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

“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

Is jealous of attention you pay to others

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

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

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

High conflict responses are often the result of people perceiving their lives as out of control and they perceive conflict as their best means of regaining control. It is a boundary-busting behavior, and those of us who are more

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

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.

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