From Codependence To Clarity: Creating Healthy Boundaries

What if the problem isn’t that your boundaries are too soft, but that you were taught they had to be walls? We open this conversation by replacing the brick-and-mortar myth with a living metaphor: doors with windows, sensors, and keypads—flexible limits that protect your peace while keeping connection possible.

Together with boundaries coach and recovery podcaster Barb Nangle, we trace the path from codependence and people‑pleasing to clarity and self‑trust. Barb shares the “flashbulb” moments that came through Al‑Anon, CODA, and ACA, the identity shift that followed, and why she sees boundaries as the antidote to codependence. We talk practicals: how to define standards across health, work, and relationships; how to turn values into guardrails; and how to use simple scripts that don’t try to control others but do honor your limits. Expect straight talk on guilt, shame, and the “selfish” label, plus real‑world examples like ending a charged phone call with care or opting out of politics to protect your nervous system.

This is also a conversation about physiology and safety. You’ll learn to read early body cues, build internal safety, and move from reactivity to choice. We unpack rumination and catastrophizing, explain why tolerating uncomfortable feelings is a boundary superpower, and show how healthy limits actually deepen intimacy by revealing your true shape. If you’ve ever said yes when you wanted to say no—or swung from no boundaries to fortress mode—this episode offers a middle path: clear, compassionate, and sustainable.

If the ideas resonate, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs boundary bravery today, and leave a quick review to help more listeners find these tools.

You can find Barb at https://higherpowercc.com/podcast/

Transcript

Reframing Boundaries With The Door Metaphor

Barb 0:00

I think of codependence as my core wound, which is a result of trauma. It's really common for people with childhood trauma to have really poor boundaries because they developed these behavior patterns to feel and stay safe.

Meet Barb Nangle And Boundary Myths

Mary 0:19

For centuries, the phrase shrinking violet was used to diminish women, to suggest we were meant to be small and meek. But in nature, violets are anything but weak. They're resilient, beautiful, and essential to the ecosystem. Hi, I'm Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist, and each week I sit down with women who remind us that being compared to a violet isn't an insult. It's a testament to strength, endurance, and the power of taking up space and living by your true nature. If you're ready to stop shrinking and start thriving, you're in the right place. Hey violets, welcome to the show. So I'm old enough to remember when the automatic doors at the grocery store were a novelty. They required that you stepped on the black mat in front of the door to activate it. And when they malfunctioned or got stuck, you could do a vertical faceplant. Because you just assumed they were going to open. Of course, eventually, automatic doors evolved. Now they have sensors that can see you coming, and sometimes they require a passcode to enter. The evolution of those automatic doors reminds me of my own journey with boundary setting. We often make the mistake of believing that boundaries are walls, unyielding, and permanent. But when boundaries are set with self-knowledge, introspection, and intention, they're actually doors. Yes, some doors are best left locked, but I still think they need windows. For example, I had an older brother who was a raging, destructive addict. After years of both physical abuse and popping up in my life when I least expected it, I locked the proverbial door. However, I still needed to be able to look out a window because while my parents had in large part reinforced his patterns through enabling, I needed to be aware of what was happening and how it was impacting other family members, including my mom. This was a choice I made. I would step in when needed, including times when I called the police or when I needed to work with a social worker to manage an aftercare plan that did not put the onus of care on anyone in the family. However, for a long time, my brother was allowed to step on the black mat in front of my door. Actually, he often stomped on it multiple times, and the door would automatically swing open. In fact, many times it was too late to lock the door, he was already standing right in front of it. That put me in a position of simply being reactive and scrambling to respond. But then when I upgraded my door to require a passcode, I could set it to keep him out yet allow others in. Sometimes we can make the mistake of setting boundaries that are so impenetrable that they are more like fortress walls, keeping everyone out to maintain a sense of safety. Boundaries are often misused and misunderstood, but when they come from a place of self-understanding and we can put aside feelings like guilt or obligation, we can learn to create flexible boundaries that evolve with our life events and situations. I am so excited to talk about this topic with my guest today. She is Barb Nangle, and she is a boundaries coach, speaker, and the founder of Higher Power Coaching and Consulting, and host of the podcast Fragmented to Whole: Life Lessons from 12-step recovery. Her specialty is working with professional women who say yes when they really want to say no, which I love the way that is worded. And I will give a little warning here: we may be swearing a bit more than usual in this episode. So welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Barb.

Barb 3:41

Thank you so much, Mary. And I have to say, I love your use of metaphor. I'm a huge fan of metaphor. I feel like learning penetrates us so much more deeply. And I tend to use boundaries are like um like a healthy boundary is like a fence with a gate in it, as opposed to a door. I remember the doors with the mat and all that stuff. But I love how you have, you know, the mat, the sensor, the keypad, and all that stuff. Those are really great, great metaphors. And I think probably the biggest myth that I encounter with boundaries is that they're like walls. And like a teeny, teeny, tiny little percentage of boundaries are like walls. But if you're being abused, you need a restraining order. That's a wall. Like that's that's necessary. But 99.99% of the time, you don't need a wall. You just need something that works for you. Yeah, for sure.

