Having Healthy Boundaries With Your Loved Ones

Are You Enabling or Empowering Your Loved Ones?

If you are a kind, compassionate, sensitive person (which you most definitely are), you never want to see anyone suffer; especially someone you love.

It is natural to want to help someone avoid pain, challenges, and possibly deter them from making a wrong decision. If you have any wisdom that could assist someone you naturally want to offer your insight. You want to enable by empowering your loved ones.

When you offer experience and expertise to someone who is eager to learn from you, there is a healthy reciprocal exchange of energy. Both parties benefit and feel wonderful from the interaction.

What happens, however, when someone you love is suffering, and keeps making the same mistakes over and over again? Part of the human experience is learning from mistakes.

At some point, our self-limiting habits will become so obvious that we take steps to clear them. It can take some trial and error for these habits to rise to our conscious awareness. In time, however, all self-destructive patterns will be replaced with love.

No matter how much faith you have in a person to succeed, it can be difficult to watch them fall, even if it is for a moment. What tends to happen, is that we try to protect people from their own pain by taking it on ourselves. It’s as if we say to ourselves, “I’m stronger than you, I know I can handle this, and you can’t so give it to me.”

What happens in these situations is that you are putting someone else’s needs in front of your own. Empowering your loved ones can seem like a loving selfless act. However, it doesn’t benefit either of you in the end.

If you sacrifice your own well-being by protecting your loved one from their mistakes, you are denying them an experience to learn and grow. There is a part of you that doesn’t trust them to know what is good for them. At that point, your kindness becomes more enabling than empowering for them.

Four simple guidelines to foster healthy and reciprocal relationships:

Be aware of your boundaries

If you are taking on responsibility for something that isn’t yours, you are allowing energy into your life that will deplete you.  Alternatively, if you are offering advice that you weren’t asked for, you are invading another person’s boundaries, which doesn’t feel good to either of you. Make sure you remind yourself that you are two distinct people each with your own energy and experiences.

Love is more powerful than fear

If you are fearful, that only instills more doubt and anxiety in the person you are trying to help. Instead of focusing on the worst case scenario, visualize your loved one successful and happy. The more you focus on that energy, the more they will entrain to it. The Universe loves to give you what you visualize.

If it’s not your life, it’s not your job

Everyone has life lessons. If we didn’t have lessons, we would not have come to Earth! Even though it seems like someone is suffering, on a soul level they are thriving – learning all that they intended to in this lifetime.

Spiritually, now matter what it looks like on the outside, we are all in the right place at the right time. Each soul has their own guardian angels helping them as well. We are all  in good hands (wings)! You can trust their Higher Self to guide them.

Love your life first

It’s impossible to know what someone else needs or what is appropriate for them if you don’t know what’s right for yourself. There is a divine plan for all of us. Each one of us is aware of our own plan through our heart and intuition.

If you are afraid that if you do what is truly in your heart that you will be hurting someone else, then you are not trusting the beauty and harmony of the Universe. What is right and appropriate for you is ultimately going to be best for everyone.

Whether it is your spouse, child, parent, friend, or even acquaintance, the BEST possible thing you can do for anyone is to be happy. Live your life to the fullest and everyone around you will be lifted by your energy.