Good Life Project - Terri Cole | Let's Talk About Boundaries

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Ever feel like life is one non-stop boundary issue? You’re not alone. And my guest, Terri Cole, can help. Before earning a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychotherapy from New York University, Terri ran a talent agency for actors and supermodels. She was your typical Type A overachiever with zero balance and no internal peace, driven by ambition, living on planes and serving as a business executive, confidante, advisor, surrogate parental figure and bounding between nearly every role, with every person imaginable. She began to realize every part of work and life was bleeding into every other part of work and life and the net effect was that everything was bleeding out. Something had to change. She wanted her life back, and she wanted to do something that felt more driven by meaning and service. Changing direction, she went back to school, started a partnership in life and family, and therapy practice at the same time, that’s now been her devotion for over two decades. What she learned in the trenches with her high-profile clients informed and continues to inspire the work she does today. She’s been on a mission. Her dharma, she shares, is teaching women how to attract and sustain healthy, vibrant, Real Love into their lives and establish and maintain effective boundaries with ease and grace. That latter part, she’s come to believe is at the heart of so much interpersonal struggle and is perpetually at the center of nearly therapeutic engagement. So, she figured it was time to share was she’s learned in her new book, Boundary Boss: The Essential Guide to Talk True, Be Seen, and (Finally) Live Free (https://amzn.to/3srgUZC). We dive deep into the world of boundaries in today’s conversation.Be sure to check out her 2017 conversation (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/terri-cole-real-love/) with us for a deeper dive.You can find Terri at:Website : https://www.terricole.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/terricoleDiscover Your Secondary Gain : https://boundaryboss.me/goodlife-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So ever feel like life is kind of one nonstop boundary issue? Well, you're not alone. My guest, Terry Cole, can help. Before earning a master's in clinical psychotherapy from New York University, Terry spent years running a talent agency for actors and supermodels. He was kind of your typical type A overachiever with zero balance, no internal peace, driven by ambition, living on planes and serving as business executive, confidant, advisor, surrogate parental figure, and really bouncing between nearly every role with every person imaginable. And she began to realize that every part of work and life was bleeding into every other part of work and life. And the net

effect was that everything was kind of bleeding out. Something had to change. She wanted her life back and she wanted to do something that felt more driven by meaning and service. So changing direction, she went back to school, started a partnership in life and family and therapy practice at the same time that has now been her devotion for over two decades. And it turns out what she learned in the trenches with her high profile clients has really informed and continues to inspire the work she does today. She's kind of on a mission. Her dharma, she shares, is teaching women how to attract and sustain healthy, vibrant, real love into their lives and establish and maintain effective boundaries with ease and grace. That latter part, she has come to believe, is at the heart of so much interpersonal struggle and is perpetually at the center of nearly

every therapeutic interaction that she has. So she figured it was time to share what she's learned in a new book, Boundary Boss. We dive deeply into the world of boundaries in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. So we've been friends for years now. We have an earlier conversation on this here podcast where we kind of go deep into the origin story a lot more about you. So if any of our listeners would really love to dive deep into that, please, we'll link it in the show notes. Our focus today is a lot more direct, a lot more linear, and it is around this word, boundaries. And you have a new book out, which is all about it. You make a statement sort of early on in your book that effectively says, without great boundaries, you cannot live a great life.

That is a bold statement. Mm-hmm. Tell me more about life. That is a bold statement. Tell me more about that. Well, it's true. I mean, two and a half decades in the trenches with my therapy clients, I can see what disordered boundaries, and I think we should establish what that means, right? What are boundaries? You know, Bre Brown would say, it's just you letting the people in your life know what's okay with you and what's not okay with you. My definition is a

little bit, you know, let's take it a little further to say that it is you knowing, prioritizing, and communicating your preferences, your desires, your limits, and your deal breakers in your life to all the people. That's in a professional setting. And of course, they'll be different. The way you would do it with a boss is different than a lover. It's different than a subordinate, but it is the act of being able to succinctly and effectively communicate who you are, what you stand for, what you want, what you won't stand for, what your limits are. To me, that is what being fluent in the language of boundaries requires. So if you cannot do that, and the reason I wrote a book is because most of my practice

is super high-functioning women, and that's who's in a lot of my courses. And I would see the same thing over and over, meaning the presenting problem would be different. Addicted person in their life, family of origin is a shit show. Whatever the thing is, everyone had a different reason. The thing that got them through the door and onto my couch was different. But then when I start unraveling, it would all come back to in one form or another, the inability to communicate, establish, and uphold healthy boundaries in their lives. So I was like, this is like a, I hate to say pandemic, but kind of, this is literally a phenomenon that is not unique to these women. And then I started

teaching this in the world. And then I have women from 120 different countries in a boundary course that I created because there was such a demand for it. And the pain points were the same. So I was like, there's a need for someone to teach this as an actual language. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious, you've been practicing psychotherapy for going on three decades at this point. In the training that you receive to sort of like go out into the world and practice, is this an area, you know, I sort of make the analogy to medicine where they get, you know, like a handful of hours on nutrition. And now so much of what's happening in the medical world is like looking at food as medicine and it's critical. And I'm curious in your training, was this an area of focus where

there was a real deep understanding or work on how to identify it, how to work with it on mechanisms, on therapeutic interventions? No, and definitely not the language, right? So effective communication and even that in my grad school education, becoming a psychotherapist, that wasn't even emphasized in the same way. I found that my interest in self-help before I even went to school and switched careers from being a talent agent is really the thing that planted sort of the seeds of this. And my own life experience, you know, Jonathan, it's not just my clients. We all, we teach what we most need to learn like 99.2% of the time where I was raised like so many women to be a good girl, right? I was raised to be nice and to have niceness be like the top virtue that you could ever aspire to

