Episode Description - How to Develop Healthy Boundaries in Your Relationships
If you've ever set a boundary that someone ignored, and then felt stuck between becoming a doormat or issuing an ultimatum, this podcast episode is for you. Licensed psychotherapist Dr. Sharon Martin joins the show to talk about healthy boundaries: what they really are, why so many people struggle with them, and why the way most of us think about boundaries is making holding our boundaries harder, not easier.
Dr. Martin unpacks why boundary problems show up differently for different people, and why the same person can swing between being a pushover and being rigid depending on the situation. She also explores the hidden ways boundary problems develop, including enmeshment, codependency, guilt, perfectionism, and past relational wounds.
Dr. Martin also reveals how healthy boundaries are less about controlling other people and more about understanding your own needs and focusing on what you can control. Through practical examples, including parenting, workplace conflicts, and high-conflict divorce situations, Dr. Martin demonstrates how small shifts in perspective can lead to greater freedom, less frustration, and healthier relationships. The result is a fresh and empowering framework that may change the way you think about boundaries altogether.
Show Notes
About Dr. Sharon
Dr. Sharon Martin, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in helping adults recover from the effects of a difficult childhood, overcome feelings of unworthiness, and learn to set boundaries. She writes extensively about codependency, perfectionism, and healthy relationships, including her popular blog, “Conquering Codependency,” for Psychology Today. Dr. Martin is also the author of four self-help books, including The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism.
Connect with Dr. Sharon
You can connect with Dr. Sharon on LinkedIn at Sharon Martin, LCSW and on Facebook at Sharon Martin, LCSW. You can also follow her on YouTube at @SharonMartin and on Instagram at dr_sharon_martin. To learn more about working with Dr. Sharon, visit her website at Live Well with Sharon Martin. And you can find her book, The Better Boundaries Workbook, here. It is also available at most bookstores.
Key Takeaways From This Episode with Dr. Sharon
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Transcript
How to Develop Healthy Boundaries in Your Relationships
SPEAKERS
Karen Covy, Dr. Sharon Martin
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Karen Covy: Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making to try to figure out what keeps us stuck, and more importantly, how do we get unstuck? I'm your host, Karen Covy, a former divorce lawyer, mediator, and arbitrator turned coach, author, and entrepreneur.
With me today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Sharon Martin. Dr. Martin is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in helping adults recover from the effects of a difficult childhood, overcome feelings of unworthiness, and learn to set boundaries. She writes extensively about codependency, perfectionism, and healthy relationships, including her popular blog, Conquering Codependency, for Psychology Today. Dr. Martin is the author of four self-help books, including The Better Boundaries Workbook and The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism.
Dr. Martin, welcome to the show.
Dr. Sharon Martin: Thanks, Karen. It's great to be here.
Karen Covy: I am thrilled to have you. Before we dive into everybody's favorite topic—boundaries, or maybe it's just my favorite topic, I don't know—I wanted to start with how you got into this line of work. What drove you to be a psychologist and to focus on relationships and boundaries specifically?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yeah, well, I'll try to give you the short version. I was telling you earlier I could give you my whole life story, but the short version is that my mother was a therapist. That's probably the most direct influence as to why I became a therapist as well. But truly, both of my parents were, and still are, very community-minded. They spend a lot of their time, both professionally and in their spare time, giving back to the community. They really modeled those values for me and my sisters, so that attitude of helping people was just something I grew up with. It is an important part of who we are and what our values are.
Let me tell you just a little bit about why I specifically fell in love with boundaries, because I love this topic as well. After many years, really decades, of working as a therapist, one of the things I recognized is that so many of the problems people were bringing into my office were actually boundary issues at their core. But that's not the way they were defining them. They weren't calling me up and saying, "Oh, I'm having trouble setting boundaries." They would say a whole host of other things like, "I'm feeling so exhausted and burnt out at work," or "I'm having the same argument over and over again with my partner," or "I'm yelling at my kids because they don't listen to me."
