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hey guys I'm Heidi Priebe welcome back to my Channel today we are talking about how to figure out where your boundaries lie and set them effectively and I am of the very firm opinion that this cannot be done without being in touch with our
Heidi Priebe explains how to set healthy boundaries by first developing body awareness, noticing how emotions show up physically, and dropping the mental 'justification game'.
Key Takeaways
- Developing body awareness is the foundation for setting effective boundaries.
- Notice and learn your body's language without trying to change it yet.
- Replace moral justification with honest, situational assessment of what you need.
- Communicate directly about what you feel and want rather than avoiding or stewing.
- Boundaries evolve as your body states and life circumstances change.
What the video covers
- Boundaries are personal, moment-to-moment, and differ across relationships, so they cannot be set well without connecting to your body.
- Step one is learning to distinguish how different emotions appear physically (posture, breathing, heartbeat, muscle tension) without judging them.
- Tracking body states does not require constant diligence; noticing them during different emotional states is enough.
- Ignoring bodily signals and telling yourself stories leads to self-regulating around fantasies rather than real-time connection.
- Example: on a date, tense body clenching may signal a past association, not necessarily a need to be defensive, and should be noticed rather than overridden with a story.
- Step two is dropping the 'justification game' of deciding who is universally right or wrong, which produces rigid boundaries that don't fit the specific situation.
- Radical honesty training example: the speaker resents a contact's repeated texting and communicates it directly rather than ignoring it.
- Boundaries should be based on what keeps you present, engaged, and alive in a relationship, not on external moral principles.
- Some relationship features are 'necessary evils' that you can tolerate without resentment, and you should accept preferences like communication style without treating them as moral failings.
- Recognizing your own reactions and choosing how to respond removes the burden of constructing an elaborate web of rules.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Why Boundaries Require Body Awareness
- 01:32Step One: Learning to Recognize Emotions in the Body
- 02:56Body Scanning Across Emotional States
- 05:20The Date Example: Noticing Tension Without Stories
- 07:32Step Two: Dropping the Justification Game
- 08:40Radical Honesty Example: Communicating Resentment
- 11:00Necessary Evils and Accepting Different Preferences
- 15:00Responding to Your Reactions and Relationship Patterns
- 20:40Boundaries Change Over Time
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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bodies why can this not be done without getting in touch with our bodies because boundaries are personal moment-to-moment things that we need to be aware of as we move through relationships the perfect set of boundaries for one relationship
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is a terrible set of boundaries for the relationship next to it all people are completely different coming from completely different places and backgrounds the way that they interact with each other is totally different and so it can feel like the Wild West trying
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to figure out where your boundaries are unless you learn to be in touch with yourself and figure out how to use moment to moment self-awareness which comes to you through a deep connection to your own body to inform which
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boundaries you need to set at which times in your relationships so in this video we are going to look at the Bare Basics of how to do that in order to improve the health of your relationships and allow you to stay maximally present
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and engaged with those relationships in every moment that you are in interacting with them all right the first step in this process is not a simple one and it's not an easy one but it is a step that will start making your life better
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on so many levels I cannot even begin to tell you how influential this will be and that is simply learning to distinguish how different emotions show up in your body I don't mean what you think about your different emotions I
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don't mean the stories that you make up in your head and what emotions you feel about those I mean when you are in the present moment actually interacting with the people who are literally physically in front of you
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or when you are alone with yourself getting very acquainted with what is happening in your body and what your body is trying to tell you moment to moment so this is going to mean that for a long period of time you're going to have to
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track your body States and this is not something that you need to do with a ton of diligence you don't need to stop every 10 minutes and write down how you're feeling but what you're going to want to start doing is noticing when I
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feel totally present engaged alert alive like I am very happy to be where I am and I'm not in my head too much what does it feel like in my body and you can learn to just start doing a
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bit of a body scan in different emotional states so when I'm energized engaged feeling open and warm towards people what does it feel like in my chest what does it feel like in my stomach do I tend to stand up more
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straight or do I tend to be more slouched and does my heart tend to be beating faster or not quite as fast how do my limbs feel am I shaking my legs or am I sitting still all of these
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different things that your body may or may not be doing you want to start noticing and learning to associate them with certain states that you're in when you are feeling sad and depressed and low what does that feel like in your
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body what do your arms feel like when you're feeling depressed are you taking deep breaths are you taking shallow breaths how's your posture and the point here is not to judge any particular body State it's to get familiar with them all body States and
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all emotions are important and they're communicating things to us but a lot of the time when we have not learned to be fully present within our own bodies we tend to ignore the information our bodies are giving us and instead tell