Mary 4:36

And so, like so many of my amazing guests that I have, I know that your story, your life story, helped to inform what you're doing now. So I usually start with asking my guests to give me kind of the flashbulb moments, the things in life that sort of illuminated the path, maybe, maybe were responsible for putting them onto a different path or created a big change. So, what would you say those flashbulb moments were for you that informed where you are today and the work that you do?

Codependence, Identity, And People‑Pleasing

Barb 5:05

So in the winter of 2014-15, I had volunteered to um co-lead a project serving homeless people through my church. And around that same time, a homeless guy named Dan started coming to my church as a parishioner. And he and I became very friendly. And I was like, oh, like God brought me this homeless person to teach me about the plight of homeless people so that when I'm running this project, I'm sermon serving homeless people as opposed to the homeless. And he actually was quite helpful in that regard. And about, I'm not sure how long, two or three months into our friendship, we had a really big snowstorm here in New Haven. And I invited Dan to stay in my home overnight. And I now know that's not normal, but I'm like, I'm a good person, like I'm a helpful person. And he did, and then he stayed another time and another time. And within a few weeks, he was practically living with me. And I soon felt trapped in my own home. He was a an admitted alcoholic and drug addict. I now think on reflection, he may have also had some kind of personality disorder. Because this guy fucked with my head in a way I had never experienced. So one day I was in therapy, and in the middle of a sentence, I was talking about Dan and I went, Oh my God, do you think I need to go to Al-Anon? And my therapist said, Yes. So um, are your listeners likely to know what Al-Anon is? Or should I just take a moment? I was just gonna say, maybe let's expand on exactly what that is. Okay. So most people, if they know anything about 12-step recovery programs, they've heard of Alcoholics Anonymous. So that was a program created in the 1930s in the United States, and it was the first time in history that droves and droves of alcoholics got and stayed sober. The second 12-step recovery program, and now there's like 200 and something, was Al Anon and was for the loved ones of alcoholics. And most people think, why do the loved ones of alcoholics need a program of recovery? And it's because alcoholism is actually a family disease. Most people only pay attention to the drinking behavior of the alcoholic. But what happens is that they're part of a system. And the things that the loved ones of an alcoholic do kind of naturally to try to get their alcoholic loved one to stop drinking, to go to rehab, to go to detox, to go to meetings, to get sober, to stay sober, actually end up being very controlling. So they end up trying to control the behavior and focus everything on the alcoholic, neglecting themselves and their own needs, paying no attention to what they want and need. They they, you know, run themselves ragged and then they become resentful because they're doing all this for the alcoholic and they're not listening. And then the alcoholic feels controlled for a very good reason, and then they get resentful and then they use it as a reason to drink and they try to blame the other person. And so I had heard of Al-Anon. And so whatever I put into Google, Mary, the word codependent came up. And I was like, what is this word? Now I was 52. I had started therapy when I was 15 and got had gone almost continuously, not entirely. I started reading self-help when I was like 23. I've done workshops and seminars and workbooks and spiritual, like you name it. I did all the things. And I was like, How is it possible that I never heard this word codependent? And I started going to Codependence Anonymous and very quickly felt a sense of relief. And I remember saying to someone, I think I need to be reparented, but I didn't know reparenting was a thing. I don't know where I got that term from. I think I thought I made it up. And a few weeks into my recovery in Codependence Anonymous, I went to go visit friends and one of whom had been in AA Alcoholics Anonymous for years. I'm like, you're gonna love this. I'm in codependence anonymous. And she said, Great, let me see if there's a coda meeting here and we'll go together. And she couldn't, but she found an ACA meeting, or what I knew of as ACOA Adult Children of Alcoholics. I didn't think I qualified, but I knew she did. So I'll I'm like, I'll go for you because you know I'm a self-sacrificing kind of person. And we walk in the room, and in the opening reading, they said we reparent ourselves. And I was like, what? And then they read the list of the 14 traits of an adult child, which is affectionately called the laundry list. And Heidi tells me that I sobbed the whole meeting. I don't remember that, but I bought the literature, came home to New Haven, and started going to ACA. I soon found out that I it's actually called adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, and that I qualify for. And I soon found out that this was a result of um intergenerational family dysfunction and that I had childhood trauma. I didn't know any of this stuff. So it was like I had a lot of light bulbs in a short period of time. And I now know, like I think of codependence as my core wound, which is a result of trauma. It's really common for people with childhood trauma to have really poor boundaries because they developed these behavior patterns to feel and stay safe in their families. And so I've learned so many things. I would say the first two years of recovery alone just drastically changed. I I was doing work for ye decades and very introspective. And all of the things that came up in my first two years of recovery, none of it came up in any of the therapy that I did or any of the other stuff. And so for me personally, 12-step recovery is where it's at. And of course, I do other things as well. But um, I was working at Yale University at the time, eventually got laid off, found my way into the world of startups, innovation, entrepreneurship in New Haven at Yale, started my own business as coach and consult. Very quickly started my podcast mainly to get the word about recovery out there. Because I was like, I found all this value, maybe other people will too. And eventually realized I needed a niche. And so it just made sense for me to be a boundaries coach because I think of boundaries as the antidote to codependence and coaching people on boundaries, as you can imagine, like shores up my boundaries, you know, even stronger. So I don't think it's an accident that I became a boundaries coach, but I've been I've been in recovery for almost 11 years and my life has been utterly transformed. And I think another like huge um insight for me came while doing the 12 steps I did in a relationship inventory. And I thought that my pattern, I happened to date men, and so I thought the pattern with all the men was that I attracted emotionally unavailable men, and it's true, but I think the real pattern was codependence. What I came to see was it I thought like I attracted those uh emotionally available men to me, and that's where it ended. But I came to realize, wait, I'm actually attracted to them as well. And then I came to understand, oh, the reason for all of that is that I'm emotionally unavailable to myself as well as other people. So of course that makes sense. So that um, and now I'm actually in my first and only healthy relationship. I was 55 and he was 60 when we met. We've been together for over seven years, and I'm able to be in a healthy relationship. And I think it has everything to do with having healthy boundaries.