When I really got down to it and started to see the common thread throughout all of this, it was people who were struggling to set boundaries. Once they learned how to do that effectively, they could essentially solve a whole host of different problems in their lives, everything from relationship problems to sometimes even health problems. They could take better care of themselves, be able to make different choices that were more fulfilling, and reach some of their goals. That's why I love boundaries too, because it is such an important skill that can have a huge impact on us. I'm a huge believer that this is something everybody can learn how to do. It really is a skill set, like cooking or driving a car; we can learn it, practice it, and implement it. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is something we can do that can really make a huge difference for us.
Karen Covy: I love that. I love that you identified the core issue—that if you can just solve this one problem, it knocks out so many others. But let's start the boundary conversation by defining what it is. What is a psychological boundary, and why do they matter?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yeah, it's true that I think we often have an idea of what a boundary is, but they're a bit more complicated than people sometimes realize. We could probably divide it into two different aspects of boundaries.
One aspect is the limits that we're going to set, and I think this is what most people are familiar with—particularly the idea of setting limits with other people. That's a boundary where I'm going to tell you what's an acceptable way to treat me or what I expect from you, or here is a limit that I'm going to set with my children. Those are pretty straightforward kinds of limits. We can also set limits for ourselves, and we can talk about that in terms of boundaries being a self-management tool. We also need to put some parameters around our own behavior to help us manage ourselves and maintain a satisfying, healthy lifestyle.
But boundaries also create a dividing line or some healthy space between who I am and who you are, or anybody else. So, it's a way of differentiating yourself from other people. What I mean by that is if we don't have that kind of boundary, we become enmeshed with other people, so we don't have a clear sense of who I am as distinct from someone else, whether that's my parent or my spouse, for example. This type of boundary helps us maintain our values, our goals, our sense of self, our personality, our hobbies, our interests, and our own set of friends. If we don't have that definition, we kind of lose who we are, and then that makes it difficult for us to do the things that really matter and be the kind of people we want to be.
Karen Covy: You know, not to take us down a rabbit hole, which I do from time to time, but enmeshment is a term that I've usually heard being in the family law and family space. It's a term I've usually heard with parents and children—that they're so enmeshed that it's not healthy for the child. What does that look like? How does that present, whether it's parent-child, two spouses, or whoever it is? How do you know if that's an issue you have?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yeah, you're absolutely right. We typically use it in the context of a parent-child relationship. I think of it like this: my job as a parent is to raise children who are going to become independent. They're going to become their own person who can make their own decisions and live their own life. They don't have to have the same values that I have. I would love it if they did, because of course there are things I think are important, but I want to empower my child to be themselves, whoever that is.
That's the opposite of what enmeshment is. If I have an enmeshed relationship with my child, I'm trying to essentially make them a copy of myself. I don't want them to individuate; I want them to be like me, and then I want to be able to control who they are, their decisions, and what they're doing. Again, that's not a healthy mindset for the parent, and it's not going to be a healthy situation for the child because they're not going to be able to grow up and fully become themselves.
We can replicate that in other relationships too. It is similar to the idea of codependency, and I think we don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole on a different tangent here, but we can have enmeshed relationships with other people. Usually, when we use that term, it is typically the parent-child relationship where it's essentially like we're too close. We often think, of course, we want to be close to our family members, but it is possible in this sense to be so close that you're just not letting people have boundaries. You're not letting them be a separate person.
Karen Covy: That's interesting. If that's what you're doing to a child, though, is that something a parent will do consciously? It seems to me that every parent would want their child to grow up to be healthy and independent. Is this something they're actually consciously setting out to create, or is it just subconscious by the nature of their personality?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Oh, that's a tough question. I think of it really as something that probably comes from the parent's own insecurity about who they are. It feels threatening for their child to have a different belief system, make choices that they disagree with, have different personality traits, or choose a partner who is really different from them. There's something about the parent themselves that is insecure and not able to tolerate the child as separate and different from them. If we think about a parent who has some narcissistic tendencies or some of those personality traits, for example, I think it might be more deliberate as a way of controlling the child. So, it might be a bit of both. For some parents, it might not be something they're aware of, but for others, I think they probably do have a greater awareness and they're really attempting to use it as a control tactic.