is for people to think that you're nice. And so what does this lead to? This leads to us saying yes when we want to say no, over giving, over feeling, over committing, over functioning, all under the umbrella, the hope of being kind and being nice. And yet let's really break it down. Is it actually nice to say yes when you want to say no? It's not, it's dishonest. It isn't nice. And then what happens is we are literally giving corrupted intel, bad data to the people in our lives. We feel empty. We feel unseen. We feel unknown because we are unseen and unknown. If we are not talking true, like write the subtitle of the book, is to talk true, be seen, and finally live free. If we're not talking true. And here's what stops most people from doing this. They don't have the words. They fear. They have all of these myths around what does it mean to be

a woman in particular with healthy boundaries. People equate healthy with harsh, like healthy boundaries with having harshness, being bitchy, rejecting, going out and confronting everyone. I'm going to punch everyone in the face with my boundaries. You're not. And that's not what it means, right? So I don't look at boundaries like weak and strong because that's not how they are. It's are they functional or dysfunctional, right? Do they accomplish

the thing that we want them to accomplish, which might be deepening intimacy in our relationships, might be protecting ourselves, right? So really getting it out of the right boundaries and wrong boundaries or weak and strong boundaries. I don't look at them that way because literally that isn't the way they are because dysfunctional boundaries come in. I actually have a thing, a boundary quiz that's out. It's just called boundaryquiz.com where you could learn like what is your primary boundary type? And there are six, really seven if you include like healthy, where disordered boundaries, you could be the ice queen, which is someone whose boundaries are too rigid where people don't agree with you. You're kind of like, F you, and I'm going to do it myself. Or I'll do it my, if it's not my way, then get out. Those are too rigid. Or you could be the chameleon where you're very impacted by what others want. And so when I'm with you, Jonathan, if you like that, then I'm like that

too. And if I'm with someone else, then I can go with that. That's a disordered boundary style. If you are the peacekeeper, you're very dialed into not wanting there to be conflict. And not just in your relationships. You don't want there to be conflict anywhere around you. You're always sort of looking to be like, hmm, where can I de-escalate what? All of those disordered boundary styles. And it doesn't mean you have to be like that all the time to have that still be primary when you're out of balance, right? When we're stressed. Because it's kind that all the time to have that still be primary when you're out of balance, right? When we're stressed, because it's kind of easy-ish to have okay boundaries when life is easy. They really, it really gets revealed when we're under a lot of pressure, but you can, of course,

I wrote a whole book about how to learn how to do it and stay balanced in it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's fascinating also the way you describe it because there's a situational element to it that I think a lot of people don't really key in. We kind of think like we're the X type of person, right? So this is the way our boundaries are, and this is how we move through life. This is our yes line, this is our no line, and that's just the way it is. But what you're saying is much more nuanced. It's like, no, actually it may be based on the situation, the circumstance, the individual, the group, the nature of the relationship is that it's not so much like you have X boundaries for everybody. And this is the way you interact with the world, but you literally may have

a vast set of different boundaries. And I wonder if you interact with the world, but you literally may have a vast set of different boundaries. And I wonder if you see in your practice, whether you like one person might actually have two different sets of boundaries in two different circumstances with two different sets of people that actually really strongly conflict with each other internally. In fact, I do. And there's some that are more common than others. So for the women in my practice over the last two and a half decades, it's like they could be, a lot of them are like CFOs and CEOs and COOs and women who are running the world, right? Like actually. And yet their ability to be that efficient and that effective and that articulate

in their romantic relationships didn't exist. It was almost as if this whole, they forgot that, they couldn't apply it here. And that really comes down to each of us has a downloaded boundary blueprint, I call it, which is, you know, this is in your unconscious mind. So this is the paradigm that we go out into the world and we think this is the way the world is, like put quotes around that, right? This is the way relationships are. This is the way I should interact with these people or those people. And we didn't need our parents or parental impactors, as I call them, because they might not have been parents per se, but the adults in our life, they didn't need to be like, this is the way it is. We just,

this is modeled behavior that we learn. And so we're impacted by that, right? Let's just say you had a parent who was, you know, a pushover, like that was their primary boundary style, saying yes when they really want to say no, always like bitching and complaining about how entitled neighbor Betty is. How about just saying no to Betty, but that wasn't a possibility, right? But Betty, what a jerk she is, you know, which can also happen when we're not doing our own boundary thing. We just cannot believe how entitled people are. And you're like, why are you surprised? People are going to ask you to do the most ridiculous things and you can get really mad or you can learn to say no. And it's so much easier just to learn to

say no. But anyway, your family of origin, just like my family of origin, there was a particular way that you interacted. It might've been in an enmeshed way where like everyone knew what was going on with everyone else and everyone was talking about everyone else's business, or it might've been more separate, right? Those are boundary things. How close, how far away, how your family interacted with the rest of the world. Some families are open systems. That was my family where friends can come and go. The door is open. Friends can sleep over. There's movement. Some families are closed systems. Nobody comes in and out, just the family. There is more of a distrust for the outside world. And that impacts what we think is appropriate to share with other people. The way that we share that information and all that

is an emotional boundary issue. You see how it's all sort of connected? Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. The idea of a bit of a boundary blueprint using your language makes a lot of sense too, right? Because I think we all have, whether it's our family of origin, whether it's our chosen family, whether it's the circumstances of our lives when we're coming up, it leaves this imprint on us, which eventually becomes this blueprint as you describe it. But what's fascinating to me is also the notion that the things that go into that blueprint, like the choices that you make about where the boundaries are and how you draw them when you're young,