Mary 12:36

Yeah. Wow. Okay, so there's 17 things I want to talk about for that. Let me see if I can remember. But the one thing that I do want to point out is I appreciate that you defined all of that because even as a therapist, the word codependency didn't come into my work until maybe the last 10 years. And I really think because there seemed to be this kind of um, I don't know, partition around treating issues with alcohol and drugs and other mental health issues. And really so much of it is co-occurring. However, I'll say we, people treating predominantly mental health issues, didn't really use that language. We didn't use the language of codependency. We talked about being a people pleaser and living the narrative of a woman who, which is typically you're supposed to make sure everybody else is okay. And so I think starting to put what I'm gonna say is this much more definitive, even deeper language or terms attached to it, I think it makes people realize that, oh, this just isn't something that you do. It's really a way that you live that requires a sort of, as you're well, you say the word recovery, and we typically hear that when we think of someone recovering from an alcohol use disorder or drug drug use disorder. And so I think when we can think about it in terms of you're recovering from this way of being and this role that you've taken in relationships for really your entire life, it is a much um sort of deeper way to think about the work that has to be done.

Guilt, “Selfish,” And Filling Your Own Cup

Barb 14:18

It's identity work. It's really like I didn't know where I ended and other people began because I was such a chameleon. And and let me also say, Mary, I have always felt like a powerful woman of agency. I am not a wallflower. People did not walk all over me. But I and and when I first heard the term people pleaser, which I never heard until recovery, I was like, I'm not a people pleaser. Oh my God, am I a people pleaser? Like, oh my God, I didn't know. I thought that I was helping people because I wanted to be helpful, and I came to see that it was really that I was an approval seeker, that the worst thing in the world that could happen to me was someone could be upset with me or think that I am a bad person. And to me, a bad person says no and is unhelpful. And now I know that's all bullshit. You know, and and some of it is patriarchy for sure, but there are pen plenty of codependent people pleasing men out there too. So it's not just a problem for women, I think it's worse for women because of this narrative that you mentioned, like being a good girl, making sure everybody around you is taken care of before you take care of yourself. And and I I want to say something about the word selfish, it's like an epithet. If you want to put a woman in her place, call her selfish. And that's just wrong. You know, it's not selfish to fuel your own tank. It's not selfish to take care of yourself. And you know, when you think about the the mask coming down in the airplane with the oxygen, they specifically tell you put the mask on yourself first. What they don't say is because if you're passed out, you can't help other people. So I love um Ashley Kirkwood says, Don't you don't you can't pour from an empty cup. You want to pour from the overflow. Well, the only way you can have overflow is if you fill your cup first. No one else is going to do it for you. So you fill your cup first. That way, if you're always pouring from the overflow, you don't ever have to worry about getting an empty cup.

Mary 16:22

And I love the idea of identity because I think when you you can say with the word and, first of all, you can be a very strong woman, know your opinions, express your opinions, and still be someone who wants to take care and gets identity from being, quote, that kind of good person. I think that's where we get kind of screwed up in our thinking and what is a good person. And for many of us, good means exactly what you're saying, that you are second, that if everybody else is okay, and I know my mom did this when she would make a meal, everybody else's plate got filled first, and then she took what whatever was left. She never got seconds, like that sort of thing. And even I think as a daughter observing that, it doesn't have to be explicitly said, it's like, oh, I see. So to be a good mom and a good spouse, you are the one that does all the background work, invisible labor, which has been a topic on my show before. But that idea of identity that we feel like we're quote, bad or as you say, selfish, if we look at what do I need in this situation? Oh, that doesn't line up with what this person wants. And but that that's okay. I don't need to do that for that person.

