relationships Archives - Megan Hallier

How to start setting boundaries in relationships (as a people pleaser)

It’s funny how we can go through life being totally oblivious to some of the ways we trip ourselves up or get in our own way.

That’s why I think therapy is such a great idea. It’s like someone kindly props a mirror up in front of us and gently shows us where we have been going wrong all this time.

For instance, I have recently come to learn that I am not very good at setting boundaries in relationships, due to the fact that I’m a run-of-the-mill people pleaser.

I have this deeply entrenched fear of disappointing people and this fear leads me to do almost anything in my power to avoid letting people down.

I am a gentle, quiet person so it is easy for me to get bowled over by stronger personalities. Like those who are louder, more confident or more forceful with their opinions than me.

It is much easier for those of us who are quiet people to just let things slide rather than face the potential embarrassment, fuss or arguments that speaking up may entail.

But without setting boundaries in relationships, this need to please can get us into some rather sticky situations.

We end up agreeing to go to places we really don’t enjoy and spending time with people we would really rather not. We end up stretching ourselves too thin and not leaving enough time for the things we truly enjoy. We end up wasting months and years of our lives trying to be something we are not.

So why are we so afraid of disappointing people?

What I think it comes down to is the fact that most of us are looking for belonging. What we want most of all, is to fit in, to be accepted and loved.

Therefore, we try to avoid doing anything that might jeopardize that.

We are scared that if we disappoint someone we might lose their validation. We might end up being alone. We might be misunderstood and left out in the future.

But here is the truth: Disappointment is part of adulthood.

Part of life is coming to terms with the fact you might not get everything that you want. We have to learn to cope with being disappointed by other people.

What is important to remember is that we cannot be everything for everyone and therefore, we will disappoint people.

You may like to look at setting boundaries in relationships as a radical act of self-care. Daring to put your needs, feelings and self above the comfort and security of keeping others happy.

“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.” – Brene Brown

How to start setting boundaries in relationships:

Accept yourself

First of all, you need to allow yourself to take up space in this world. That means being proud and unashamed of who you are.

For example, I have this weird thing about cutlery where I cannot stand using a knife and a fork that don’t match. I know it is a little nutty but when I try to be cool and let it slide, I just feel uncomfortable and don’t enjoy my meal as much.

But I am learning that part of loving myself is indulging these quirks and being okay with the way that I am, weird cutlery issues and all!

We deserve to eat with matching cutlery if that is what makes us happy. We deserve to wear the polka dot skirt if that makes us feel fabulous. We deserve to dance to that music that nobody else gets if that puts us in a good mood.

You are fine just the way you are. Celebrate you. Accept you.

Put it into practice: Start owning those little quirks that make you who you are instead of feeling embarrassed by them.

Consider your own needs

Something that has felt so freeing for me is to recognise that my voice, opinions and feelings are valid.

For a long time I have been afraid of rocking the boat, of making waves or being a nuisance so I have stayed quiet and withdrawn rather than speaking my mind.

My first instinct is to go along with what others say or want, without giving any consideration to how I am feeling or the fact that I can say ‘NO.’

Setting boundaries in relationships is important for protecting yourself. It’s about being aware of your needs and how any given situation makes you feel. It is about stopping to consider what terms and conditions you might need to put in place so that you feel comfortable.

Put it into practice: Next time someone asks something of you, stop and consider your needs before automatically agreeing.

Communicate your needs

I’m no relationship expert but I have come to learn that communication is one of the most important things in healthy relationships.

It is so easy to misunderstand someone and to allow resentment to build up if you don’t clear the air on a frequent basis. The power of vulnerability is that it gives us an opportunity to confront problems before they get bottled up.

First things first, you have to know yourself and what you need.

If it is really important to you that your significant other shows up to watch your important event, then tell them. If something your mum said really upset you, then let her know how her words made you feel.

Put it into practice: Be vulnerable and share your needs or feelings with someone today.

I heard a quote recently that has stuck with me…

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” – Joseph Campbell

A lot of people are afraid of growing older but I think the older I get, the more I am becoming my true self.

With age comes this deeper understanding of who we are and what we need to be happy. And we become less willing to compromise on our happiness as we did when we were younger.

But we don’t have to wait until we get older to start practicing self care and setting boundaries in our relationships. Let’s start now by putting these little steps into practice each day. Let’s choose to love ourselves even if that means disappointing others.