when these are being formed based on that circumstance, maybe they're actually healthy then. Maybe they actually kept you alive. Maybe you had a family that was homeless or struggling or there was abuse. And these were the things that actually seemed aggressive, but yet they were appropriate for that moment in time. And yet it seems like what becomes this blueprint never gets revisited as life circumstances evolve. Yes. And you make such a good point there, Jonathan, that,

you know, and I always say this to clients, like this adaptive behavior in your childhood that did keep you, if you had a parent who was unstable or a parent who had an addiction issue, let's say, you would learn, they would not have to tell you anything for you to know that the focus should be on them, what they need and what they want. So you become a people pleaser instantaneously because kids are so intuitive and you don't want to be on the receiving end of any rage. So you're working either as fast as you can to keep them entertained, to get them what they need, to make dinner, to, you know, these are all these kids who are parentified at a young age. Now, when we get to adulthood, those things that were adaptive become maladaptive, and then they dictate disordered boundaries. And we're not aware of the fact that they even exist, let alone that they're now maladaptive.

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. You talked a little bit about your upbringing. There's a line in the book where you write, when you were a kid, your home was effectively a perfect storm of covert communication and emotional dysfunction, which followed you. As a young adult, your boundaries become protecting yourself, sarcasm, manipulating people, and eventually substance to sort of cope with this. And you roll into a young adult, you're out in the working world performing, like you said,

at a really high level. And then you change careers and you're running a modeling agency and you're out there doing big deals. And from the outside looking in, I think the tendency for so many people is to say, well, that person has to be really well-adjusted and have healthy boundaries because they seem to be functioning in such an extraordinary level at work and life. And yet, even for you, and I guess that's a big part of why you do what you do now, it was the exact opposite. It's funny, the illusion, you know, that being driven, right?

So part of the story in the book is that I was so driven to succeed. And I just thought, I'm just ambitious. That's all, nothing. And then, of course, you know, a bunch of therapy later, you're like just thought, I'm just ambitious. That's all, nothing. And then of course, you know, a bunch of therapy later, you're like, oh, I'm trying to prove to my father that I was not the wrong gender because I felt like he wanted a boy and I was his fourth daughter and blah, blah, blah. So you start to look at your own motivation, of course. And when I started, that's when things started shifting of, oh, I'm being driven by fear of unworthiness. I'm being driven to prove something. So keep in mind, the external world, right? Success looks like success, whether it's driven by pain, blood,

sweat, tears, whether it's driven by joy, inspiration, being energized. To the outside world, it just looks like, wow, you were running a talent agency in your early thirties. That's amazing. But at what cost? And I think that this is something that you bring up a great point of what it looks like. And I say, don't make any assumptions. And I don't make assumptions about people because so many of my private clients have been these incredibly high-functioning women who are so capable. And in fact, in the book, I talk about the codependency connection to disordered boundaries. And that over the years, I mean, I struggled with this myself, codependency. We'll talk a

little bit about what it is. So, cause I think there's a lot of different ideas and there's a lot of wrong ideas about what it is. So if you look at with my clients, I was seeing this behavior with them, codependency. But anytime I would say the word codependent, they'd be like, what? Crazy. Hello. Everyone's dependent on me. I'm the one who's getting shit done. What are you talking about? Like, what do you mean? Like the Melody Beatty, codependent no more idea that codependency is only you being involved with an addict and covering for them when their boss calls, right?

Like it's, no, that is not the codependency that I've seen. And so I actually came up with a new terminology called the high functioning codependency because your boundaries are still disordered and it's still dysfunctional, but it's very hard to see the same way that you were like, oh, we look at success and people are like, you must be crushing it and super happy. This is very much the same. So think of highly capable human beings who it's almost like, you know, Ginger Rogers was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing except she was doing it backwards and in heels. That's like these women in my practice are so high functioning that they actually are getting it all done, but they are getting it all done at the expense of themselves and their mental health and their wellness.

And from my perspective, high functioning codependency and codependency itself is being overly invested in the feeling states, the decisions, the outcomes of the people in your life to the detriment of your own internal peace or your own life experience. So, you know, because I know, you know, you got to be very careful with your words because I've had so many people say, what's wrong with caring about the people that I love? I'm like, hello, I'm not saying don't care. I'm saying to the detriment that when something happens to someone you love, and if they're not a minor child, but I'm obviously not talking about minor children, if it feels like it's happening to you, and I know that's what it feels like because I am a recovering, high-functioning codependent where the urgency to do something, to fix, to come up with a solution for that person, my sister, my cousin, the person I love, is so great that everything else is going away until I can figure that out.

That's codependency. Because when you think about what codependency really is, it is overt and covert bids for control. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And control very often to the demise of you, your lifestyle, your happiness, your health, let alone the fact that it is one of those words, which is a proxy for security, which is a proxy for certainty, which can never be had. So it's like the ultimate form of suffering. It is. And it also isn't, it doesn't end up doing what we want it to do because there's always

more things. And I think that there was this incredibly pivotal moment in my early 30s where I was in therapy with the same brilliant therapist, Ruth. And I was talking about one of my sisters and I was crying and she was in a terrible situation. And as you know, I'd stopped drinking in my early 20s. And so I was dealing with there still being quite a bit of addiction within the family system. And this particular sister, she was kind of the scapegoat of the family where she was acting out the veiled feelings, the frustration of the group, like poor scapegoats, they get chosen. People in the family system think that, no, they're the problem. You're

like, oh yeah, no, they were chosen to be the problem. Trust me. It's like the system has its own energy. But anyway, she was in a terrible situation, living in the woods without running water with a crackhead who was physically abusive to her. I mean, I'm not exaggerating. Those were the facts of the situation. So I was crying to my therapist and screaming to Vic. I don't think we were married. No, we were married, I think.