Barb 17:42

Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, when the thing that, like I mentioned, in addition to not wanting people to think I was bad, I didn't want people to be upset with me. And now I get their upsetness is theirs, it's not mine. And here's the thing if I've been accommodating you for decades and I stop accommodating you, of course you're going to be upset. You get to be upset. It's upsetting to think, oh, this person's been really helpful to me and bent over backwards for me, and I've come to rely on them and now I can't anymore. Yeah, it's upsetting. They get to be upset. And I, so I recently did a post on social media. I have this picture of me relaxing. I love to watch Hallmark movies, and I have this Hallmark movie watching blanket and my my Hallmark mug, and I have this big smile on my face. And underneath, I wrote me when other people are upset with me. Like now I can be fine if other people are upset with me. In the past, I would be like, I'm gonna die. My life is under threat. How what do I have to do to get them to not be upset with me? And it's because I'm now a distinct person. And you know, I used to be enmeshed with everybody around me. I used to feel other people's feelings, and I don't anymore, and I don't take responsibility for other people's feelings. Of course, I don't think to do things to purposely hurt people's feelings, but you know, I've heard it said if someone's feelings must be hurt, it shouldn't be yours. When I tell my clients, they're like, What? And I say, let's let's think about it this way. Let's say that that um, because nobody wants to hurt anybody's feelings, and that's why a lot of people don't want to set boundaries. So I say, let's say that there were 10 people that you wanted to set um boundaries with and you didn't set boundaries with anyone, your feelings are getting hurt 10 times over. Like, so you get to be included in the people whose feelings you don't want to hurt. Well, now let's say you actually do set boundaries with all 10 of those people. Maybe three of them might have their feelings hurt. So three individual people separately had their feelings hurt instead of one person, you getting your feelings hurt 10 times over. Like, think about that. It's like you get to take care of yourself, you don't have to keep being the buffer for everybody else's difficulty. You don't have to take the hit all the time. You get to allow other people to be upset. You don't have to be the one internalizing all internalizing all the upsetness all the time.

What A Boundary Is: Standards And Limits

Mary 20:11

And that is a very difficult concept for a lot of my clients that are starting this journey when I say, you know, you're not responsible for other people's feelings. And there's usually this like pause. Yeah, like, what do you mean? And so I have I actually have a list of 10 things that if any of these are true, then you probably need to set some better boundaries. And one of them is I'm okay if people are angry at what I say or do. And again, you make a good point. We're not intentionally setting out to piss anybody off, it's not about that, yeah. But the system wants us to stay in the role that we've always been in. So, yes, you start to change, and the people that you have been putting before you, they're not gonna like it and they're gonna push back. That doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It actually probably means you're doing something right. Right. You've been heard. Yes, yes, absolutely. So I think one of the things, well, let me stick a pin in what I'm thinking because I think we're gonna come back around to it. I want to start talking, first of all, more specifically about boundaries themselves. And we talked a little bit about what they're not. They're not a wall, they're more like a door. But if somebody has this idea of, I know I need to set better boundaries, they don't really know exactly what that means because they have, they are very much at the beginning of their journey. How would you describe to your clients what a boundary is? What is an example of a boundary?

Values As Guardrails And Early Missteps

Barb 21:38

Yeah, so I think of boundaries as standards that we have for our lives, hopefully that we live up to. And therefore, we have limits for ourselves and other people that we set to uphold those standards. So, a really easy example would be I have certain health standards. So I had like I drank abusively until I was in my early 40s. I smoked I smoked bales of weed. I smoke cigarettes. I smoke cigarettes secretly for like 20, 20 years. I'm also in recovery for compulsive overeating. I'm down over 100 pounds. So I've been abusing myself and neglecting myself my entire life. So I have some pretty high health standards now because I really take care of myself. So I have limits for me and limits for other people. I have a million limits, you know. Um, but a limit that I have for myself is I go to bed by like 10:30 at night. I don't stay up all night watching Netflix or scrolling social media or reading a book like I used to, because sleep is foundational to good health. Uh, a limit I have for other people is I don't allow smoking in my home because I have a healthy home. If you want to smoke, you need to go outside. So those are just basic examples that I think people can identify. And what happens is like in the beginning, what people often say is like, I don't know what my boundaries are. Like now that I'm starting to get a handle on what they are, I don't know what my boundaries are. So what I do with my clients, Mary, is I take them through an exercise to determine their top five values. So it's not just what's the word that describes my value. I have them write out. What does this value mean to me and why is it important to me? And we use those almost as like guardrails or guideposts for when and where to set boundaries and when and where to um to make how to make decisions about their life. And what we often find, and I know I found for me, was there are certain things that we value that we're not living up with at all. So living up to. In the beginning, I had to set limits with people, and I was teaching them and me about new ways of behaving, and now they have become integrated into my very beingness. So I don't set boundaries, I just have them. I don't even really need, I just already know what's okay and what's not okay. And I will frequently have clients, people in recovery, friends, describe a scenario and I'm able to tell them what they might do that would be healthy. And so last year somebody said to me, How do you know? And I was like, That's a really good question. How do I know? And I realized that I slowed my process down. And what I do is I put myself in that situation. And because I know me so well now, I know exactly what I would do. It doesn't mean that's what you will do or what you should do, but it's a guideline for here's what a healthy boundary could look like. Because some people are like, I have no idea. And I will tell you, Mary, the first time I remember knowing this is me setting a boundary, I don't remember what it was. This was me.

unknown 25:06

Wham!