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In Building relationships

The power of vulnerability: having the courage to say how we really feel

I never really grasped the power of vulnerability until I started dating.

The effort required to put yourself out there and meet someone in the first place is immense. And this only compounds once you are actually in a relationship and forced to share so much of yourself with another person.

I had no idea how difficult it would be to articulate my frustration or the depth of my affection. But both things are equally challenging.

Both require a level of vulnerability I was completely unprepared for.

Even for someone who loves words as much as me, finding the right ones to say can be nearly impossible. It’s like my mouth dries up and the ability to formulate a sentence disappears.

One of the biggest lessons I am learning is that withdrawing from vulnerability and bottling up emotions is a surefire way to cause trouble in a relationship. And when broken people try to build relationships, trouble is already present in spades.

When I was doing a spot of gardening this week I found a perfect metaphor for this phenomenon.

I’ve recently come to learn that walnut trees are prolific and tenacious in their pursuit of complete, garden domination.

They grow up into these ginormous, towering trees which look absolutely magnificent but are really just huge, leafy pests. Every autumn they drop hundreds of walnuts beneath their canopy and an army of shoots sprout before your very eyes.

I was given the critical task of removing the excess shoots from beneath one of the trees before they got out of control and created a backyard platoon.

Due to my lack of gardening experience, I foolishly predicted the work would be easy.

At first, I found that the small, immature plants were easy to pull out. They only required a gentle tug and the entire shoot and roots would be in my hands.

The larger plants were a different story however. Their roots were well established, their stems were thicker and so they were tougher to remove from the ground.

And as I huffed and puffed under the shade of that grand old, walnut tree I thought about how similar these shoots are to our bottled up emotions.

We start out with a little niggling frustration, a slight undiagnosed sadness, there will be something that upsets us and we will refuse to figure out why.

Then little by little, the frustrations mount, the anger seethes, the sadness deepens.

What once was a small shoot becomes a fully developed plant. With roots spanning deep and wide. We find it is impossible to remove with a simple, gentle tug, instead we must cut off the stem and dig out the roots.

The problem with avoiding vulnerability is that our issues never get resolved.

That’s what we are doing every time we fear vulnerability and say “I’m fine” even though we are not.

This is what happens when someone upsets us but we choose to not make waves or confront the problem.

And this is what we allow to fester when we refrain from doing the difficult work of dealing with our emotions through self-reflection.

I’m guilty of this as much as anyone.

I have a terrible propensity for believing people can and should read my mind. That they should be aware when I am upset and they should know exactly what I need them to do to make things right.

This doesn’t bode well in relationships. People can hardly ever read my mind. Most of the time I just go quiet and no one will be any the wiser that what they did upset me.

Sometimes I get lazy and prefer to avoid dwelling on my negative emotions. Instead of asking myself why I am feeling upset and working out what I can do about it, I numb myself. I run in the other direction. I shut out those feelings.

But staying silent doesn’t make the problem go away. Numbing ourselves or pushing the negative emotion down deep doesn’t allow us to heal.

The problem just simmers away in the background, waiting dormant, ready to pop back up at any moment.

What we need is to understand the power of vulnerability.

Choosing to say how we really feel. Laying our cards on the table. Opening up and allowing ourselves to heal.

Daring to be vulnerable is a terrifying feeling. Like losing control of the car you are driving. Like being a bug under a microscope. Like leaning dangerously over the edge of a cliff.

There is no easy way to wander into vulnerability. It takes a great deal of work.

But the rewards of vulnerability are countless. The power of vulnerability is incredible.

When we find the courage to say how we really feel, we create an opportunity for real connection with others.

When we allow people to see our weaknesses, our fears and our biggest needs, we allow them to step into those places and help us mend ourselves.

If we learn to process our emotions, to express our feelings, to release instead of bottling them up, we can find a deeper sense of belonging.

We have to be braver about this.

We need to start tackling those shoots when they are still small. Instead of just brushing things off, we need to start dealing with our emotions.

We need to become more self aware so that we know our strengths and weaknesses. So we know what makes us so very frustrated or absolutely delighted. We have to take the time to get to know ourselves first.

And we need to ask for help when we feel sad or confused or lonely. It isn’t fair to expect people to read our minds and determine our needs.

