The Boundary Pattern That’s Sabotaging Your Relationships as a Highly Sensitive Person

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover the boundary pattern that is sabotaging your relationships as a highly sensitive person.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why your boundaries collapse the moment someone is nice to you. The hidden cost of the Jekyll Hyde boundary pattern and how boundary confusion is keeping you trapped in toxic dynamics. Welcome to this edition of Self-Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.

After an upset, I used to dislike it when my partner was in a good mood again, which actually happened pretty quickly for him because it meant somehow in my mind that we were moving on and that I would never have my needs addressed. Have you ever felt like you’re a bit like Jekyll and Hyde? Like one minute saying, no, this is my boundary, and then two minutes later it’s oh, they were nice, so the boundary goes down.

Growing up in my family, I was aware of what others wanted and my mom was too. And I learned from her that it was a good thing to help others fulfill their desires. And so what she did, and what I learned from her is that this is not only okay to do, it’s a good thing to do, and the sooner you can do it, the better.

She never said this directly, but this is how I put it together, is that if I could find out what somebody wanted before, maybe even before they want, knew what they wanted. I could give that to them and somehow that would please them. Now I know that is me totally being in the other person’s business and crossing over into an area that actually can cause conflict.

But growing up I wasn’t sure where the boundaries were. Have you ever had that thought, your wish is my command, like that used to be what I believed. If you just wish it, then that means I have to do it like almost compelled to do it. And this shows a lack of clarity about where the boundary actually is.

In fact, when I was on the receiving end of that and my mom would step in and help me with something that I hadn’t asked for, it used to make me really mad. And I see in retrospect now how this whole idea just didn’t make sense. There was a lot of craziness in that, in a way, but I was caught in that, and that seemed like it was I didn’t know anything other, to be honest.

In fact, I think about myself and how independent I try to be, and I think it stems a little bit from. My mom wanting to help me, and I’m like, no, I don’t want your help. I wanna do it on my own. Like when you’re trying to separate from mother it usually happens age two. No I do it. Like that.

That’s still going on in me to some degree. And I think it’s partly because of this lack of clarity of boundaries. So it’s no fun on the receiving side, but it’s also no fun on the giving side because. It’s, it means you’re not quite in your own business. You’re like stretched over onto someone else’s property and it always makes you a little nervous when you’re trespassing.

So have you noticed that you struggle with, where do you end and where does someone else begin? Or maybe it shows up when you move somewhere or when you start a new relationship. And you completely lose yourself and dump your friends. Forget about your friends. Forget about the life you had. These are all the signs that it’s not clear where boundaries are, like you’re not seeing clearly where the boundaries are.

And granted, there is a lot of gray area between what is my business and what is purely someone else’s business. And it’s confused by interactions with children where they’re dependent on you or anyone who’s in independent situation. There are gray areas, but there’s also clarity that can be found when you look at it.

The problem with inconsistent boundaries is that they train people that your no doesn’t really mean no. And I think when I look back in my family, I think no is actually a bad word, like a taboo word in our family, or at least it was for me. And maybe that’s just me being an HSP. I really only saw a couple options.

If someone asked me to do something, I could say yes, but not really mean it, like I’m just being nice or I’m just being cooperative or something like that. But there wasn’t a no option. My other option was to say, oh yeah, awesome. Great idea. I’d love to do that, which was really a genuine, real, yes. So you can see how my yes and no table got skewed.

And it’s really just two versions of yes, I can say yes and be lying about it, or I can say yes with a lot of enthusiasm and that’s a real yes. But I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t say I’d rather not, or none of that was in my vocabulary. It’s not a muscle that I trained in any. And if you don’t have a muscle or a skill of being able to say no, if it’s not an option because of whatever you’re thinking and believing, then it’s like driving a car without any breaks.

So you can go faster and faster. You can coast, which is like breaking, but not really, but you can’t actually hit the brakes. And so that means if somebody goes out in the middle of the road. And you don’t have any brakes, you have no choice but to either swerve and try to miss them or you end up hitting them or something bad is gonna happen when you’re driving.

It requires the combination of an accelerator and a brake to give you control. ’cause you can go faster, but then you can slow it down. It’s like when you’re learning to, to ski, for example, if you’ve ever done that. W at first you don’t think you have any breaks, and so you just, it’s so scary to go down this steep slope.

But as you learn that you can turn your skis and slow your speed down, in fact, you can actually turn ’em sideways and stop. Then suddenly that fear becomes less and less because you have a way of controlling your speed. You can go faster straight down. You can go slower by breaking side to side.