And just being like, I'm going to get her an apartment and I'm going to do the thing and I'm going to call the person and I'm going to do an intervention and whatever I was going to do. And finally, Ruth said, you know, Tara, let me ask you something. What makes you think that you she doesn't need to learn it in a place in the woods without running water with some a-hole who beats her can we agree to that she was like nope can't agree to that because i'm not god and neither are you. But what you really want, Tara, what you really want is you've worked for 20 years to create internal peace. And her dumpster fire of a life is really interrupting that peace. And her, you want her pain to end so that your pain can end. I was like, wow,

that makes me feel way less cool than when I thought I was just being Mother Teresa. But it's true. But what I learned in that moment, because I actually said to her, so you mean I don't have to do this? And she was like, Tara, not only do you not have to, it's impossible. You cannot do it because it is her life. And I will venture to even say that the money that you've thrown at this problem and the other things that you've done, you have temporarily alleviated her pain and her pain is what's going to drive her to find her solution. I was like, oh my God. So I even might've impeded the process of her getting better. Holy crap.

But it let me off the hook. And it also made me realize where else was I doing a less extreme version of that desire to save and how codependent and dysfunctional and what disordered boundaries I was exhibiting in that relationship. Yeah. I mean, that also really feels like it ties in with this concept that you share around, I guess it's almost at the blueprint level too, of the notion of secondary gain. Part of, that, you know, part of the blueprint is this is how we behave in order to like get X, but there's always this sort of like other thing. There's this other thing that you're trying to accomplish that you're not even aware of that this, these behaviors are serving this other secondary gain, which for you, I mean,

yeah, that becomes apparent in the example that you were just sharing with your sister on a bunch of different levels. But deconstruct a little bit more of this notion of secondary gain, because I think it's really fascinating. Yeah, I do too. This is a notion. A lot of times I teach about it and say how to get unstuck, right? That we don't understand why we're stuck in certain behaviors, our own behavior, or we're in

repeated situations in relationships, or we say we really want to do this thing, but then somehow we just can't manage to do this thing. And if I go to the example of the one that I just gave you, secondary gain is the unobvious gain from staying stuck somewhere, right? So it's not primary gain. It is the hidden benefit or relief or something that you don't even know you're getting from it, because obviously none of us consciously wants to stay stuck in a frustrating cycle of whatever. So in the situation with my sister, the questions that we ask to reveal secondary gain, so this is like, you could just put this in your hip pocket and you can just have it with you.

And I'll make sure that I'm giving you guys a free gift. I'll make sure that it's in that download. That you say, what do I get to not feel, not face, or not experience by staying stuck here? So if I'd had that insight at that age and I said, Terry, what do you get to not face, not feel, not experience? By staying stuck, thinking you can save Jenna, I would get to not face the excruciating pain that I couldn't, the reality of her situation that was out of my control. I didn't have to face, feel, was the youngest of the siblings? Like, there was a whole bunch of psychological guilt that I would have had to face or feel if I slowed down.

And I did face and feel once Ruth pointed out what was going on, once I stopped, you know, trying to problem solve and fix as fast as I could. So you may, you know, I had a client who, you know, claimed all she wanted was to be in a relationship. Like she really wanted a good relationship. And then she put the stipulation on, she was going to get back in the dating pool when she lost 10 pounds. I kept being like, you're just no, I don't see why that needs to be there. Like, you're great. And why? But, you know, as therapists, you know, you think that you go, OK, well, something's happening here. Let's let's just let this thing play out. And then finally, and she couldn't do it.

Every week then, what we would focus on is how she fell off the wagon and then she ate carbs, even though she wasn't going to. And she did this thing and that thing and how she's failing, failing, failing with the losing the 10 pounds. And so finally, I was like, why don't we go at this from a secondary gain point of view? What do you get to not face, not feel, not experience by not losing the 10 pounds? You know, you don't need to be a therapist to know what those things were. I don't have to be rejected. I don't have to be vulnerable in a real way. I don't have to get into a relationship, even though I want to, and feel like I don't have the skills to maintain health.

There was a whole myriad of things. And of course, you know, miraculously or not, once we unpacked all of those things, seriously, she didn't need to lose. She lost two pounds and was like, I'm going back on the apps right now. I was like, exactly. Because you didn didn't need to lose. She lost two pounds and was like, I'm going back on the apps right now. I was like, exactly. Because you didn't even need to lose any weight to begin with. So there's something valuable about going, huh, there is something in this for me without blaming, right? Without being like, why am I like that? Or what's wrong with me? It's just having a deeper understanding of the way that our minds work.

And that's a lot of what my goal was with this book, was to make these concepts accessible. Because people are smart. I don't think you need to be in a therapist's office for 20 years. Hey, I love it. I've been a therapist for 30 years. It's my fave. But that's me, right? That's a choice.

I really believe that the reason I wrote this book is that I believe that people are smart and they just need a guide. They just need powerful questions. They just need, like, I'm nobody's guru, not in this book and not anywhere, but I'm a damn good GPS to get people to the answers that they have within them. They just don't know how to get to the basement.