Karen Covy: Okay, so let's talk about boundaries per se and what makes a good boundary. A lot of people think of boundaries, like you said in the first instance, as limits. The idea of a boundary is, "Okay, you can't talk to me in this particular way. If you raise your voice or start yelling at me, that is not okay, so that's my boundary. And if you do that, then I'm just never going to talk to you anymore, so you have to do what I said." Then, of course, the person you just said that to does exactly what you told them not to do, and you're kind of right back in the soup, so to speak. Is that a healthy boundary, or did I just screw it up?
Dr. Sharon Martin: I think we all know that's not going to be a good approach, Karen. Right, we can already tell this isn't what I would call relationship building. We're causing more discord in the relationship if we go about setting a boundary in that way. Our goal is to create stronger, healthier relationships with our boundaries by creating clarity, agreements, and understanding. This is where boundaries can be really helpful and strengthen our relationships. When we have clarity, we both understand what the expectations are, who's responsible for what, and how we're going to approach things. Then we actually have less conflict in the relationship and we can feel closer.
But you have hit on a lot of different components of where people go wrong with their boundaries, so it's probably worth delving into that a little bit. Part of it is that you set that boundary up—and I know it was just an example, of course—essentially as an ultimatum for this person. There was a threat involved in it, which, again, is not relationship building. That's going to cause people to leave, right? We're not going to be able to have relationships if we keep coming back to people, or even just once saying, "It's my way or the highway."
Now, I will say, certainly there are some situations and some boundaries that absolutely need to be deal-breakers. Those are boundaries that involve safety, where we need that boundary to keep ourselves safe or to keep a minor child safe whom we're responsible for. But aside from that, the majority of our boundaries should be situations where there is some compromise or some negotiation, where we're really trying to come to some agreements among people. I'm assuming that these are people you care about, that you're close to, and that you want to have relationships with. If that's not the case, we might have a different approach.
As one other aside, there also may be one or more people in somebody's life who are what I'm just going to call a very difficult person—a person who has let you know that they are not interested in respecting your boundaries, having agreements, or compromising on things. With those particular people, we need a different approach, but let's put that in its own little category for the time being. Most people in our lives are the people we want to work together with; we all care about each other, and a collaborative approach is going to be much more satisfactory for everybody.
The other thing that is important here when we're setting our boundaries is we want to look at what part of this is in my control. What are the things that I can change myself in order to improve the situation and get my needs met? This is where our boundaries are going to be the most effective. Certainly, sometimes boundaries are going to involve us asking somebody else to do something or to change their behavior. In your example, I might decide I'm going to ask this person to use a different tone of voice or to not curse at me. You could make a very specific request, but whether the person is going to honor that request is not something I have any control over.
Karen Covy: But what you're saying is exactly what I see in so many of my clients who have boundary issues. They're caught, because if you give an ultimatum like, "If you don't do this, I'll do blah blah blah," then there's a consequence. But if you don't have a consequence, then the boundary doesn't seem like a boundary—it seems too porous. So you're vacillating between being a pushover and giving an ultimatum, and neither one of those is effective.
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yeah. Well, sometimes it is a situation where if the other person isn't going to change their behavior, we need to focus on what I can do in that situation to get my needs met. If somebody's yelling at me and I've asked them to not do that, I might decide I'm going to leave the room or I'm going to hang up the phone. I'm going to do something in that particular situation to protect my well-being.
That still leaves us with the question of how do I continue to have a relationship with this person, but this might be a person I'm going to put in that category of difficult people. They're showing me that they're not interested in treating me with respect—and I would say that's a pretty low bar of respect, to not yell at me or call me names, right? I think we can all agree that's going to be important.
But I think the other situation is one where we have gotten stuck on what the solution is. I'm saying it needs to be this solution, this is the boundary that I'm setting, when we really need to back up and say maybe there are some other boundaries and some other ways for me to get my needs met in this situation that we can agree on. You'll hear me talk about boundaries with this particular phrasing: a boundary is a way of getting your own needs met. I think if you start to use that idea in your mind, it will start to open up the possibilities for you, rather than jumping to the solution of, "You need to stop doing this," or "I want it to be like this, and this is the only way for me to have my needs met in this situation."