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ourselves stories about the situations we're in and perhaps about the way we want those situations to go and then we learn to self-regulate with those stories instead of showing up and being present with how we actually feel in the
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moment so let's say I'm on a date and I really wanted the date to go well and halfway through the date I'm like yeah this date isn't going so well right I'm noticing for some reason that I can't put my
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finger on I'm feeling kind of tense my body's kind of clenching I'm not taking particularly deep breaths it's almost like my body is in some sort of a defensive posture I might have no idea why I might not have a single conscious
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thought about why my body is in that state but it's something to note it's something to be aware of it doesn't necessarily mean that I need to be defensive towards my date it could mean that my date reminds me of someone in
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the past who I needed to have that defensive guarded posture with however the important part is that I don't ignore the fact that my body is reacting in a certain way if I don't want the date to go badly and so I make
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up a story in my head about this person being completely different than they are and start to self-regulate with that story that is the beginning of a terrible limerent disaster where I'm now going to be trying to force this person
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to be more like the version of them I've invented inside of my head to escape the uncomfortable body sensation I'm experiencing in the moment and that is going to get us further and further away as time goes on from an authentic
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real-time connection and the reason I'm explaining all this is because I want to be really clear that developing an awareness of what your body is doing at a given point in time in different interactions is not at this point about
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trying to change your body experience it's just about learning the language of your body and becoming deeply familiar with it so that you are no longer constantly fighting it with your conscious mind and later on in this video we're going to talk about why that
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is so important for learning to set boundaries step two in the process of using body awareness to set better boundaries for ourselves and this is going to be the most difficult one for a lot of people is getting rid of the
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conscious mental justification game that most of us are constantly playing when we go to approach boundaries when we are playing what I call the justification game inside of our close relationships what we are trying to do is determine
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who is universally right and who is universally wrong and then we are trying to base our decisions about which boundaries to set on what we believe to be in objective assessment of the situation based on principles that we
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believe are external to us so if I tell myself there's a universal right and a universal wrong and I will set boundaries around that which is universally wrong and I will allow in any behavior from others that is
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generally considered to be universally right then what I'm going to end up with is a giant set of boundaries that does not apply very well to my specific situation and I'm going to be miserable within them because I am not keeping out
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what is important for me to keep out in order for me to remain present engaged and Alive inside of my relationship and I might also be letting in a lot of stuff that I ought to be keeping out in
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order to keep myself present engaged and Alive inside of my relationship so right off the bat I'm going to give you an example of this one because it can be kind of difficult to wrap our heads around this concept so there is a point
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where I was doing a training call for a radical honesty program if you've been around this channel for a while you know that I have used the philosophy of radical honesty to help me quite a bit in learning to get in touch with my body
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States and my emotions and learn to express them directly and then there was a radical honesty training call I was on one time where there is a member of the group who had been texting me to try to
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set up a call that we had agreed to set up and I had been ignoring this person's text messages so we got on a call together and the trainer was like does anyone have any conflicts or anything that's lingering
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for them before we get started that you want to clear and get out of the way with each other which was a very common way to begin calls and I was like yeah I feel really guilty that this guy I'll
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call him Jim uh has been messaging me and I have not been messaging him back I have been putting it off and I feel very like oh kind of guilty and distressed in my body and the instructor went it sounds like
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you're mad at Jim for texting you and I was like no I'm not mad at Jim for texting me he has every right to text me I'm the one who's being the jerk here for not responding to him after I had
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agreed to have a call with him and the instructor went well do you want to have a call with him and I had to check into my body State and my body was screaming no I do not and I felt surprised as Hell by that
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response because I thought in my conscious mind that I totally wanted to have a call with Jim Jim was an awesome person I really liked him and yet my body was saying no I don't want to have the call
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and I realized I have been feeling super burnt out lately and I really really hate online communication and I know that about myself Zoom calls are the death of me so it does not matter how much I like someone or how much I want
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to be in touch with them generally I don't want to have a zoom call and the instructor went try telling Jim that you resent him for texting you and I was like that's ridiculous I don't resent Jim for texting me I just feel bad that
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I haven't answered him she was like suspender disbelief and try it so I went okay Jim I'm sorry for what I'm about to say I resent you for texting me and I tried it a few more times until I