Barb 25:07

Way too hard. Yes. Now, if I had known it was going to be way too harsh, that's not the boundary that I would have set. But I didn't know because I didn't know. Now, can you imagine if I was like, that's it, I'm no good at boundaries. Where like I wouldn't be where I am today. I wouldn't have the healthy relationship and the wonderful life that I have today. But I realized, oh, this is an experimental process. And so one of the things we were talking about before we started recording was that people like kind of like you didn't use this language, but going too far with boundaries and being a little bit too harsh with boundaries. And I think that sometimes there's a pendulum swing that happens that if you have never allowed anybody to do any, if you have allowed people to metaphorically walk all over you or just barrel through your door in the past, and then you start, you lock it, you padlock it, you put a secret code on it, you build a moat, you put a firewall around that. Like some people go to that extreme because they don't know, they can't get to nuance. And then my experience is most people don't go quite that far, but my experience is it doesn't take long for them to realize, okay, this doesn't work for me either, because I need people and I need connection to people. That being said, I work with a lot of people that identify as adult children and have histories of trauma and families that are traumatic. And they sometimes do cut people off and realize I need to do this to breathe.

Mary 26:38

Yeah. Yeah, that's a really important point. Sometimes I think we can think so much about quote, protecting our peace that when anything comes in, and we feel it with our body first. That's what I believe. Like we know this isn't okay.

Barb 26:55

Yeah, your nervous system tells you.

Mary 26:57

Yes. And I think for some people that have had a lot of trauma, they'll start to feel the beginnings of that and they do re-slam the door. So for instance, I love that you talk about sleep because now that I'm the age I am, even if I we go away with our older children, I'll usually be the one to say, hey, if they want to hang out at the bar or whatever, I'll be like, I'm gonna go to bed. It's 9:30. And I used to feel really like like squirmy about that. Like it felt weird. And then I was like, well, they certainly don't care. And if they do care, it's not my problem. And so that's one of those things where I think I can say that now. Do I sometimes stay later? Yeah, it depends on the situation. So I think flexibility, but then sometimes there could be a situation where anytime somebody feels a personality. So I'll get I'll use myself as an example. For a long time, it was hard for me to work with young people that I knew had an issue with alcohol because of what I went through with my brother. So that brought me up against a situation professionally because I worked in the last part of my career in a college. Well, if I can't work with kids that have alcohol use issues, I can't do my job. And so I think for me, it became something where I needed to develop capacity to be able to see this person as who they are. Their issues are unique, they're always woven into all kinds of other things, like you're saying, from their family of origin and you know, whatever they came to the school with from their home and from their life. And even though initially I would feel that internally, that like I had to like learn to breathe through that, develop capacity for me not to react, you know, even in the dating world when I would smell alcohol on somebody's breath. And I did not not drink, like I would go out, I would do, but in certain situations, that that triggered all of that stuff. So I think when we're setting a boundary, that idea of revisiting what do we really need for ourselves and making sure that we don't do what we've been saying, build a wall made of stone that's 17 feet high, because then we don't learn to truly live in the world. We don't have flexibility, we protect ourselves so much that we lose the ability to have that flexibility, I think, in some situations.