So the problem also is that you start losing respect from other people because they never know which version of you they’re going to get. And this can be confusing and people stay a little bit distant. And it undermines our ability to have close relationships with people and to have meaningful relationships with people.

Also, it can happen that relationships become power struggles because people test your limits constantly. They’re not sure where are, where is your boundary, so they have to push it around and try to find out where it is. And you may be trying to be nice all this time and avoid conflict, but then it ends up blowing up at some point you just, you max out, and now we know where your limit is, but.

People aren’t sure because it moves around and that’s something that can be problematic in a relationship or you abandon your own life every time someone new shows interest because boundaries feel too harsh. So this idea of boundaries is a big one. It’s a big issue for highly sensitive people. It’s not interestingly enough, in my opinion, a part of the actual HSP trait.

Trait. The trait is sensitivity and depth of processing and empathy. But the, this can be done in a balanced way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be imbalanced and crossing into another person’s business. It also doesn’t mean that you’re weak willed. As HSPs, we are often drowning in what other people’s experiences, other people’s emotions, and it’s hard to swim back to shore to back where we are.

We are highly empathetic, and this is, I think, what sets us up. It’s like a proclivity for this kind of imbalance, but again, I don’t think it’s the nature of being highly sensitive that causes us to not have boundaries. It’s just that we tend in that direction. If we’re gonna have an imbalance, it goes in that direction because we’re already empathetic to begin with.

I think the real reason why we have trouble with boundaries is that we get attached somehow, and this is just a human condition where we get attached to things that are good. We get attached to things that we want, and we want love and we want approval. And we want appreciation. We want these good things from people in our lives.

But when we get attached to it, when we depend on it, then we may think that no is not an option. Because if we say no, we’re going to get disapproval or we may get some pushback. And this also plays into another part of being an HSP, which is we don’t like conflict and we also experience. People’s pushback as something that feels like a big deal.

It hurts us. It feels the, we feel the emotion of it strongly, and we don’t want to feel that. So for all these reasons, it becomes difficult to say no.

I like to focus on the limiting beliefs that stop us from saying no, because those are things we can work with. Those are things we can explore and see if they’re really supported by our own experience or whether we’re just believing them and blindly following along. So one of those beliefs is that strong boundaries will make me cold and unloved or unloving, and that is something that is easy to believe, but it’s like a immature version of reality.

Looking as if there are only two options. Either I have to be a total jerk or I’m a doormat. It’s black and white thinking, and whenever you see that black and white thinking, it means it’s very limited. It’s like only two options. I’m a jerk or I’m a doormat. Ironically, when I look at my own relationship with my partner, what has happened over the years is I have been able to find my boundaries more and more, and they’re not harsh.

It’s not like I’m trying to be mean. I’m not trying to uhhuh. Be, in fact, I don’t need to be mean. When I’ve really found where my actual boundaries are, what is an actual boundary, it’s my own experience. This works for me and this doesn’t work for me. It’s based on my experience when I’ve found those. And then I’ve also re come to respect my own sorry, my partner’s boundaries as well.

What happened is we’ve become closer and a lot of resentment has gone. And it has stoked the love between us because there isn’t this need to continuously test those boundaries. So ironically, people respect you more when you’re consistent and when you’re not actually, when you’re accommodating. It’s great to be flexible, but there has to be some experience, some truth inside.

That is your experience that people want to know. Another way of saying it is where’s your location in the room? Where are you, where do you actually stand? And as HSPs, it’s easy to just. Playing into where other people are and not actually take the time to find out where we are.

When you do, when you find it and when you develop the muscle to stand on it, then you become a player in the room and the respect level goes up on all levels and the confidence level goes up as well. You can’t love others well when you’re disappearing into them. Boundaries, ironically are what make love possible.

Consistent boundaries aren’t about being harsh, they’re about being clear, and clarity is the greatest gift you can give both to yourself and to others. So if you’re exhausted from the Jekyll and Hyde boundary pattern, if people walk all over you because your limits keep changing and you’re tired of losing yourself every time someone wants something from you.

But what you really want is rock solid boundaries that people respect consistent relationships where you don’t disappear, and the ability to stay connected to yourself even when others are pulling at you. That’s exactly why I created the HSP Inner Freedom Program. If you’re interested, go to the show notes, click on the first link you find, or visit true inner freedom.com.

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