I think now I realise the power of vulnerability. To be vulnerable is not to show weakness but to recognise our strength. To understand that saying how we really feel is one of the bravest and best things we can do.

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In Building relationships

When broken people try to build relationships

I’ve been thinking recently about the cost of relationships.

Being in a relationship, be it romantic, friendly, forced by blood relation or other, is costly. People come into our lives and leave muddy footprints all over them.

Relationships require so much patience, compassion and forgiveness. Sometimes it feels too hard. Too costly. Too much to ask.

For example, I like to take good care of my things. I place a great deal of value in my possessions and so I tend to treat all of them with my utmost respect.

However, I am learning that other people do not take the same precautions with their own possessions nor those of anyone else for that matter.

I came to realize this the hard way in my first flatting experience.

Somehow I ended up flatting with three loud, rambunctious, messy boys.

I never thought I would flat with boys at all, let alone three at once, but God has such a great sense of humour that way.

So I would often find myself stumbling into wrestling matches on the living room floor, piggy-back rides in the kitchen and tea box tower construction in the pantry.

And as you can imagine, such chaos often left casualties. Fortunately, nay miraculously, none of us were ever harmed, but the same cannot be said for our flat, furniture and crockery.

Cups were chipped, once white tea towels became grey and splotchy, spatulas were singed on hot frying pans and beautiful china bowls were cracked irreparably.

There was this one bowl I was particularly fond of because it was on the clearance shelf at the kitchenware store.

It was white with this delicate turquoise pattern etched all around it. I fell in love the minute I laid eyes on this bowl and I knew I had to buy it.

If I had a china cabinet I would have kept it nicely tucked away in there because it was almost too beautiful to be used.

One day I came home and found my precious bowl with a big, ugly chip in its rim.

And not only that, but inching from the chip right through the middle of the bowl was a hairline crack which I knew spelled disaster.

It broke my heart.

I knew I shouldn’t have trusted those careless boys with my beautiful bowl. This is why we can’t have nice things. Because people are sloppy and careless and incredibly clumsy.

If we let them use our fine china it will get chipped, it’s only a matter of time.

I stormed around the flat for a little bit and muttered to myself about how careless boys are and how I should teach them a lesson about breaking other peoples precious belongings.

And I was getting all puffed up and ready to fight until I realized how melodramatic and absurd I was being.

It was a bowl for goodness sake. It was no antique, it wasn’t a heirloom, it wasn’t given to me by someone very special.

It probably cost less than 15 dollars. It had no sentimental or monetary value and yet I felt so outraged that someone had broken something that belonged to me.

It’s a joy to have nice things. It just makes sense that you would look after the things which you have spent your hard earned money on.

But it becomes a problem when we value our things more than people.

So this brings me back to the cost of relationships. The fact that sharing my life, my home and my space with other people means that things won’t ever be the same.

They’ll leave their fingerprints all over my wineglasses. Their problems cluttering up my quiet Friday evening. Their brokenness chipping a hairline crack of disappointment and hurt throughout the smooth crockery of our relationship.

But I don’t want to be the kind of person who is so caught up in bubble-wrapping her china bowls that she misses out on communing with friends.

I don’t want to become obsessed with collecting things that I lose the chance to build a community that depends on sharing.

Too often I think we let our pride, our egos and our desire for perfection to get in the way of real connection. True intimacy. Deep relationship.

But I want to learn how to let people in.

I want to love others. I want to drink from chipped cups and wear my best friends socks and lend someone my sweater when it gets cold.

I want to trade lemons from your tree for basil from my garden. I want to swap chocolate chip cookie recipes and your mom’s famous potato salad recipe.

I want to be the kind of person who values people, not things.

And that isn’t an easy thing for me to do. Because people with my personality type tend to want to keep things to them self. We so badly want to be different, unique and important and it can feel like allowing people to see all of us will spoil that.

I’m deeply afraid that someone will copy me and then I won’t be so special anymore.

But I’m learning that this is one of the costs of relationships. The fact that someone might copy us or abandon us or hurt us in ways we never saw coming.

It is so messy and risky and completely gut-wrenching at times, but it is what we were made for after all.

To love and be loved. To share and be seen. To lean on and lead on one another.

So come on over and use my best china because life is for living, not just for looking at.