Flexibility, Capacity, And Nervous System Cues

Barb 29:26

Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a couple of things about that what you said that I want to share. I want to talk about capacity in a moment. But also, people think like that goes along with this myth of boundaries being like walls. They think that boundaries cut you off from people. Boundaries actually connect you to people. And here's why. Because when you develop healthy boundaries, you're becoming your real identity. Like you're discovering your real identity, you're letting people know the truth of this is okay with me and this is not okay with me. You're you're starting to understand this is where I end and other people begin. This is where my responsibility ends and other people's begin. Here, this is what I want, like, need, and prefer. And when you know those things and you have standards in your life to bring more of those things into your life and less like more things that that fuel you in your life and less things that drain you in your life, you might lose some people. They'll probably fade away as opposed to having a big, huge argument. But when those people get out of the way, your real people can be attracted to you. And and if you there like many people will stay in your life, the relationship will change, but what you're doing is coming clean with them and saying, This is who I really am, so that they can know the real you. And when you start sharing the real you with people, they're much more likely to share their real you. And that is intimacy, and you can't have that without a certain level of vulnerability. And if you don't know who you are, if you don't know about what your identity is, how can you share that with other people? So it's like boundaries are really about being connected to other people, not putting up with stuff that you know that you don't want. Like I mentioned, I'm now in the first and only healthy relationship. If I were to boil it down to one, of course it's many things, but to one thing that we do in our relationship, and it has to do with boundaries, is when something upsets us, we bring it up as soon as is reasonable. Like sometimes we might need to pause and take a breath. Sometimes, you know, we're in front of other people, it's not appropriate to do it, but we don't let things fester. We we bring them up and we process them and we we own our parts in things. We don't blame constantly. We're both of us very much own. And then I want to say something about developing capacity. And I think that we're talking about the same thing, but I talk about it differently. I talk about creating a sense of internal safety. And so when you have a sense of internal safety, your capacity expands. And so what I've come to realize is that learning how to build healthy boundaries is learning to create a sense of internal safety. Learning I can actually take care of myself, I can rely on myself, I will follow through for myself, I will have my own back, I will not abandon myself for the relationship or so that people will approve of me. I am going to be here and I'm and another way to talk about it. I know a lot of people talk about attachment styles. It's about being securely attached to yourself. And when you have this sense of internal safety and you are securely attached to yourself, you're not seeking that in the outside world, which is what we do when we're, you know, codependent people, pleasing overgivers, peacekeeper people, is we are trying to do all of those behaviors to get them to be like connected to us, thinking I need their approval to be safe. I need my connection to them to be safe. You like I want people's approval, Mary, but I don't like with claws, need it the way that I used to. And part of it is that I have my own approval because I'm living in integrity with myself. I live up to my or I do the best I can to live up to my values. And I also know I have my own back now in ways I never did before. I don't abandon myself anymore. And I deeply know that. And so I used to think secure attachment in a relationship was about those two people are securely attached to each other. It's no, those two people are securely attached to themselves so they can securely attach to each other. And that all came to me like I developed that personally through building boundaries, which are like 7,000 of the reasons why I became a boundaries coach, because I want what I've got for other people.

Boundaries Create Connection And Intimacy

Mary 34:08

Yeah. And I think it's important to say that if someone is listening and they're recognizing that I am a very strict boundary setter in the sense that it is a wall. Anytime I feel, I really don't like the word triggered, but I'll use it. Anytime you feel triggered by something, that's something to pay attention to and honor in the short term because it developed to keep you safe. So it's there for a reason. It's not, you're not broken or wrong. It's there for a reason. It's just not serving you anymore. It is now become a barrier to not only authentic relationships, but as you're saying to yourself. Um, and so I think sometimes too, we have um, I had young people that they started to recognize that their parents had some very severe mental health issues. And in order to keep peace, they would constantly be feeling hurt or upset or wounded or all of the things. And so I think we can make the mistake too of feeling cruel if we set a boundary with someone like that. But really, what, and I'm thinking about one specific person, we worked to help her set a boundary where if her mom started to have the behavior, the manipulative, you know, sort of, and again, my client felt it. She knew exactly when it was starting because she would start to get shaky and panicky and just be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. She would feel that, and then she would say, you know what? I don't want to stay on the phone with you when you're saying these things. They feel hurtful. So I'm gonna end the conversation, but I'll call and check in with you tomorrow. Like I think we're we have to remember there can be a middle ground. And sometimes with a trusted coach or therapist, that's how you explore that because you don't one day wake up and say, Oh, there's the light switch for boundaries, and you flip it on and you're like an expert, right? It's a it's a decades-long process and it can go back and forth.

