, respect and decency are nowhere in sight, and I talk to myself in unreasonable and often horrific ways. Despite knowing this is far less than ideal, I keep doing it and never set any boundaries for myself.

Boundaries are a popular topic of conversation within the self-help and mental health communities, but I’ve noticed that the focus tends to be on setting boundaries with others. When I think of setting boundaries, I think about my standards and expectations of others and how they treat me. Rarely do I think about my standards and expectations of how I treat myself. I doubt I’m the only person who missed that particular part of the message. I’d argue that setting boundaries for myself is even more important than setting boundaries for others. The “love yourself first” concept comes to mind here because if I let myself treat myself terribly, then what are the chances that I allow that behavior in others? Probably pretty high, and my life thus far has been fairly indicative of that.

I feel like I worked on boundaries backward. No wonder I have such a hard time maintaining healthy boundaries with the people in my life if I can’t maintain any boundaries with myself. Worse yet, I feel like I’ve never even tried. It didn’t occur to me until now that self-focused boundaries are glaringly missing from my life. Now that I’ve made this crucial discovery, I plan to lay down some very serious boundaries for myself and try to stick to them as best I can. As I’ve mentioned in the last few posts, personal accountability can be difficult when there is no one but yourself to hold your feet to the fire, but I’m hoping writing my intention here will help with that a bit.

If you relate and feel like you could benefit from adding more self-focused boundaries to your life, maybe try what I plan to do. I plan to journal about setting boundaries for myself using this as my prompt: Imagine your relationship with yourself is between you and another person. What are the boundaries you would create in that relationship? What behavior would you refuse to tolerate? What would you need to feel seen, heard, respected, and loved? What would you need that person to know about how their treatment makes you feel?

Flipping the script like that and imagining someone else treating me the way I treat myself hits way harder. Let me know in the comments below if it does the same for you and if there are any new boundaries you plan to set for yourself that you’d like to share!