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really felt it in my body I resent you for texting me and I went oh my God that feels so true and I realized in that moment you can feel anger and resentment towards something that you believe in your
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conscious mind is perfectly reasonable solely because it's not the thing that you want so there was not a single cell in my body that thought that Jim had done a wrong thing for texting me I quite like Jim as a person I had
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explicitly told him I want to meet up and have a call next week but when I said that it wasn't completely true it wasn't something that resonated with the rest of my body I wanted to want to have
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the call but that's different than wanting to have it and what I learned from that experience is that in order for me to stay healthy engaged and Alive within my relationships I have to learn things about myself like what types of
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communication I don't like now if I make a new friend who I predominantly interact with online I make a point to tell them I don't like doing Zoom calls I also don't really like texting I do not want to keep our relationship
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predominantly alive through virtual interactions so if we want to get to know each other I would like to prioritize doing that in person if it's too difficult to do it in person because let's say we live in different countries
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unfortunately no matter how much I like you I'm not going to make it a priority to keep in touch with you because I just really hate virtual communication and if the only way for me to stay connected with you is virtual I'm going to start
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to resent you over the course of our relationship even though I don't consciously think that that's fair but the point here is that when we go against what we want because we believe that what we want is not justified or
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what we don't want is not justified whether or not our conscious mind wants to do this we will start to feel resentment for going against what we want and it's going to be very easy for us to project that resentment
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unconsciously onto the other person and start to feel an annoyed by or resentful of them without understanding why that resentment might show up as guilt and feelings of like clenching in our body when we see them and we know like oh I
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haven't responded to their message and that entire experience could be erased by us just telling them here's what I don't want even though it's fair for you to want it and so I'm going to set a boundary around the way I communicate
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even though it would be perfectly reasonable for me to communicate a different way and even if the majority of the world happens to communicate a different way I don't let's say use text very often and if it's really important
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to you for me to text you back very quickly we might just not be the best friends for each other because there's a pretty big discrepancy in terms of what we want out of a friendship and what we
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do and don't like so the whole point of this step eventually boils down to figuring out what you do and don't like and using that information to start informing which boundaries you need to set instead of trying to set a bunch of boundaries
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based on what you think you should and shouldn't do the reason I do not recommend setting your boundaries around the things that you think you should and shouldn't do is because if you are showing up to a relationship out of obligation when in
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reality you feel tense resistant perhaps unconsciously resentful of the fact that you are only showing up in certain ways because you feel obligated to that is going to create mental resistance inside of the relationship that is going to cut
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you off from feeling present and engaged with that person in the moment that you are there now there will always be things in relationships every now and then that we have to do for the greater good for example I will happily text
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somebody to make a plan with them and figure out when we're going to see each other next and I don't feel any resentment when I'm doing that because to me it's a necessary evil so there will be necessary evils inside of our
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relationships but a necessary evil does not feel like resistance right it feels maybe a little bit annoying maybe like we have to change our energy a little bit for a minute at a time but it does not feel like this kind of constant
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gnawing frustration because we are showing up inauthentically and doing things we don't want to do because we have formed our boundaries around what we think we should want and not want instead of what we authentically like and don't like and so the final but
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definitely not the simplest step in this process is bringing both of those skills together the skills of moment-to-moment body awareness and the skill of learning to set boundaries based on what we do and don't want as opposed to what we
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think is right or wrong and using the combination of those skills to constantly set the boundaries that work for us Within any given situation that we find ourselves in and the cool thing about this is that when you learn to get
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really in tune with yourself and really in tune with what your body is saying you actually don't have to think that hard about your boundaries because you can very quickly in a given moment tune into the fact that you do or don't like
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what is happening and based on whether you do or don't like it you now have a decision to make about how you will respond and that alleviates you of the responsibility of having to mentally construct this giant web of boundaries
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that half the time might not even really make you feel very good about your relationships and the more that we learn to do this to be aware of what isn't working for us and what we don't like in