And so that's really what the book is. It's a book and a sort of a workbook all in one, because I also didn't want people to have to be like, and now you need part two of the thing. Like, no, you just need the one thing. That's it. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?'re gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk the notion of secondary gain and also um extracting knowledge from you and putting it into the world um is a whole different conversation we'll circle around too but um i'm still curious

about this notion of secondary gain because you've seen this now so many times. Does it always occur? Like, is it basically, is this always a thing that is coupled with whatever the primary, even if it's not spoken, objective of these boundaries are? or is it just this random thing that sometimes it's there, sometimes not? Because from the outside looking in without any expertise in it, it feels like it probably is almost always there. And it's probably the more powerful unlock key. But I'm curious whether from the inside looking out, having been through this for so many

times, that's valid. It is valid. And here's the thing. This is when you use it. This is when it makes sense. When you are trying to get unstuck. When you can't seem to shift something in your life. I would venture to say that 99.9% of the time, if you can reveal, and there's a few other questions that I have you ask yourself around that. I feel like that one is the most powerful. What do I get to not feel, not face, not experience by staying stuck?

But then there's, who am I if I'm not? Right? So like with my client. That's got to be terrifying for a lot of people. That one question. Right. Who am I if I. That's got to be terrifying for a lot of people. That one question. Right. Who am I if I'm not fixing my sister's life? And at that point in my life, I would be like, I literally didn't actually know because being that fixer was such, it was such an important part of my identity until it got, until that mean therapist told me I actually wasn't fixing anything. And I had to really look and go, all right, so what in my own life needs my fixing since that's the only life I can actually do anything about?

So I do think it's powerful. There'll always be exceptions, Jonathan, of course, as you know. But human, your mind is smart. Your mind, your, you know, we call it fear mind, ego mind. There's lots of different ways of, our mind protects us from pain, wants to. You know, in the book, I do a whole thing on defense mechanisms. And, you know, I call them things that we can understand, like the lies we tell ourselves to avoid drawing boundaries, right? So that's denial. That is rationalization. That is when you look at them in the therapeutic form, like the way that they're written, and then you put them into regular language and regular situations. Like I'm sharing a lot of just client case studies and my own personal experiences in life. You go, huh, yeah, I kind of see that I do do that.

That is interesting. You know, blaming other people, doing a lot of projecting about how if this person wasn't like this, then everything would be okay. And you're like, no, because really you're actually the common denominator in your life. But we need to make sense, the way the mind works, right? We need to make sense of our experience to the best of our ability. And when you start putting these strategies or these alternate ways, like they're really alternate frames, let's say, of looking at problem solving or situations, you go, oh, that's different.

And now I feel empowered to do something different. Because a lot of those frames put us in a victim personality, like nothing I can do. It's just the way it is. I'm like, well, I don't know about that. Yeah. And it also, right, it places agency outside of us. It says, okay, this is the way that my life is. This is the way that people are around me. This is the nature of the circumstance. And even if some of that is true, when that becomes your default state, the underlying thing there is that I have no ability to change this. But even underneath that, it's, and I'm not responsible if I don't.

Right. And yet that is the path to your own suffering. Because the truth is the things we can control and keep in mind, I'm not, listen, if you live in a war torn place, like I'm not talking about living in extreme circumstances, really. I'm talking about life. And in, even in this country, there is no regular life because we, there is so much unrest and so many things happening since the pandemic. But in an average day, interacting with your mother-in-law, interacting with a friend, interacting, buying something online, whatever it is, you have choices about the way that you think about something. Whether you think

about something from the point of view, whether you focus on the thing that happened that was wrong, whether you ruminate badly about yourself and spend all of this time in the past wishing you did something different or fearfully projecting into the future. These are thought processes, but these are thought disorders. If we can't stop ruminating about something that only exists in our frigging mind, because it literally is over, right? It only exists in your memory. Like it's not even in the here anymore at all. That is a way of basically picking up a baseball bat and like smashing yourself in the face with it over and over for no good reason. Like it won't bring you somewhere good. And those are internal boundaries, right? So we don't just have boundaries with others and boundaries aren't just to keep others

out, right? It's not just about limits. It's also about having your yes be an authentic yes that resonates with people. Because if you're saying yes, when you really want to say no, you know what they can't believe either is your yes, because you're not being truthful. So there's a lot in this book that has to do with our relationship to ourselves, because it is without a doubt, the most important relationship that you will ever invest in, in your life, because everything else stems from how you treat yourself. That is the bar that every other relationship in your life looks at to be like, oh, that's how this person should be treated. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You shared this notion of corrupted boundaries and kind of some examples, like constant yesing, saying yes to everything

when you really mean no, and then resenting it after the fact. And then other people also sensing that and realizing, oh, that was never a yes in the first place, which creates like a secondary trauma in the relationship to a certain extent. You identify another form of corrupting boundaries, which I thought was kind of fascinating and I think less intuitive, which is hyperpositivity. Yes. Well, any of you, if you are in the self-help space, then you know exactly what hyperpositivity is. And what it really stems from is dysfunctional emotional boundaries. So if someone has a problem, something terrible has happened in their life, they are in pain. If you feel compelled to say, well, look on the bright side, like stop, right? That's control. Or say, at least they lived a long life. Okay, stop. That doesn't change

what the, that makes you feel better. The hyper positive person. Like it makes me insane when people are like, everything happens for a reason after some horrendous thing happens. And you're like, that's for you. That is literally to make yourself feel better. But it, A, it's not for you to say, right? If someone loses someone, it's not for you to say anything to make it better. And A, that doesn't make it better. The only thing that you should say if someone has passed away is, I can't imagine how you're feeling, but I'm here for you.