Oftentimes, there are a lot of different ways to get that need met. When I work with the other person, we can come up with a variety of solutions. Even if I do this exercise on my own and really brainstorm all the different ways, I can find alternatives. Before that, though, I must understand what it is that I need in this situation. In this particular example we're talking about, maybe I have a need to feel respected. It could be any number of things, depending on what the situation is. Once I understand what I need, then I can have bright possibilities and decide which is the best one. It is a bit of trial and error sometimes to find the one that is going to work the best.
Karen Covy: Well, that raises an interesting question because it sounds like there's a piece of this work in figuring out what you need and what your boundary is that's individual, and there's a piece of it that is joint, or in a relationship with the other person—like, "Here's my need, how can we meet this need?" If somebody knows they have a boundary issue, where do they start to figure things out? Do they start with individual therapy, with couples counseling, or how does this work?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Sorry, I actually missed a bit of what you said because it stalled out there, Karen.
Karen Covy: No worries. The question is: if you have a boundary issue, part of figuring out what you need, putting words to that, and defining your boundary is your individual work. But figuring out how to get your needs met is something you can talk with your partner or the other person about. So, how do you start resolving these issues? Is it individual therapy? Is it marriage counseling? How do you deal with the problem?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Well, it could be either, both, or a combination of them, honestly, depending on the particulars of your situation. It isn't uncommon for people to do some individual therapy and some couples therapy at the same time, or one after the other sequentially. But certainly, it's always good to start with yourself because that's where you're going to have the most control. If you're motivated to do the work, there's nothing that's going to hold you back from having a better understanding of what you need and what you're looking for, and that's going to be information that is useful no matter what approach you take. So, I would say probably start with yourself and go from there.
Karen Covy: Okay, so let's ask a more foundational question. I'm just curious: some people have boundary issues, while others seem not to. What causes a boundary problem? Why do some people have this?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Well, we might think about this in two categories. One is people who have boundaries that are too weak, so they're not setting boundaries enough or they're not setting them consistently. The other category is people who have boundaries that are too rigid. The reality is that a lot of us will vacillate between both. In some situations, your boundaries will be too weak, and then you'll get so upset, frustrated, and resentful from having weak boundaries that you swing over to the other side and start setting these really harsh, rigid boundaries as a result. You may have a combination of both.
I would say for folks whose boundaries are weak and who are struggling to set them, they tend to be folks who feel guilty when they ask for something, set a limit, or say no. I'll just speak for myself; we tend to be a bit of people-pleasers. We're afraid of upsetting other people, and we want to keep other people happy. Part of that, I would say, is because you probably didn't have models for setting healthy boundaries. There are probably not too many people who get overt lessons specifically from their parents or their teachers about how to set boundaries, right? We don't really learn this as a skill set. But if you also didn't have the opportunity to see people setting boundaries in real life, you're just not going to have absorbed that information, known how to do it, or even known that it is important. So that's part of it.
For folks whose boundaries tend to be extra rigid, oftentimes that is the result of some sort of relational trauma—some experience of having been hurt in relationships—and so you're erecting boundaries, or walls, in response to that. It's self-protective, and it makes complete sense that you want to keep yourself safe. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is you're keeping everybody out instead of being in a middle ground where you're able to differentiate what's a healthy situation and a trusting relationship where you can be more vulnerable and let people into your life. Instead, you keep those walls up all the time and say, "Nope, nope, I'm not going to share anything with you," or "I'm not going to make any compromises here." Those are folks who sometimes have a "my way or the highway" approach to it. But like I said, sometimes it's also just the response to a boundary that was too weak; we feel taken advantage of, and then we want to protect ourselves.
