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WOMEN WITH A “GOOD girl” tendency are often inclined to avoid conflict in relationships at work and at home. Conflict is natural part of a healthy relationship. Conflict gives us an opportunity to show up in our truth, speak up about how we feel and what we need. Yet many women, including myself, feel great discomfort when someone disagrees with us or is angry with us for any reason. To avoid this, we hint at difficult issues rather than being direct about them or we disguise difficult topics in conversation or procrastinate discussing them. By not expressing our true feelings or stating our needs, we put ourselves on the back burner and by doing so, we can end up feeling dismissed, controlled, and suppressed.
In the next chapter I will describe how to shift our ingrained beliefs that create blind spots for us. With the women that I have coached, the most common limiting beliefs that come up around conflict include:
The reality is that difference of opinion is natural and usually there is no absolute truth. Often in a disagreement, there is truth in what both individuals feel and acknowledging the other person’s experience and having them acknowledge ours is what is necessary. Every adult is fully capable of taking care of him or herself and even if they are feeling a difficult emotion, they don’t need us to save them. It is entirely normal for each of us to feel strong emotions and they don’t need to be avoided.
The next time you can feel the uncomfortable anticipation of a difficult conversation or potential conflict, ground down into your body, feel your feet on the ground, and keep breathing deeply. Give yourself loving compassion and support by telling yourself, “You’re safe. You can do this. It’s vitally important to express your truth.” Your job is to stay in your body, breathing, speak from the vantage point of your own experience and when the other person speaks, deeply listen, try not to react, and reflect back what you have heard them say about how they are feeling, without making them wrong. You don’t need to accept the responsibility for how they are feeling. Everyone is 100% responsible for their own reactions. Do take the responsibility for speaking up and saying what is true for you. Take responsibility of what you think, how you feel, and what you want.
I have a client who owned a business with her siblings that had been in the family for over forty years. She carried the burden of responsibility for her siblings’ ownership in the business, a burden that had weighed heavily on her for twenty years. She sacrificed her own desires and needs for two decades, for the sake of her family. By the time we started working together, it had taken a toll on her physical and emotional wellbeing. When we isolated her belief that she would let them down if she spoke up and stated what she wanted, to buy them out so she wouldn’t be responsible for their inheritance, she became aware of her tendency to rescue other people at her own expense.
Although it was the scariest thing she had ever done, she set up a meeting with her siblings and told them her decision. This brave act of speaking her truth, not only healed herself, it healed generational family dysfunction. She found an authentic part of her universal self that brought a new sense of relief, peace, and strength.
Being in this kind of integrity with ourselves, even when it feels hard, is the essence of establishing proper boundaries. Over committing to please or rescue others means we sacrifice ourselves and this eventually wears us down. Many women believe “I have to do everything, or nothing will get done.” Doing it all can lead to burnout, depression, and getting sick. This striving, whether it shows up as trying to be a supermom, overachieving at work, or volunteering on multiple committees, is how women tend to overcompensate for the insecurity they feel, seeking validation through external accomplishments. This was my strategy for decades until I got so depleted that I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I have also observed how when women don’t have clear boundaries and stand up for them, they develop resentment for those around them. When our needs are perpetually denied, we can tend to feel angry with the very people who we are prioritizing over ourselves. Conversely, when we make ourselves and our needs a priority, we have the energy bandwidth and emotional capacity to be kinder and more compassionate. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown says, “The most compassionate people that I’ve ever interviewed... happened to be the most boundaried. They happened to be the people who had very, very clear boundaries about what they were willing to do, what they were not willing to do, what they were willing to take on, and what they were not willing to take on... I think it is much easier to be compassionate when we feel respected, and almost impossible to feel compassionate, and feel empathic for people when we feel like we’re being taken advantage of or when we’re being sucked dry.”
Saying “No, I can’t do that,” can feel incredibly uncomfortable as we begin to practice honoring our boundaries. Choosing to feel that discomfort in the moment is an act of self-integrity and self-care in the long term.
Learning the difference between what “yes” and “no” feels like to our universal selves is the foundation of establishing clear boundaries. Calming the societal self is the first step in discerning this difference. The practice of saying “no” when our universal self is feeling it, requires a healthy balance of our societal and universal selves. A balance that comes from not just hearing the voice but heeding it. It can feel scary at first but with practice, the voice gets clearer and we get stronger.
The voice of the universal self is our inner wisdom and can only be heard/felt through the body. Because it is a subtle, sublime whisper, we must choose to hear it. The choice is to calm the mind and the societal self, connect in our hearts and bodies and listen to the intuitive truth of what bubbles up, despite the waves of fear that might wash through us.
