Soul Kadee

If, like me, you’re an empath, INFJ, Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) or Type 4 Personality, you know how difficult it can be to create and maintain healthy boundaries in our closest relationships.

The inability to maintain boundaries often results in problems with assertiveness and saying “no” when we need to.

Our instinctive tendency is to withdraw in situations where we feel our boundaries are being violated. It’s often caused me to go, Greta Garbo-like, into my own shell, feeling strongly that “I want to be alone.”

Elaine La Joie has an excellent article on the Intuitive Introverted Withdrawal Pattern that creates the unconscious tendency of sensitive people to withdraw instead of communicate.

In my life, this tendency created a fear of intimacy. Everytime I got too close to a person, it triggered this fear and I ended up sabotaging my relationships by withdrawing. In her article on Fear Of Intimacy, Margaret Paul notes that

When we learn how to speak up for ourselves and not allow others to invade, smother, dominate and control us, we will no longer fear losing ourselves in a relationship.

Elaine also notes that sometimes the best energetic boundary is speaking up for ourselves and our needs.

Empaths know they have a different set of needs than most people, and so we can get the idea that our needs don’t count as much because they seem unreasonable or too different from the rest of the world.

Learning how to speak our needs unapologetically is a basic step in proper self-care. Yes, we take the first scary step in admitting who we are, but how else are people to truly know us?

Assertiveness Training is an essential skill for Empaths who need to learn how to create and maintain healthy boundaries. Assertiveness is about finding a middle way between aggression and passivity that best respects the personal boundaries of all relationship partners.

Creating boundaries can topple the balance of our relationships. But for the sake of our self-worth and self-respect, we may have to end relationships that cannot adjust to these new dynamics, or recreate a balance in relationships that we can’t end, like those with our family.

In her article on Rebalancing Relationships, Elaine writes that,

Many empaths know what is likely to happen if they insist on new behaviors, and so choose not to set new boundaries that would rebalance the relationship, all in order to avoid unpleasantness.

This only leads to resentment and more pretense for the empath, and eventually loss of self worth and self respect. They wonder if they are uncompassionate and selfish, completely ignoring the cost to themselves. Our souls and our subconscious are paying attention to this lack of self-care and self-respect.

If we consciously choose to stay in these relationships, we will be up against a permanent block to the unfolding of our spiritual gifts, and we will not mature into fully individuated and conscious human beings.

Type 4 Personalities sometimes exhibit unhealthy behaviour by giving too much. It often ends up making us feel drained and unappreciated.

When we learn to question our unconscious motives, we realise that we often give because we’ve grown up with the belief that to get love we have to give love, and that the needs of others are more important than our own.

But giving with expectation taints the very act of giving. To give in a healthy manner, our hearts must be pure and free of expectations. To do this, we need to take care of our own needs and to give to ourselves first, before we can give to others in a healthy, loving manner.

Elaine’s article on The Giving Persona has some useful advice on dealing with this problem.

Many empaths and beginning intuitives have fallen into the trap of giving too much of themselves away. We believe subconsciously that the way to receive love is to earn it by doing loving things. As children we may have been taught that doing loving things and making others happy is what it means to be a good boy or good girl.

If we believe this, we may ignore our own needs, or we may come to believe that we have no personal needs, that the only need we really have is to make others in our lives happy with us. When we have taken on this Giving Persona, we are hypervigilant to the needs of others, and always ready to please.

When healthy, people with this personality type can be very generous and loving, but they have figured out how to access their own inner needs and honor those needs before and sometimes instead of the needs of others.

When empaths move toward maturity and awareness, the first thing they must do is learn to set boundaries with the very people to whom they have been giving their emotional energy away.

In the end, people with a Giving Persona can become very loving human beings. But, the whole key is to go down to that subconscious level and realize that their worth does not depend on how much they please others, how much they give to others, or how much joy they bring to others.

Once they start valuing themselves and their individual needs, they become a whole person. Once they are whole, they are truly able to support the others around them.

For empaths and Type 4s, emotional literacy is the first step in creating healthy boundaries. Becoming mindful of our emotions and reactions in the moment can help us make better choices for ourselves and others.

Mindfulness or present moment awareness is a spiritual practice whereby a person is intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally. In Buddhism, mindfulness is considered a prerequisite for developing insight and wisdom.

Incorporating a spiritual practice that teaches mindfulness (I use meditation and tai chi), is an essential step to personal growth. Especially for empaths and intuitives, spiritual growth goes hand in hand with psychological growth. As this article on Personality, Essence, & Spirituality notes:

Psychology without spirituality is arid and ultimately meaningless, while spirituality without grounding in psychological work leads to vanity and illusions. Either way, disappointment and deception result. To be most effective, spirituality and psychology need to go hand in hand to reinforce the best in each other.

Radical Personal Responsibility is another practice I recommend to empaths. We often tend to take on another person’s emotions or project our own emotions on to others.

An empath ignorant of her emotions and unaware of her emotional boundaries can end up blaming another person for her distress. Taking responsibility for our feelings and the role we play in situations is the first step towards acceptance and change.

Paul and Layne Cutright have an excellent ebook (see reading list below) that teaches how to assume personal responsibility and deal with upsets. They write that,

When you assume radical personal responsibility, you live in a truth that proclaims:

I am responsible for how I allow others to affect me.

In a world of forces beyond my control, I can learn to be the keeper of my own heart and mind.

Even when things appear not to be going my way, and I am upon an emotional sea of crossing and diverging currents, I can still navigate my way to my ultimate good fortune.

I proclaim that I am not a victim of the world I see. I am a co-creator of it. Let love and wisdom be my moral compass, and let clarity be the wind in my sails.

Recommended Reading:

Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: Making Life Right When It Feels All Wrong by Herbert Phd Fensterheim, Jean Baer

This book is like the bible on Assertiveness Training and shows through case studies and examples how learning to say no and set boundaries with others can help anyone overcome their problems with assertiveness. Essential reading for empaths.

Assertiveness Training Download

Say what you mean, calmly and clearly, right when you need to. Assertiveness training often misses a vital ingredient - the ability to stay calm while stating your case, which often causes people to stop trying - they think being more assertive is beyond them.

Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child by Margaret Paul

Because empaths live in the world of their emotions, they often feel so overwhelmed by their own painful emotions, that they tend to deny them and dissociate, even from themselves. But suppressing painful emotions creates pathological conditions that can take years to resolve. Getting in touch with your intuition or inner child and learning to nurture your own feelings is essential for empaths who want to achieve emotional maturity.

The Highly Sensitive Person in Love: Understanding and Managing Relationships When the World Overwhelms You by Elaine Aron

As a reader notes, HSP’s have difficulty making a relationship to their healthy creative selves; they have often learned to pathologize their gifts of intuition and introspection, depth and empathy. Separated from self, it should be no surprise that they also often become alienated from their partners, when they are in sync with themselves, they can be warm, compassionate, spontaneous and profoundly present in love relationships.

Mindfulness by Ellen J. Langer

To be mindful, stressing process over outcome, allows free rein to intuition and creativity, and opens us to new information and perspectives, says the author.

You’re Never Upset For The Reason You Think by Paul and Layne Cutright

Learn a powerful, effective and easy to use tool for resolving any upset in record time. The CURE is a 13 step process for enlightened conflict resolution that can be done alone or with another to quickly get over anything.

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