Karen Covy: Let's talk for a moment about boundaries as a self-management tool—in other words, having boundaries with ourselves. Can you say more about what that is?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yeah, I think sometimes we forget about needing limits with ourselves, or perhaps we just don't really think about boundaries in this particular context. But it's very similar to the idea of a boundary as a rule or a limit that you're going to set with a child to help them learn how to manage their own behavior. As a parent, I need to set a lot more limits and boundaries with my child when they're younger, but as they get older, I should be able to loosen up on that and let them start making more of their own decisions, managing their own behavior, and deciding for themselves what the limits are. It's the same idea in terms of what we're going to do for ourselves.
Think about healthy habits and routines that you might set for yourself. These often involve some kind of limit that you have created to help your life run more smoothly. This can be so many different kinds of things. For one thing, we're often setting limits for ourselves, even as adults, with technology. I might say, "I'm not going to spend three hours scrolling on Instagram; I'm going to give myself 15 minutes," or "I'm not going to watch two hours of TV every day because if I do that, it causes problems for me, so I need to set a limit there." Very commonly, we set some limits around healthy eating or the amount of alcohol that we're going to consume.
It could also be something like going out on weeknights. Maybe I decide that if I'm out Monday through Thursday night during the week, it means I don't get enough sleep and I'm grumpy the next day. So, I create almost a rule for myself where I say, "I'm only going to go out one night during the work week," because that helps my life run more smoothly. I might set a bedtime alarm or a wake-up alarm. These are limits that we all often use without even clocking that it's a limit we set for ourselves.
It's a simple example that helps us remember that sometimes we decide we need to have a really firm limit with ourselves because if we don't, a creep sets in, takes over, and negative consequences follow. But there might be some of these limits, or even just particular situations that come up, where you say, "I can be more flexible with myself." For instance, during the holiday season or on vacation, I might loosen up on a limit I have for myself. Sometimes that works out great, and it's a good decision because we thought it through and made that compromise. Other times, you might say, "Well, that didn't work out well. I really just went off the rails with that." Next vacation, I'm going to need to decide on a different set of limits for myself so that I don't spend all my money or have a hangover every day.
This is part of us being responsible adults, essentially—having some limits for ourselves. If people are struggling in some of those areas, it's a good reminder to say, "Okay, maybe I need to rethink what my limits are and be a little bit clearer with myself about that." Often, these are things that we just kind of have in the back of our mind, like, "Oh, it's a good idea for me to go to bed by 11." But if I don't have an actual plan about how I'm going to do that or why I'm going to do that, it's very easy to not take it too seriously. If people are struggling with that, I would say write it down for yourself. Be really clear about what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and why you're going to do it. Do some tracking so that you can monitor it for yourself and make adjustments until you figure out what's working.
Karen Covy: That raises a question: do boundary issues bleed over from one situation to another? For example, let's say I'm experiencing boundary issues with myself. Will I also have boundary issues with my spouse, my children, my job, and so on? Is it pretty pervasive, or can it just be that I have boundary issues with one person?
Dr. Sharon Martin: It can go either way. I would say that often people are struggling in multiple areas, especially if you think about relationship boundaries. If it's a struggle for you to be more assertive, say what you need, or ask somebody to make a change, usually that will happen across multiple situations or multiple people. You might notice, "Oh, I'm having that struggle at work, I'm having that struggle with my mom, and I'm having that struggle with my friend." They might look a little bit different, but often there's something core within me causing me to find it hard to do that. That's often true, although it certainly could be the case that you're pretty competent and skilled at boundaries in general, but you have one particular difficult person in your life. It could be that you got a new boss who's just really hard to deal with, or a really difficult neighbor, unfortunately, and you might just find it's pretty isolated to this particular person with whom you can't figure out how to reach any agreements or have any consensus about how to manage things. So that certainly can happen also.
Karen Covy: So, how do you go about solving that problem? Let's say you've identified whether it's a problem you have globally with everybody or just a problem with one person, and you see that you are having some sort of issue setting boundaries and enforcing them—not just setting them, but enforcing them. How do you go about turning that around?
Dr. Sharon Martin: I would try to be very deliberate with what I'm doing. Similar to what I was saying with self-management boundaries, instead of just having these vague ideas in my head—which is what most of us do, and a lot of the time it works just fine—if it's not working, you want to be more specific with yourself.
