This month’s wellness update features New York Times best-selling author, Nedra Tawab. As a therapist, she has built a successful career helping others establish and maintain personal boundaries for better health and wellbeing. While her book was not written exclusively with family caregivers in mind, the themes in her 2021 release, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, offer compelling parallels and helpful strategies for caregivers. Though it can be uncomfortable and challenging work, feeling equipped to identify and prioritize our needs helps us protect space for self-care and can be truly transformative. This challenging, yet fascinating process often liberates years of behavior patterns which have unintentionally impeded our peace of mind and overall health. I appreciate how her work aligns with healthy caregiving strategies by offering short-term, long-term and self-manageable skills.
When caring for others, particularly adults with dementia whose needs require more time and oversight, establishing healthy boundaries can offer substantial benefits for everyone surrounding the caregiver. Before experiencing all the benefits of healthy boundaries, the steps to identify and honor one's own needs must first be securely established. This is no small feat and where family caregivers often need ongoing support and reminders. In dementia care, this is a moving target. We all make compromises for the people we love and yet the balance of our needs vs. others can generate instability within ourselves. This internal battle is how resentment and burnout take seed.
“Neglecting self-care is the first thing to happen
when we get caught up in our desire to help others.”
Contrary to how it initially sounds, the work of creating and maintaining boundaries is not about controlling outside stressors, walling-out the world, especially those who care about our health and best interests. While we’ve all done this before to cope with intermittent feelings of overwhelm, doing so as a long-term strategy is harmful to relationships as well as exhausting. Attempting to manage things outside of our control is one sure way to feel even less stable internally. Instead, this approach is about radical self-care and preservation where accountability is firmly rooted in managing ourselves while letting go of managing conditions (and the people) around us in order to feel secure. Sometimes the people we love the most will unintentionally challenge our capacity to show up for ourselves. This makes sense when we consider years of conditioning and cultural expectations to be supportive at all costs as one (unhealthy) definition of love. What we actually discover through boundary work is how the thief of our peace is often no other than…ourselves. Oftentimes, we’re the biggest threat to protecting and preserving our own mental health and wellbeing.
It’s human and natural to turn away from ourselves from time to time, particularly when what we are experiencing is painful or confusing. The trouble rests in how easily this can become habitual, when we dismiss our immediate discomfort by looking for something else (or someone else) to soothe our distress. This is precisely where healthy boundaries (for self and others) can show up and help us through, like following a roadmap back to our peace. This also fosters self-trust and it becomes easier to ask for help and receive it when we’re clear on what we need. While the word boundaries can be misunderstood as a barrier or a closing around emotional or physical availability, in this sense, it is self-care in action and approached as an opening to our health. Boundaries are built and reinforced through honest dialogue, beginning with how we speak to ourselves and then with others. One simple boundary expressed skillfully, such as our capacity to say No, can compassionately protect our health and our relationships. It also goes a long way toward protecting the finite resources we have: our time, availability and energy.
"The ability to say no to yourself is a gift. If you can resist your urges, change your habits, and say yes to only what you deem truly meaningful, you’ll be practicing healthy self-boundaries.
It’s your responsibility to care for yourself without excuses."
Boundaries are not invisible walls, they are flexible and responsive to present conditions and function best when communicated, regularly and clearly. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, located in one of the most dreary months of the year in Michigan, this is a loving act which flows in all directions. And this also happens to be where things get interesting. It’s easy to forgo important agreements when the agreement maker is also the agreement editor and the agreement breaker. While we can get away with treating ourselves poorly, the cost will likely show up in our peace, happiness and the quality of our relationships. Look around. If any of these things feel particularly strained, a healthy boundary may be helpful. While there are no quick fixes in caregiving and no easy routes through decision making, there are simpler and less harmful ones!
For your consideration, here’s a simple list of clarifying questions. See what resonates, challenges or interests you.
“To determine if your expectations are reasonable, consider this:"
- Whose standard am I trying to meet?
- Do I have the time to commit to this?
- What’s the worst thing that could happen if I don’t do this?
- How can I honor my boundaries in this situation?
Boundary work has been an essential inclusion in our wellness programming over the years and Nedra Tawab’s work offers exceptional insights for navigating the discomforts of saying No to what does not align and the counter-intuitive discomfort of also saying Yes to ourselves. The practical and deep-cutting skill building underscores an essential point and mindset for all caregivers to embrace: Self-care is not a luxury.
“Remember: there is no such thing as guilt-free boundary setting.
If you want to minimize (not eliminate) guilt, change the way you think about the process.
Stop thinking about boundaries as mean or wrong; start to believe that they’re a nonnegotiable part of healthy relationships, as well as a self-care and wellness practice.”