Barb 36:10

I mean, it can be decades long. I don't think it necessarily has to be, but I love like using your metaphor of doors before. I love what you just said about your client. I'm gonna close this door right now, but I'm opening another door tomorrow. Right. So when she says, I'm gonna hang up from this call right now, I'll call you tomorrow to check in, she's letting her know, I still love you. I'm not disconnecting from you permanently, but I'm taking care of myself. And I think, you know, what I've learned when when I started building healthy boundaries, um, I have a brother who, by the way, I've recently reconciled with and it's been miraculous. And I realized I thought that I could go to him and say, Listen, I don't, I can't talk politics, even though he and I agree, he was very vehement. And I just was like, uh, and I thought I could just say to him, I don't want to talk politics anymore. And he'd be like, oh, okay. And then I would say, like, as a reminder, I don't want to talk about politics. And it was like impossible. He like lived and breathed it. And then I started to realize, oh, I'm trying to control him. That's not setting a boundary. It's not I'm the one that doesn't want to talk politics, not him. So then I realized, okay, well, I can't make him not talk about politics. What I can do is spend less time with him, and I can spend um time with him less frequently. I personally at the time chose not to tell him. I didn't say, if you continue to talk about politics, I'm gonna be spending less time with you less frequently. And I think that I was still learning back then, which is why I did it that way. Now I would choose to say to somebody, listen, I really can't tolerate talking about politics. It's not good for my nervous system. So obviously you can do whatever you want, but if you continue to talk about it, I'm gonna have to leave because I got to take care of myself. Like now I would do that. But I, when I first started building boundaries, I thought that I could set a boundary and someone would listen to me. I thought it was about controlling other people. It's like here's the secret it's really about controlling you. Like what, like you develop your standards and then you set your life up in such a way that most of the time your standards are met. And it's not because you're controlling other people, it's because you're not allowing them to do certain things. Like I just had a call with a client yesterday. She's in this relatively new relationship, and I think that she needs to end it. And I told her so. Um, but she said to me that they were up until four o'clock in the morning. And she said, How did she say it? She said, Um, he won't let me speak. She said, I feel like I'm being like choked internally. And I said, It's not him that's not letting you speak, it's you. And the reason that you feel choked internally is because you are choking yourself internally. So you could go, stop. That's it. Enough. And you could get up and leave. Like you, he cannot, he's not touching you, he's not coming near you, he's not tying a scarf around your mouth. He you are saying he's not letting me talk. No, you're allowing him to just plow right over. And she was like, Okay, I think on some level I knew this, but I really needed to hear this. And I'm like, You you can't control him. Like, she keeps thinking if I shrink enough, and it's killing her. She literally got a migraine and then started vomiting from the migraine the next day. And I was like, Okay, this is bad. Like, at minimum, you have got to get into couples counseling, but truly, I believe this is because they've only been together for like eight or nine weeks, and it's already at this level. That's insane.

Mary 39:55

Yeah. Yikes.

Barb 39:57

Yeah, yeah.

Internal Safety, Secure Self‑Attachment

Mary 39:58

And you know, I think it's a good point you make about boundaries really are about what you need and what you want. And I think sometimes we make the mistake of declaring the boundary in an attempt to change someone's behavior. And so when I go back to my client, she wasn't saying, if you don't stop, I'm hanging up. She was saying, you know what, I'm gonna go now. And I think we also make the mistake of thinking we can't be loving and set a boundary.

Barb 40:24

And we're absolutely not true.

Mary 40:26

We absolutely can. And so I think she was just, we don't always have to declare it. Sometimes it makes sense. And other times we speak volumes by our behavior. And so when we can be measured, and on the inside, she didn't, I know she wasn't calm initially. Her heart was pounding when she first did this because we're afraid of rejection, we're afraid of hurting someone. And so part of it is also developing the tolerance for someone else's reaction to not want to rush back in and be like, wait, I'm just I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm or for her to hang up and in two seconds call back and say, Oh, wait, I'm sorry. We have to be able to sit with that reaction of someone that is they're disappointed or they're mad or they're whatever that feeling is, that is theirs to manage.

Middle Ground: Loving Limits In Practice

Barb 41:10

Right. And that tolerance that you're talking about, that's what I'm when I say building internal safety. So there's a lot of feelings work involved in building healthy boundaries. Because the main reason that we don't set boundaries or we cave on our boundaries is because of the feelings typically of guilt and shame that arise when we set boundaries and we can't tolerate them. And we also can't tolerate other people being upset with us. So we have to, or we get to. I say that all the time. My clients say have to. I'm like, get to, get to. We get to learn how to manage our own feelings, how to feel like feelings are energy in motion, and energy by its very nature, morphs and changes. Like we're afraid, I'm gonna feel like this forever. No, you're not. It may suck for a couple minutes, but it's going to go through you. You're not gonna die from it. And I learned that it was actually me resisting my feelings that was way worse than feeling the feelings. And and then learning how to manage my feelings and also learning how to manage my life in such a way that I'm not constantly putting myself in situations that are triggering for me. Like I used to um like go into environments that were upsetting to me and then be like, Why am I so upset? And I think like one of the ways that I talk about boundaries are um boundaries of self-containment. So these are things we either need to contain or stop doing entirely. And some of them are really only like nobody even knows about them. And some of them don't just affect me, they affect other people too. And so, like a big one was I didn't even know that I ruminated and catastrophized, Mary. I really didn't. And what I realized that when I ruminate and catastrophize, I'm jacking up my nervous system. And I didn't even know that I was doing it. So it would be impossible to stop when you don't know that you're doing something. So once I recognized it and then recognized it, it was inflaming my body that I realized I've got to change the channel. What do I gotta do to change the channel? And I just had a call today with um a fellow in recovery, and she was telling me about some difficult stuff. And I said, Do me a favor, tell me something good. And she told me this beautiful story of how she surprised her granddaughter at her dance class, and the granddaughter, she's four, came running out and jumped on her and hugged her with her arms and legs. And like I could feel how the beautiful it was. And I said, Vicki, do me a favor. When you start going down the spiral, stop what you're thinking and go to that memory, the memory of your granddaughter and what it felt like. Like I didn't know until I got in recovery and did all this kind of work that I was like thinking horrible thoughts thoughts. Made me feel like shit constantly, which is why my nervous system was jacked up. So I didn't know that I was doing that. And then I also didn't know that I could replay pleasant things to get those good feelings going through my body. And there's this one meditation I listen to all the time. And what I love he says at the end is those good feelings, they live in you at all times. They are there waiting to be tapped into. The shitty feelings are too. The problem is most of us just replay things as if they will turn out differently if we replay them enough, or we catastrophize enough as if we're going to prevent problems by thinking about all of the million ways that things can be a problem. And I say this, I deal with this too. So I don't think I ruminate anymore. I'm pretty sure I don't. I would say my catastrophizing has gone down by like 90%. But that 10% that's left is one of the most difficult things in life for me, is to notice it and be like, okay, time to change the channel.