You want to say, "Here's the problem. Let's define what the problem is." Either define what I need or want in this situation, look at what my options are, and list the various boundary solutions I could possibly use to get that need or want met. Then, I'm going to create a plan. I'm going to decide what I'm going to do, how I'm going to do it, and when I'm going to do it. Then I'm going to see how that works, and then I'm going to make some changes. If it hasn't met the need satisfactorily, or if I haven't gotten enough of what I want or need to be content, I need to go back and say, "Okay, well, maybe I need to fine-tune this a little bit, or maybe I need to try one of those other ideas that I had on that list."
Again, keep in mind to look for solutions that are within my control, because this is often where we sort of get lost—trying to set boundaries where we want somebody else to make a change, but they're not willing to make the change. I'll tell you one really quick example of this that I have in my book. It's super simple, but consider the idea that you work in a busy office, and there's a communal refrigerator, which is often the case. You bring your lunch, you put it in there, and then lunch comes around, and you find day after day that somebody has eaten your lunch. I cannot control whether somebody eats the lunch that I put in the communal refrigerator, as much as I know that this is wrong and they should respect that that's my lunch because it has my name on it. It's probably not something that I am going to be able to get other people to change. Certainly, it's reasonable to send out an email or go around to your colleagues and say, "Hey, don't eat my lunch. Who's eating my lunch?" That's fine, but if that doesn't work, then I need to come back to myself and say, "Okay, Sharon, what is in your control? You want to be able to bring your lunch and eat it at lunchtime. How are you..."
Dr. Sharon Martin: So maybe I decide I'm going to get a cooler bag, put my lunch in it, and store it at my desk. Or maybe I'm fortunate enough to be in a situation where I could get a little mini-refrigerator and put it at my desk where I can control it and make sure nobody is going to eat it. Now, I might say, "Well, why do I have to do that? Why should the onus be on me to buy the refrigerator, the cooler bag, or do this extra thing?" Well, that's the reality of the situation. It's not the ideal solution. The ideal for me would have been that people would just respect my boundary and not eat my lunch, because the boundary right there says, "Sharon's lunch, don't eat." But if they're not, I have now solved my problem of having my lunch and having a way to keep it cold, even though it wasn't the ideal solution.
This is the reality of life for most of us as adults: there is often not a perfect solution to the issue that we are struggling with. So, we need to be realistic about what options will work. Now I have come up with a solution that works, and if I can just accept that sometimes it's an imperfect solution but totally in my control, that would be a good outcome for me. That is a super simple example, but you can use that concept with other ideas just to remember that sometimes it's an imperfect solution. Always try to at least be aware of the things that you can control for yourself because often there are changes you can make. We just sometimes don't want to be the one who has to make the changes because we feel like the other person should be making them. Perhaps they should be, but if I can't make them do it, then I need to stop fighting that battle because that is just going to be frustrating for all of us.
Karen Covy: I love the example. Like you said, it was super simple, but I see this playing out in divorce all the time. You've got two spouses, and there could be a boundary issue over anything. Maybe one spouse doesn't bring the child home at the exact time and they're always 15 minutes late. You say, "Please don't be late. It's important because of blah blah blah," and nothing changes. So people get really frustrated and they say exactly what you just said: "I shouldn't be the one that has to do this." How can somebody in a divorce situation—when you've got somebody on the other side who really doesn't care about your boundary and they're going to do whatever they're going to do—navigate that? What are their options?
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yes, this is a great scenario, and I'm sure it's very common. It's exactly what we're talking about. I would say this is someone we're going to put into our category of difficult people because, at least in this scenario, the ex isn't really concerned about your feelings, your needs, or your boundaries. They might even be someone who is intentionally doing it because they know it irritates you. At a certain point, I think we need to accept it's not worth the effort and aggravation to continue to try to get this person to change. Instead, let's say, "This is what the situation is. What can I do to make it better for myself?"