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the moment and then to communicate directly about what it is that we don't like and either ask for resolution or set an immediate boundary around it the less we have to ruminate and worry about what future interactions are going to
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look like because we're going to trust ourselves to stay present throughout them and respond appropriately based on the wisdom that our body is presenting us with in the moment that the things are happening so I often see posts
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online that are something along the lines of like what if I start dating someone and I really like them and then I find out that they're super insecure really attached so we're a month in and I find out they're avoidant and to me
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that is such a mental question right it's coming from someone who seems to have lost touch with their body awareness if we're staying aware present and regulated within our own bodies we're going to notice the moments in which there's a disconnect between us
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and our partners we're going to notice the moments that we feel like oh I really want you to react differently than the way that you're reacting if I'm telling you something personal and you're making a joke in response or you're changing the
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subject if I'm in my body I'm going to notice that doesn't feel good that feels a little bit like a jab to me and I don't want to feel jabbed I don't like it right I just don't like it
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so I'm going to maybe try asking this person hey would you mind not making a joke when I say something personal I like to have these conversations more in Earnest and if they want to accommodate that then that's great and you can work
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with that and if they don't then what are you going to notice oh I didn't like it when they said that they wouldn't work with me on that or I didn't like it when I asked them to stop making a joke
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and then they made another joke in response and so what do we do when we're continuously encountering a situation we don't like we set a boundary maybe I don't talk to this person about personal things anymore and that might be disappointing if this
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was someone who I was considering as a romantic partner and I'm now seeing that the things that are important to me within a romantic relationship are not things that they are willing to offer or able to offer but instead of deciding
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that there is a universal right or wrong and this person is wrong for having those preferences or for having an attachment style that I wish they didn't have I'm just going to notice that I don't like it maybe their attachment
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style is perfect for someone else who also prefers to cope with difficult feelings through humor but if I don't like it it just means this person is not for me and it's my job to protect myself and my
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own vulnerabilities through setting a boundary even if that means picking someone else to try to be close with in that way this work is not going to protect you from having to make difficult decisions feel difficult emotions and walk away
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from things that you may have once had a lot of Hope about but what this process will help you do is develop a set of boundaries that are authentic to who you are and the way that you want to show up
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in the world and have relationships and it might not hurt to note that if you find there are a lot of things people do that you don't like and there are a lot of times when people are unwilling to
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change their behavior when you ask them directly you might want to just do some examining of what it is that you're expecting out of other people and if there are perhaps alternate ways of getting those needs met or if maybe the
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problem is that you're pursuing the same type of person over and over again who is unwilling or unable to meet you where you're at but if that's the case the worst possible way to go about trying to solve that scenario is trying to
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convince someone that they are wrong and the way that they're showing up in the world is wrong even if you're right even if the person you're dating is like a serial killer you're not going to want to waste your time trying to get them to
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change when what you could be doing is going hey I don't like serial killing I'm going to report this person to the police and go find a different boyfriend this is obviously a very extreme example but to a lesser degree you see this
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happening all the time right people trying to change other people under this made-up Banner of universal right or wrong it is right to text this much and wrong to text this much or whatever it is in a relationship instead of just
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recognizing this person's preferences are not aligned with mine and the way to set boundaries is to pay attention to what my body's telling me and use that information to understand what my preferences are and where I need to set
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boundaries to make sure that I can show up to my relationships without resentment unexpressed anger or resistance in as many situations as humanly possible so this is not easy it's a complicated ongoing process that if you are taking it on in the most
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effective way possible you are going to be financing for the rest of your life because your body states are also going to change over the course of your life you're going to get adapted to new ways of thinking behaving feeling and that's
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an exciting thing and there are many wonderful things that can happen in this process including negotiating our boundaries getting playful and inventive with them but for now we are going to leave it at the Bare Basics as always if
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you guys have any questions or comments or thoughts that are coming up for you as you go through this video let me know in the comments what those are or have been I love you all I hope you're taking
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care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again super soon [Music]
Topics:boundariesbody awarenessemotional regulationrelationshipsradical honestyself-awarenesssomatic awarenesscommunicationattachmentpersonal growth