Mary 45:03

And you're right that we so much of what happens internally, it does manifest in our body. Like you talked about your client with the migraines, that you know, I I talk often about I had thyroid cancer. And I think that came from not using my voice for most of my life because where is the energy blocked? So that that is important too. And we could probably do a whole episode just on that. But yeah, I think that idea of um yeah, being aware of too that sometimes you do decide that you don't want to have a person in your life. That is okay too. So I think the the takeaway really is you figure out, like you said, based on your values, based on what does it feel internally when something happens, that's kind of your meter to tell you, are my boundaries being pushed? And then where do you want them to be? And then practicing that, and it's going to be different for every situation.

Barb 45:58

Yeah. The problem for many people, including myself, is that um, even though I did all this work and I was introspective, I was so unaware of what was going on internally. Part of it has to do with the fact that I was numbing for decades with substances, you know, and that and like codependence is kind of like creating a substance internally, like an inner drugstore. And so I was, we call that in my ACA program addiction to excitement or addiction to chaos, is another way to describe it. It's basically I've lived in fight or flight mode my entire life. And to me, that's life. So when I'm not activated, I feel like I'm dead. You know, it's like, what I remember doing the steps with this woman in early recovery. She had been sober in AA for 12 years before she came into ACA. And as she started getting a measure of peace, she was like, What is this peace shit? Because it was so foreign to her. It was intolerable because it was just because it was foreign and it took her a while to be like, oh, this is that serenity thing that people are talking about. Like I never really knew what it meant. And then, you know, when you're there, it's a lot easier to see as soon as you get triggered. So it does take a while. And then there's the fact that a lot of people dissociate, they don't trust themselves. So it does take time to understand, oh, that's a that signal that my body's been giving me. That's called fear, you know? Yeah. Or, you know, like I had a friend when she came into recovery, she said she thought she wasn't afraid of anything. Well, she'd been quivering her entire life. She was literally walking around scared her entire life and didn't know that that was fear. Wow. I know it's so sad. And now she's like, Oh my god, I was afraid of everything, but especially people like being rejected or judged or humiliated or abandoned by them.

Mary 47:51

Yeah. Well, we talked about so many awesome things today. I have loved this conversation. So take a minute and tell us a little bit about what you do and where people can find you, and I will link everything in the show notes.

Barb 48:05

Fantastic. So I am a boundaries coach. Um, I target primarily professional women who say yes when they really want to say no and who neglect themselves because they're so focused on others. So they tend to be professional women who are overwhelmed, and I help them develop this sense of internal safety so they can say no without guilt and shame and stop focusing so much on what other people think. I do my signature program is called Unshakable You, the Fragmented to Whole method. It's a 12-week private coaching program, it's a multimedia curriculum. You get just like it's you get everything from me. And then of course, I have some smaller packages and I have mini courses and that sort of thing. Um, I since you're listening to this on a podcast, you might want to just head on over to Fragmented to Whole on this same podcast app that you're listening to. If someone has heard me and feels like I really think I might want to work with Barb, I do offer a free 30-minute say no without guilt call. They can go to BarbChat.net and that takes you to my calendar, and then you'll, you know, answer a few questions and find a time that works for you. But I I hang out on LinkedIn now. So I'm at BarbNangle, N as a Neighbor, A-N-G-L-E. And then my website has tons of free stuff: family boundaries, romantic boundaries, personal boundaries, workplace boundaries, and a whole lot more. And that's higherpowercc.com. All right.

Mary 49:35

Well, I'm gonna link everything also in the show notes. But Barb, thank you so much for what a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Barb 49:43

Thank you. It's so good to talk to somebody who really not only do you get it as a professional, but it's clear that you get it from a personal standpoint. And it's such a pleasure to have like a deep conversation like this.

Feelings Tolerance, Rumination, Catastrophizing

Mary 49:54

Yeah, yeah, it's been great. And I want to thank everybody for listening. We're building such a lovely community here, and there's nothing I love more than hearing from you, whether it's your thoughts about an episode or your ideas for a future episode. So you can email me at nsvpodcast at gmail.com. I will link that in the show notes too. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.