That's it. Because you know what? I don't care if your mailman died of the exact same thing that that person's lover died of. You still don't know. You know how people are like, I know exactly how you feel. You're like, you definitely don't. And please stop. Stop. Because now it's the centering of the other person's experience on us or on the hyper positive person, rather than just creating expansion for, I'm so sorry, what can I do? Or do you want to talk about it or whatever? So looking at why people do this, right? They can't tolerate their feelings. They can't tolerate the stark reality of this world. And so it's almost,

and people will get mad. Trust me, you try to take their hyperpositivity away. Trust me, they're not hyperpositive. They're pissed. They're like, you're just a Debbie Downer. You know, you're like, no, stop hyperpositiving, if that's a word, all over my life. So it is an overstepping of boundaries, but it's very common. Yeah. And I mean, the secondary gain there, right, is you don't want to feel this thing that other people feel, which may be like rooted in absolute reality of trauma and suffering. There's is, there's bad stuff. So if I, right, if I'm hyper positive about it, then it's, it's just unique to them. And maybe it's not even real. And maybe they just haven't evolved to a place where they can process and see the light side of this. So I don't have

to feel it, you know, and you have, it is, but it's fascinating to see hyper positivity as a, as a corrupted boundary issue. Cause I never really thought about it that way. Oh, it is. There's a whole bunch of things. Like when you think about boundaries for as long as I have, it's like you suddenly see them not everywhere, but kind of everywhere. And what is functional and what is dysfunctional, right? What is healthy and what isn't healthy?

And again, I always say this when people are like, you know, they want to dispute the thing like, well, I do this and I'm happy. Then there's literally no problem. I've had women be like, I love to overgive. I love to give auto advice to other people. I loved, people expect that of me and that's who I am. I'm like, awesome. If you are not in pain, there is not a problem. That's it. I am not sitting here being like, you need to all have the boundaries I think you should have. No, this book is about if you are in pain,

if you do not feel seen, if it is difficult for you to talk true, if it's difficult for you to set a limit and prioritize your own needs, preferences, desires, there's a zillion and five ways that I teach you in this book how to do it. It's like a step-by-step process, step one until you literally are a boundary boss. That's exactly what we're doing in the book. But I also don't think that everyone wants what I want. And my judgment, I say that like, and it sounds like I'm kidding, but actually I really mean it.

Like I have no judgment for anyone who says, I'm happy and satisfied with my life. I don't wanna be seen. That is your right, honestly. But if you have any of the things that Jonathan and I have talked about, then that's who this book is for, you know? Yeah. It's fascinating.

And I think that lens is, it's interesting in a broader context, right? Because it's not just you. It's, I think as a society, we tend to walk around saying, you know, like if I have a hammer, I'm like, I'm looking for the world in search of a nail. And so let me not say I think, because I have you who's an expert in this. I wonder, and I'm curious what your experience shares, whether when we develop a set of boundaries that we feel allows us to live well, comfortably, to be in the world in the way that we feel allows us to live well, comfortably, like to be in the world in the way that we want

to be. Whether there is a tendency for us to kind of walk around and say, okay, this set of boundaries, really it's working for me. So this should be the universal set of boundaries for all people. And you kind of walk around and when you meet somebody who's not happy for some, whatever reason it may be or suffering, and you can kind of do like a quick diagnostic, well, my boundaries are this, their boundaries are this, clearly they need to change the way that they're being because like, no, adopt my boundaries and everything will be okay type of thing. Do you see that? I do. And it's not, people are not as conscious about that, like what you're just saying. But it's like in relationships, we'll get, I'll get a lot of questions from people out there in the world when I do lives and whenever about, you know, wanting to know if they have a right to a particular boundary. Like, and if their person isn't on the path to becoming a boundary boss, you know, how are they going to have healthy boundaries in their relationship if their person isn't on the path to becoming a boundary boss? How are they going to have healthy boundaries in their relationship

if their person isn't willing to work on it? And I always say, listen, we have to make sure that our side of the street is clean before we do anything, which is the deep dive into the basement and all of those things that I walk you through so that you have an understanding, not just of your family of origin and what you learned in your culture, your country, your social circle, all of those things about boundaries, but then your experiences. Then we go into your childhood experiences, romantic experiences, because those things also leave their mark. And so if you're questioning, because I've

also had a lot of people write into me and be like, I think that I want my person to dress differently. And that's my boundary. I'm like, no, it's not. Yes, it's not a boundary. That's literally you being controlling. And I'm not telling you, you can't give them a gift of a cool pair of jeans, maybe for Christmas, but like, that's not the same. And someone saying, this person was violating my boundary. They came in and they sat too close to me. And I said, well, did you tell them? And she said, well, no, because it was so obvious they were too close to me. And I was like, well, no, because what is too close to you might not be too close to them or to me. And those things, especially clients of mine who've had abuse background or had any kind of a trauma background, anyone sitting too close to you, like encroaching on your personal space, can feel very violating.

It does not mean, though, that that person violated your boundary because nobody has a crystal ball and nobody is required to read your mind. And so when we say things like, even in relationships, oh, like, listen, if they were raised right, they would know that was wrong. What they did was incorrect. I'm not telling them. They can figure it out. Oh, they know something's wrong. It was very chilly in my house last night.