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In Building relationships

The gift of our diversity

I am ignorant. I am naïve. My mind is narrow and my knowledge is limited. I see the unfamiliar as threatening. The unknown as alarming. In my bubble of consistency and uniformity I am safe.

But I’m slowly learning what lies beyond the unfamiliar, uncertain and uncommon is extraordinary.

If we always colour within the lines, if we only stick with what we know, we risk missing out on the fullness of life.

When we step outside our comfort zone, when we sit and listen to those who look and sound nothing like us…we experience something beautiful. We realize that we really aren’t that different after all.

We’ve recently moved into a new neighbourhood and I decided that I would like to take this fresh start as an opportunity to get to know my neighbours properly. Previously, I’ve missed that acceptable window in which to become acquainted with my neighbours and so I lived beside them for years without ever knowing their names or their stories.

This time had to be different. So I started small. I baked a batch of apple and cinnamon muffins, nothing flashy or obnoxious and we went over to introduce ourselves.

We were greeted by a smiling Chinese woman and her daughter. I rambled an introduction nervously before realizing that she didn’t speak English and couldn’t understand a word I’d just said. Fortunately, her daughter translated for us and kindly ushered us in for a cup of tea.

We stepped into their lounge and sat gingerly on the edge of their couch while they boiled the kettle and pulled cups and teapots together. The TV was blaring in a language foreign to my ears. There were strange figures forming a shrine on the mantelpiece. The cup was tiny and made of glass which burnt my fingers as I picked it up.

I felt myself shuffling uncomfortably as one who has traveled infrequently and only to countries which speak English.

But as we sipped our tea, breathing in the sweet scent and sharing in this sacred ceremony our guards started slipping. Our differences became less noticeable. Our exquisite humanity knitted us together.

We began to share our stories, where we came from, what we love to do, what makes us unique and what makes us the same. We sat and chatted in broken English and messy Chinese and came away an hour later with two new friends and a dinner invitation for later that week.

And it was over dinner that I realized the significance of food and friendship in our lives. That something as simple as a batch of muffins can enable two families to build bridges and forge a relationship.

Because gathered around the table with the pink plastic cover, the mismatching chairs, the delicately painted bowls and thin wooden chopsticks, we were a picture of heaven. Regardless of our nationality, native tongue or chosen religion, we gathered here.

It is around a table that communion becomes real.

“Here we break bread and receive one another. We set aside our differences, our grievances and we are one. This is love. This is Jesus. This is heaven touching earth.”

There’s a lot of talk these days about right and wrong. We search relentlessly for answers, for truth, for the moral high ground.

But all of this seems to just lead us further into segregation. We are divided by our opinions and our pride. We can’t see past our narrowminded views and we can’t step down from our high horses.

There are plenty of people who go through the motions, who obey the regulations, who colour within the lines.

But when we’re so busy polishing our church shoes and pointing fingers, we miss the big picture.

We are all the same and infinitely different. We carry separate dreams, fears and failings. But we are bound to one another in love. That’s the way it was always meant to be.

Beneath all of our arrogance, insecurities, doubts and fragility is a beating heart seeking connection.

Too often we let things stop us from reaching out, from crossing the street or baking a batch of muffins. But I’ve tasted and seen that God is good. I know now that this way is the best way.

“Welcoming strangers and making friends. Picking up the stragglers and inviting them in. Humbling ourselves and letting others go first.”

That’s what Jesus did and that’s what he’s asked us to do too.

And as much as I’d like to keep my head down and my blinds drawn… I simply cannot ignore this call. And now I’ve got a taste of it I really can’t stop.

I keep getting these heart nudges to be the one to say hello, to ask someone to join in, to give without getting anything in return.

And what I’ve found is as much as I give, it’s returned to me pressed down, shaken together, running over. That’s the way it is, we give the little we have and get immeasurably more in return.

So we can play it safe, we can colour within the lines and do only what is necessary or we can move beyond our bubbles of consistency and uniformity. We can move towards the unknown, uncommon and unfamiliar because it is there that we find one of those delightful thin places where heaven meets earth.

That’s the gift of our diversity.

P.S. Welcome to the new blog! I hope you like what you’ve seen so far. In this space I’m going to be writing about living intentionally, building relationships and finding encouragement for your everyday life and I’d love to have you stick around for more. Feel free to Follow my blog with Bloglovin, connect on Facebook or follow along behind the scenes on Instagram.

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