I might say, "Okay, I know he's going to be 15 or 30 minutes late, so I'm going to plan for that." I'm going to make sure that, to the best of my ability, we don't have to rush off to something immediately, so there's not a next commitment that I'm now going to be late for. Or, I'm going to bring something productive to busy myself with so I can make use of that 15 or 30 minutes instead of just sitting there and stewing about it. Maybe I'm going to write in my journal and vent my feelings that way. The idea is to try to come back to the thought of, "How can I make this better for myself? What is it that I can personally do if I can't change the actual situation?"
Maybe there's still something I can do that will improve it, even if it's just incremental improvements. It's by no means the ideal situation. I think just recognizing that you're having some strong feelings—and understandably so—about what the other person is doing, especially if you feel like they're doing it intentionally, is key. Having that awareness means saying, "Okay, I know that I am angry and frustrated in this situation. I need to do something to take care of myself. I need some outlets for those feelings so that they do not spill over in front of my child or into the relationship with the ex." I need to just take ownership of that and try to deal with it.
It's super hard, and I don't mean to imply otherwise, because it's totally understandable to want to be in a place of knowing you are right and they are wrong. That may be true, but getting ourselves stuck in that is not going to be helpful. It's not going to move us in the direction that we want, which is either problem-solving or emotionally detaching and being able to truly move forward for ourselves.
Karen Covy: Yeah, and I would think that in that kind of a situation, having someone like a therapist or a coach there to be that mirror to reflect is helpful. What I see so often is that people set a boundary very intentionally—it's a good boundary that makes sense—but the outcome they're expecting is for the other person to change, and that just doesn't happen. Then they get angry, they get frustrated, and the whole situation escalates. The idea that I think would be helpful is for them to talk to somebody to say, "How can I get to solving the problem instead of trying to change someone else's behavior?" When you're in it, you're so angry you don't even see it.
Dr. Sharon Martin: I think a really good takeaway from this example is that we want to make sure we're defining the problem correctly. Try to define the problem as what you need or want in this situation, rather than thinking the problem is your ex being 15 minutes late. That's not a problem that you can solve. Instead, if I want to solve the problem of feeling angry and annoyed every time my child is brought back to me late, that's a problem I can solve now.
Karen Covy: Right. Everybody is always trying to make the other person change, which in this kind of context doesn't happen. But if it stops bothering you—if you find a way to solve your need to not be angry or upset—then if they're 15 minutes late, you've just reframed the problem so it's not one anymore.
Dr. Sharon Martin: Yeah, it's almost ironic because we often feel in these situations like we're giving in or letting them get away with being late, and that feels really bad when we're framing the problem that way. But the interesting thing is that reframing it and doing the things we've been talking about—really looking at the stuff you can control and how you can change your own behavior and feelings about it—is actually really empowering. It almost feels initially like it's disempowering, like you're giving in. But actually, once you're doing this successfully and you realize you can accept what is and learn how to not be so impacted and upset about it, that's where your freedom lies. That's where you really feel the empowerment of taking back control of your life. You don't have to be blown around by what somebody else is doing; you can control your own self.
Karen Covy: I love that. It's just about reframing the way you look at something in situations when there really is nothing else that you can do. There's so much that we could go into with boundaries, but I want to be respectful of your time and have a boundary there. If somebody is interested in this and wants to learn more or go deeper, where can they find you?
Dr. Sharon Martin: My website is LiveWellWithSharonMartin.com, and from there you can find all the things that I'm doing. My book is The Better Boundaries Workbook, and people can find that at pretty much any bookstore or ask for it if they don't have it.
Karen Covy: We will have links to all of this in the show notes—to the book and to your website. Dr. Martin, thank you so much for sharing all your wisdom. This is a really hot topic in divorce, so I really appreciate your sharing everything you know about it.
Dr. Sharon Martin: My pleasure. Thank you.
Karen Covy: And for those of you out there who are watching or listening, if you enjoyed today's conversation and you'd like to hear more conversations just like it, do me a big favor: give the episode a thumbs up, like and subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to the YouTube channel. It helps more than you know, and I look forward to talking with you all again next time.