Like, why are we, why is it like a scavenger hunt for them to figure out what the hell is wrong? And why are we not? What is it about saying it? And if we look at the secondary gain, what do I get to not feel, not face, not experience by making my person guess what the hell the problem is, is I get to not be vulnerable. I get to not deal with the fact that if they actually knew, either they would do it and then I would have to not be mad anymore, or they would not be willing to do it and I would have to face what that feels like. Telling the truth makes us vulnerable

in a particular way that not telling the truth doesn't. But we reap all these amazing rewards. So I always talk about voluntary vulnerability though, as you know, we're not being indiscriminately quote unquote truthful. And someone telling you that your haircut looks like crap is not someone being truthful. It's just them being judgmental. You know, people who love to be like, you can always count on me to, I'll tell you the hard, brutal truth. You're like, you're a sadist. You just want to hurt my feelings. And you haven't cornered the market on the truth. And I don't care what you think about my hair. So off, like I don't need that. But I've seen people use truth as like another big stick to beat you in the face with, you know? So I think we have to look at

the whole thing long way around the barn. But coming back to vulnerability, that there is something about your internal boundaries. Being discerning and voluntarily vulnerable means taking your time, getting to know someone. Like I would have clients say, well, when do I need to tell the person I've had two dates with about my childhood trauma, the sexual abuse, the thing, the thing. I'm like, okay, never. Like, I don't know. But like, why are you saying it? Like you owe Bob who has his own frigging basement filled with unseemly shit, trust me, that you need to confess what happened in your early life. That indicated to me, and that was someone who was in a course of mine, that you have not into the tapestry of your life. They wouldn't be the thing that was sticking out that you felt like you had to confess. So there is a boundary issue around vulnerability as well. If we want, we mistake this vulnerability for intimacy by either being sexual too soon or by telling the person every frigging thing about your life too soon. But that's disappointing.

And that is a dysfunctional emotional boundary. So those are all the things that we make the distinctions ahead of time. And there's reasons you do that. There's not like there's not something wrong with you. There's literally life experiences that set us up to do that and to confuse those things. But you can learn how to not. Yeah.

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iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. That also really touches on this notion that you speak about of reactive versus proactive boundaries.

Because in one state, you're describing these things where you're reacting in real time and throwing these things up. But on the other hand, you have these other situations where you're in your head anticipating out in the future, what have these other situations where you're in your head anticipating out in the future, you know, like what should these things be? And sometimes that's actually a really good thing, but sometimes it becomes an anxiety producing, you know, obsessive compulsive type of thing. You know, but the notion of not necessarily reactive or proactive, but more adaptive feels like that's kind of the sweet spot where health lives. Yep.

I think that you get to adaptive when you, you know, I teach a proactive boundary plan. Like how do we, in established relationships, right? You already have a boundary dance that's already happening. Maybe you want to change that. But now you have another person. and maybe you've been doing this dance for like three decades, you know? So you're going to change the steps of your boundary dance, make a different request, perhaps set a limit. That person's definitely going to frigging notice, like there's no way that they're not going to notice that you changed the dance. So proactive success plans, it's like we thoughtfully take our time and go, okay, so I'm talking

to this person, this friend that I've had for many years, who I know is very defensive, let's say. I know this about this friend, but I love them and I still need to draw this boundary with them. Then we go out of our way to start that conversation with an appreciation about that friend. I love that you always think about me and invite me to things. And then you make the simple request that they stop telling your business to Betty or whatever it is the thing is that you have to say. But there is a way to go into it. Now, once you've done this a few times, it becomes your new normal so much faster

than you might think because people are so coachable. We just didn't know what to do. We just didn't know the words. We just didn't know where our boundaries were. So we end up fighting about those things or taking it personally. But when you get clear, like this is my side of the street, this is the other person's side of the street, it becomes that proactive success plan becomes an adaptive response. And it really happens. I would always notice with my clients, there would be a tipping point in the learning curve where they would come in and say, Terry, you're not going to believe this. I wasn't even planning on saying anything to my boss.

And it just literally came out of my mouth with ease and grace. And I'm like, right, because now we know that you've integrated the things that you needed to integrate to access your true feeling in that moment and not feel threatened because you weren't having a transference to the past. You weren't experiencing your frigging boss as your father. Like all these things that we move out of the way through this step-by-step process. And before you know it, it is intuitive and adaptive. Which I think is so important for us in our personal relationships. It has been for generations, but especially now, you know, we are, as we have this conversation, you know, we're, we're a year plus into this bizarre altered reality. We're also living in

a time where a lot of divisiveness and a lot of necessary revelation and reflection and acknowledging of a lot of injustice, a lot of harm that's been going on on a society-wide level, we're grappling with it. Stuff that has been going on for generations and generations is now kind of on the surface in a level where a lot of people are saying, okay, so what is my place in this? And also how does the way that I've chosen to live in the world, how did the decisions that I made, how did the boundaries that I put up, how do they interact with my sense of justice, my sense of right and wrong, my sense of ethics? Where is the line between things like boundaries, emotional labor, privilege in the context of current harm and the need for justice and the need to not opt out simply

because you quote, have a boundary. Right. Well, listen, I mean, I think that all of us, even people who, you know, most people, if you are not of color and you are in the world of self-help or anything, you definitely had some illusion, or I certainly did, about my, I will never say woke, but about my contribution, right? My white privilege, my entitlement, all of those things. And I just went in and for three years, I've just been studying and paying women of color in particular to teach me, not asking anyone for anything for free because, wow, stop, just stop doing that, please. That then helps me make an informed, but it's such a breaking down process of having to have this reality, this truth of how did I contribute personally to the oppression of others? And it doesn't matter if that wasn't my intention. The privilege is that I don't have to know it because of where I live and the access that I have. So that was, I mean, that has been and continues to be. And I feel like your boundaries

change when you evolve. And this is a huge one. And I'm so grateful it's happening in my lifetime. But it's going to continue happening. I can only aspire to actually be an ally. I do the work. I pay the money. I vote. I go out.

I do the things that I can do. It's on a Patreon account, anything. But I'm learning and I'm listening and I'm watching things in history that I would never have watched before. Where I was like, this is not, you don't get to opt out of this. Because this is your world too. Do you want to be a part of the solution? So, I don't know, that was a long way around the barn to come back to that. It is a boundary issue.

And yet it's a boundary issue, how we're interfacing with the greater society, especially in the US right now. And I think that for many of us, that's been changing drastically in the last, at least for me, it's been about three years. Yeah. I mean, and I think it's interesting to look at it in the context of boundaries and also a sense of not only are they healthy or unhealthy in our own lives, but are they healthy or unhealthy in the bigger construct of culture and society and the notion of how you want to be in the world and what is the world that we want to live in. And also, are the boundaries that I have chosen or just defaulted to up until a certain point in my life unwittingly even doing harm, not just to me, but to other people. And maybe I need to revisit them

for all of those reasons. Yeah. The internal boundaries though, it's like there's something about, you know, disordered boundaries can be expressed in a myriad of ways. But one is that if it's really hard for you to accept no from someone else. And I find this to be very true with my clients and all these women who've taken the boundary quiz who find themselves to kind of be chameleons or the pushover, let's say, that it's hard for them to say no, but then they could be like devastated when someone else says no to them. And so being very tender about yourself, about your self-image, about how you experience yourself, that is a sign of, I mean, listen, lack of self-development to a degree, but it's also a sign of disordered boundaries. And I think that in order to do the work, our own work, you have got to deal with your the whole thing that like, you know, intention and impact, right?

Like, but it wasn't, I wouldn't, it wouldn't be my intention, right? Of course, not grasping that that doesn't change shit and that it doesn't change the impact. That it really, probably the whole first year was this reconstructing of myself in respect to race, like for sure, and having to decide that I wasn't that fragile and that I could be a part of this solution, and I would let others lead, and I would do it and do it bad, and be willing to publicly just say, I'm sorry, I did it bad.

But I'm going to be in it and I want to do it because I am a part of the human race and this matters to me. But that took time to get to the willingness, especially if you suffer from perfectionism and being worried about the way people perceive you. Wow, probably that took about a year and a half just that alone of being like, you are not that fragile and this is important. Yeah. You wrap up the work in this book with language, which I thought was fascinating. Because I think as we come full circle, everything that we're talking about here is a process. And one of the big fears in any context is, okay, so now I get it. Now I think I see myself a little bit more clearly and I see the nature of the dynamic between me and X, Y, Z, person, community, world, whatever it may be. But I don't have the language to

understand how to even begin to address it. So I was fascinated that you actually devoted a whole chunk of the last part of the book to literal verbatim scripts. I was just kind of curious why that was so important to you. Because one thing that I've heard tens of thousands of times is I was going to say something and I didn't have the words. And so what I started doing in my therapy practice years ago is I'd created these like sentence starters when someone needed to make a simple request or someone needed to set a limit or just to make it easy to share your preference, whatever the situation was.

So each client would be like, oh, I don't even know. So in the beginning, I would like do it for each person, you know, and then you start being like, all right, I'm going to put them in one place and just keep handing out my little paper. And then I realized as time went on that there are many schools of thought and there are many different problem solving strategies and techniques that like, I'm not the only person sort of doing this, but also that there's a way for you, there's something for you to say in every situation. So actually I go through the process of naming like a billion different scenarios in the book. And what are one or two things that you might say? Like, what are one or

two things you might say to someone who incessantly interrupts when you're talking, right? What are one or two things you might say for someone who is asking you an intrusive question about something that's none of their effing business? Now, maybe it's Aunt Betty. It's like, we don't want to be like too mean about it. But how do we, what is a strategy to not punch Aunt Betty in the face, but to not answer a question that we don't want to answer. So yes, language, we all need it.

Including every single person I've ever met. And I'm raising my hand right here. I just found it, I found it really, I'm somebody who obsesses over language and I found it really interesting for me to sort of like, and I also, as a general rule, I kind of don't like it when other people give me language and prompts, and I also, as a general rule, I kind of don't like it when other people

give me language and prompts, but I found it, it was really interesting because I was, as I was reading through some of the prompts, I was like, okay, so one, just like over ego for a hot minute and see the value of this. And I was like, oh, this would have been so valuable then. And like that conversation, oh, I wish I had like these five words to just understand how to ease into it in a more graceful way, or even like maybe that would actually give me the courage to even say something where I normally would have just backed away. So it was interesting. I thought it was incredibly valuable, but it was interesting for me to sort of observe my own response to the prompts, which was super cool.

It's funny. I'm the same, though. I actually normally don't love it. And yet, in that part of the book, I always say, listen, I will always give you a funny way to do something, too. Because humor is such a thing for me. I diffuse situations with humor and I feel like sometimes I can just say something. If like your co-worker's like, so wait, I heard you got a raise. How much money are you making?

You know, and being able to just say, oh, trust me, Bob, not half what I'm worth. Right? Like you're just not answering the question. And every single, either it's a sentence stem or a whole entire thing, it's literally just a framework for you to go, okay, maybe I would say it this way, or I would switch out this word, but it gives you somewhere to start. Yeah. No, I love that. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in this container of good life project,

if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Honestly, means to talk true, be seen and live free. To me, that's what it means. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course,

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing

Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference Between me and you is? You're gonna die Don't shoot if we need him Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk