#9: Introduction to the 5-Step Boundary Solution

Welcome to Beyond Bitchy, mastering the art of boundaries with Vicki Tidwell Palmer. Do you think of personal and relationship boundaries as harsh, rigid or bitchy, or do you feel clueless about how boundaries work? Whether you think boundaries are bitchy or baffling, we will give you a fresh vision of personal limits as a source of freedom and liberation. Every week Vicki shares expert information about how you can master the art of boundaries so you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. Hi this is Vicki Tidwell Palmer and welcome to episode number nine of the Beyond Bitchy podcast. Today I want to introduce you to a boundary setting process I created several years ago called the Five Step Boundary Solution and as you can probably tell by the name, it is a step-by-step process with five total steps that will lead you through a process of identifying, creating and maintaining healthy, effective, personal and relationship boundaries. And in order to help people walk through this Five Step Boundary Solution process, I created what I call a Five Step Boundary Solution Clarifier. And it helps you to clarify what kind of boundaries you want to set. And if you would like to own your own copy of a fillable PDF, the Five Step Boundary Solution Clarifier that will walk you through this process, you can go to BeyondBitchy.com and see this show notes for this show or just go to the homepage of BeyondBitchy.com and you can download one right there from the homepage and it will help you to walk through the process that I'm going to give you an overview about today. So I want to give you just a little bit of background on how and why I created the Five Step Boundary Solution process. For the past 11 years, I have worked with betrayed partners, mostly women, women who have suffered sexual betrayal, usually chronic in a chronic kind of way. So serial infidelity, chronic sexual betrayal, or they were in a relationship with someone who struggled without of control, sexual behavior or sex addiction. And as you can imagine for someone who is in a situation of chronic infidelity, there is so much deception and frankly gaslighting and sometimes even outright abuse that goes on in situations like that, the women and also men who are impacted by chronic sexual betrayal or another person's addiction. And this goes for any addiction, by the way. When you're in a situation like that, you have a very strong and sometimes desperate need to understand and to create boundaries on all levels, but especially in these situations emotionally and sexually. So as I had worked with these partners over a period of many years, what I came to see is that the partners who had a good understanding about the way boundaries worked, they made faster and better progress, sometimes even before they got to me, they had a better understanding of boundaries, usually from having a child or an adult child who struggled with addiction. And if you have a family member that struggles with addiction, you will need to get a black belt in boundaries or you are going to suffer a lot. And so what I noticed is that these partners who, for example, they had an adult child who had a chronic addiction and they had maybe gone through the teenage years, of course, with this child and they had been in treatment, they learned some of these skills and then they were able to apply those to their primary relationship with the person who was either also struggling with an addiction or there just was a situation of chronic deception and infidelity. And then for the other partners, I really just had to start at ground level with how do you go about knowing what kind of boundaries you need or want to set. And so when I created the five-step boundary solution process, it was essentially reverse engineered, meaning I thought about and reflected on how I was leading through or leading my clients through this boundary setting process and then I created a system that would help anyone regardless of what their situation was because the five-step boundary solution process is a universal process for anyone who wants to create healthy boundaries. So I created this five-step process and formalized it into the five-step boundary solution and today I'm going to walk you through and introduce you to and give you an overview of all five of those steps. Now obviously there's a lot more to many of the steps than we will have time to cover today but you'll have an overview and also this episode will help to be a guide for you if you download the five-step boundary solution clear fire as you want to walk through any boundaries that you may want to set and also just a quick reminder. These are boundaries in adult relationships and it's not to say that you couldn't use a clear fire if you wanted to get clarity about a boundary you might want to set with a child for example but this process is really designed more for adult relationships and you'll see why that is as we go along because for example in step three in the third step when you identify your power center that's the name of the third step one of the options there is that you make a request and that's not something that you would do with a child. I mean typically when you're dealing with children it's more about maybe giving choices or essentially letting them know that this is the parameter or the limit but that's just a simple example of why this has more to do with adult relationships. Okay so in order to walk through these steps I want to give you a very concrete example because if I just give you the abstract steps it might not be very clear to you how would this work with my specific problem. So I've chosen a specific issue that may be familiar to many of you because this is a problem I've heard a lot in my office and frankly I've had this issue in some of my own relationships and it's a pretty common typical problem especially in long term relationships and it has to do with the way your spouse or partner drives meaning the way they drive a car and your experience of being with them in the car and things that they do that are either scary to you or there may be a little bit activating maybe you kind of get a little bit nervous or you know maybe they're doing something that's just outright dangerous or even illegal. Like for example some people just think that a stop sign is a suggestion as opposed to a hard stop and so if you are in a relationship with someone who just sees a stop sign as a more of a yield or just a suggestion and they continually just roll through stop signs that is actually illegal behavior but anyway that's the example that I want to use because it will help to see how these steps work and then how you might apply them to a certain problem in your situation. Okay so let's jump into the steps and the first step of the five-step boundary solution process is called knowing and owning your reality. So step one is about identifying what exactly am I experiencing here? What is my reality with regard to this situation and keep in mind that the five-step boundary solution process and the five-step boundary solution clarifier is something that you do per issue. So for example if you start to use this process and you like it and it's helpful for you you will end up downloading and using multiple clarifiers and if you download the fillable PDF you can just duplicate it on your computer and then just fill out a new one for whatever the new issue is and one of the things about it that I think is extremely helpful is that it puts you, it engages the prefrontal cortex of your brain which that's the part of the brain that is like the gatekeeper it's the one that has all of the rules and makes the rules for you and is more linear in the way that it goes about problem solving because most of the time when you're in a situation of wanting to set a boundary your emotions are probably rather high and it's not a good place from which to determine what actions or non-actions you want to take next so the [BLANK_AUDIO] The clarifier really helps to get that part of the brain engaged, and it starts to take some of the emotion and maybe the activation or the charge out of the situation. That doesn't mean that there are no emotions involved in this, and we'll get to that in just a moment. But I want to point out why it's so helpful to even have a tool like this and what it does in terms of focusing your brain. So again, the first tip is knowing and owning your reality. The truth is that we really cannot do anything without knowing what our reality is. And a simple example of that is if you have ever wanted to get a handle on your money situation or you wanted to track your money in order to be a better money manager, one of the first things that most financial people, coaches or planners or people like that will tell you is to just start tracking your money. You know, carrying around a little notebook and riding down every time you spend something or otherwise tracking your expenses. And that is a way of tracking data, and that's what step one is about. You're going to know and own your reality. And the way you do that is by identifying three key things. The first one is the data. So going back to our example of the car and driving, let's say that your spouse has a habit of often or more often than not driving, you know, let's say 10 to 15 miles over this speed limit when you're on the freeway, for example, or let's even throw in that example I gave earlier of that stop signs are a suggestion or your spouse treats them like a yield sign as opposed to coming to a full stop at most of the stop signs. I mean, all of us from time to time we roll through a stop sign, right? But I'm talking about more of a chronic, really ongoing issue where it is more of the norm than the exception. So data is what you could record with a video camera. It's what you could see here, taste, smell, touch. And the reason that this is so important is that often we are more in touch with what we think about what happens or what's happening rather than what the actual data is. And we're going to get to that in a moment. But what you want to start with first is what's the data. And in this case, the data is my spouse drives 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit. At least we'll say 80% or more of the time that I am in the car with him. And he also rolls through stop signs about that same percentage of time. And of course, you know, percentage is a little, it's a little bit not exact data, but it's close enough. We're saying it's a majority of the time. And that's really pretty good clean data. This is what would not be cleaned data if I said my spouse drives too fast because we don't know what that means. And it's not about something that we could record necessarily with a video camera. I mean, we could record with a video camera at the speed limit was 50 and he was driving 70, but just saying too fast is not actually data. So keep in mind in this first piece of step one, you want it to be something you could record with a video camera because in just a moment, we're going to get to the part about what you think about it or what your perceptions are. And that again is the part that most people get confused between that and the data. Okay. So first of all, we've identified the data. My spouse drives over 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit, more than 80% of the time as well as rolling through stop signs about that percentage of the time period. That's the data. And then the next part of identifying your reality is that you ask yourself what do you perceive? What do you think about it? What is, and this is another word to use for this, what is your judgment about that? I really prefer thoughts or perceptions. Another way to say it is what did you make up about it? That is an expression that comes from p-amelody. And by the way, even identifying data, thoughts, and then we're going to get to emotions at a moment. That's essentially from what she calls the talking format. It's a little bit different than what we're doing here. But again, it's a very clear, clean process for identifying what your reality is. So let's think about what might be my thought about what my spouse is doing this data. So one of my thoughts could be that this behavior is dangerous. Your thought could be that it frightens me. So when this happens, my thought is that it's dangerous or what I make up about it is that it's dangerous. Usually it's a little stronger than that. Most of the time when we're in a long-term committed relationship and we're in a situation like this, we tend to have thoughts that are a little bit stronger than that. For example, it wouldn't be surprising to me to hear a spouse say, "When I make up about you speeding like that and running stop signs is that you don't care about me or my safety." That's a very common thing for a person to make up. When I go more into step one in future episodes because I'm going to do a deep dive into every one of these because, as you can tell already, they get rather complex. But even that one piece about what we make up about what someone else is doing is so, so powerful and it's worth a whole episode on its own. But I'm going to keep this one simple and say, "Well, what I make up about it is that it's dangerous and it frightens me." Actually, that's going a bit to the emotions. So let's say, "Well, my thought is that it's dangerous and also my thought is that, eventually, you're going to get a ticket. You're going to get a speeding ticket or a ticket for running the stop sign or here's another one." My thought is that our insurance is going to go up after you get the speeding ticket or run a stop sign and run into somebody and have an accident. I mean, there's so many thoughts you could have. But I just want you to get the flavor here. You start with the data. You go to the thoughts. And then the last part is the emotions. And I kind of snuck that in a minute to go when I said frightened. So for us just to keep this really clean, the whole thing would look like when you drive 10 to 15 miles over this speed limit when we're on the freeway and most of the time. And you run stop signs. What I think about that is that you're going to get a ticket that it's unsafe and our insurance is going to go up. And about that, I feel fearful. You also might feel angry. So the emotions that are associated with this could be, I'm fearful, I'm angry. Those would be, I think, the primary ones. And as I describe this, I described it as if I were telling the other person. That's not really the purpose here. The purpose here is just to identify it for your own sake as you're going through this process. But I just actually did model to you how you might say it to the person. And depending on what we decide later in this process about what to do, you actually might say this to the person. So this also prepares a request that you might make in the future. But just sticking to step one, we are identifying three key things, the data, the thoughts, and the emotions. That's step one. So the second step is about getting your needs met. So in the second step, you identify what need you have that is not being met in the situation that you're in. And then the second part is you determine what your vision is, what is the outcome that you would like in this situation. Okay, so let's go to the needs first. And since we're talking about an issue that has to do with, it's kind of activating that causes you some fear that has an element of danger in it. One of the needs, and there are many, many needs, and that reminds me to, I want to give you a resource while it's on my mind. There's a great list of needs on the Center for Nonviolent Communication website. I'm going to put a link to that website in the show notes for today. I believe the website is CNVC that stands for Center for Nonviolent Communication.org. And you can just find on there, they have a needs list. This organization was founded by Marshall Rosenberg, who wrote the book Nonviolent Communication. But anyway, it'll give you a list of needs. But in this situation, it's pretty simple to figure out that one of the needs here might be a need for safety. Or a need to, the one that comes to my mind is comfort. Because when you're nervous system, it's very activated by someone driving in this way. You lose your feeling of being comfortable in that situation, or maybe even with that person, you might not feel comfortable riding in the car with that person if it gets bad enough, or if it's very activating for you. So we'll say just. two needs are a need for safety, a need for comfort. I would also add that it might affect your need for connection, because I don't know if you've noticed this, but most of the time when you feel fearful or you feel angry about something that your spouse or partner is doing, it creates a disconnection between the two of you. And when we're in a committed long-term relationship connection is just sort of built into that. We most of us have a need for that. And so anything that interferes with that for us that causes us to feel, for example, fearful or angry, is going to cause disconnection. So it could be any of those three or all of them. So you identify what needs are not being met, and then you think about what is the vision of what I would like to see happen here? What's the outcome that I want? So in this situation, I would imagine for most people what you would really like is you would like your spouse to change. You would like your spouse to drive the speed limit, or maybe only three to five miles over the speed limit, or you would like them to stop at the majority. Maybe we shouldn't say the majority, because it's only 51%. But let's say you would like them to stop at, you know, maybe 90% of the stop signs instead of only the 20 or less percent that he or she is doing now. So that's probably what the outcome that you would like. And you know, we'll get to this in a minute, but it's just helpful to keep in the back of your mind that the bad news is we don't have power over what another person does, but we can make a request. And actually, that's the direction that I want to go with this. There are a lot of different visions that you could have. And let me tell you what I mean by that. Let's make up a story where you've been dealing with this for many years. And by the way, I know a lot of people who've dealt with things like this for many years. And I'm even thinking of somebody that I know that kind of later in life, they decide this was after being married to their spouse for decades. And this driving issue, and it was not exactly the issues I'm talking about, but it was essentially kind of dangerous and maybe even illegal driving. This person just decided that they were not going to ride in the car any longer with their spouse. And that's that is an outcome. And so let's just make up a story where you've been at this for a while. You made a request of the person to do it differently. And they even said, oh, yeah, you know, I'll do that, but then they didn't follow through. And when that happens, and we'll talk about this when we get to step five, you have to increase your level of self-care. And what that means with boundary work is that the boundary has to become more capable of meeting your needs, meaning with the case of driving that essentially this person that I just was talking about, they decided that from that point on, whenever they decided this, that they would no longer ride in the car. They were willing to be the driver, but they were not willing to be the passenger in a car where their spouse was driving. And so that could be the vision if you've already kind of gone through this step before in terms of making a request. But I think for this one, I'd like to keep to that this is the first time that you really have looked at this issue. And you're trying to decide what to do because truly, ideally, you could make a request and get that need met for them to do it differently. And that's the direction we're going to go. So we'll just say that the vision here is that you would like your spouse to, for the most part, drive the speed limit. And it wouldn't want to say for the most part, I mean, because there's no perfection, right? So they're going to drive the speed limit, and they're going to stop at the, you know, 80% of the stop signs. And that is your vision for what you want to have happened. So two parts of step two, what needs are not being met. And then what is my vision? What's the outcome that I want in this situation? Okay. So that leads to the third step. And this is, they're all important, but this one is so important because it has to do with identifying your power center. So step three is identifying your power center. That means what is it that you have power over? And there are four options in step three. The first option is that you have the power to change this situation. Now, in the case that I told you about where the person stopped writing in the car, if that's where you were going with this, then you do have the power to make that happen. But with the vision that we had, which is that he's going to do it differently, you do not have the power to make that happen because none of us has the power to make someone do or not do anything, right? I mean, if we threaten and hold a gun to their head, maybe, but essentially, we don't have the power to do this. So that's the first option. The second option is that we need to ask for help. Asking for help is different than making a request. That's the third option. But asking for help is like, let's say that I need more information about something like, I'm really worried about my, the longevity of my relationship or whether or not I can stay in it, but I have two small children and I'm just not sure what would happen if I divorced and what would happen about child custody and visitation and, you know, spousal support or those kind of things. And I need to go and talk to an attorney or I need to go talk to a therapist or a doctor of some kind. That's what asking for help is. It's not specifically your request. It's that I don't have enough information. I need more information in order to get to where I want to go to realize the vision that I created for myself in step two. So that's the second option under step three. The third option under step three, which is identify your power center is you make a request of another person. And that's what we're going to do in our example. So you make a request of another person. The, the fourth option under identifying your power center is that you're powerless. And in this case, you really aren't. You're powerless over what your spouse does, but you are not powerless over having some impact on whether or not he stops doing this behavior because you have a right to make a request that he do it differently. So in this case, you are not powerless. All right. So the third step, what we have found out is that in this particular example that we are going to need to make a request of another person, which leads to step four. And step four is when you create and implement the action plan. And this is based very much on step two and three. We have the vision that we want. We want our spouse to change something that he's doing. And we also know where our power center is. And that really determines the next steps. So we identified what we want and that we need to make a request. And so I want to explain to you, talk to you about how to make a very effective request. And this is a whole topic on its own that there's a certain level of skill and art to making very effective requests. And so I want to give you an example of what it would sound like with with the driving issue that is the focus of this process. So what I could say to my spouse is, you know, when we're in the car, when I'm riding in the car with you, what I've noticed is that about 80% or more of the time when we're on the freeway, you drive 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit. And you also, about that same percentage of time, you roll through stop signs or you don't stop at stop signs. And when that happens, you know, my thought is that you're going to get a ticket. My thought is that it's dangerous for you to drive that way. And frankly, when I'm in the car with you and you're driving that way, I feel fearful and I'm angry about it because I really want to enjoy riding in the car with you. And so my request is, would you be willing to drive not more than five miles over the speed limit and to stop at at least 80% of the stop signs whenever I'm in the car with you? Okay, now this is a very specific request and it's so important when you're making requests that they are very specific. So if I had said to him what I'd like is for you to drive slower, that is not a specific request. We don't know what that means. And frankly, since I told him he was driving 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit, if he drove nine miles over the speed limit, he would actually be complying with my request, even though I might want him to do a lower number than that. So notice how specific it was. I said no more than five miles over the speed limit. I gave a percentage. It's a little hard to really quantify this, but I want you just to get the flavor of what it sounds like. And the one about the speed limit is really nice and specific. So I make this request. Now, a lot of you, I'm sure, are wondering, okay, but what happens if they say no, they won't or they say yes, and then they don't do it. And this is all really going to the next step, step five of the five-step boundary solution process. But for now, I want to stick with how you go about creating and implementing this plan. And for the sake of walking through this, let's say that a really reasonable response to what I just requested would be, actually, you're right. I'm putting a sudden danger of a my self-endanger of getting a speeding ticket and having our insurance go up if I'm regularly driving that much over the speed limit. So I'm willing to drive no more than five miles over the speed limit. The thing about the stop signs, it's a little fuzzy to me, but here's what I'm willing to do. I'm willing to really make a concerted effort to stop at all of the stop signs. I don't think I'm going to do it perfectly, but I'm willing to really look at that and do it better in the future. That's a very relational response. And truthfully, most of us are not going to get that much of a relational response, but I want to just give you a picture of what it looks like when two people are being very respectful, clean, and clear in the way they go about setting personal and relationship boundaries. So for now, I want to leave it at that. And then I'm going to talk a little more, I want to talk in step five about what to do about those more messy situations because that really does go to when boundaries don't work, for example. So let's move to step five. Step five of the five step boundary solution process is that you evaluate your results. So you evaluate what happened as a result of what you did. Now in this case, what's happened so far is that it's successful. We do not know what's going to happen in the future, and we will need to revisit it if it doesn't work out well. And that's what step five speaks to. So step five is either this was successful and great job, success, celebration. That's all great. But let's talk about some ways in which this example that we've been working through might not work. Let's say that your spouse agreed to what you asked, but he did not follow through. So he continues regularly to drive 10 to 15 miles over the speed limit and roll through stop signs. So what do you do? And what you do is you go back to step one. And that's the beauty of this process is that now if the person doesn't follow through or they break an agreement or there's some kind of boundary violation, you essentially have a new problem. You have a new issue which is we had an agreement and it was broken and so now that's the data. So when you think about step one, you go back and you say, okay, the data is he agreed that he would do this, but he did not. And this is what I think about it and this is what I feel. And then you literally just move through the process again. And I want to point out here, as I mentioned before, that when there are broken agreements or boundary violations, you must increase your level of self-care, meaning the level of your boundary work. So one example of how that might work in this situation is let's say that you made an agreement, it was not followed, your spouse didn't do what he agreed to do. Increasing your level of self-care might be that you start to set some limits around how you're in the car with him. And this would be not as a punishment, but as a matter of self-care. So let's say that it was really very highly activating or triggering or scary to you when he's speeding a very natural response to that would be, I'm willing to ride in the car with you as long as we're not on the freeway. So we're just driving around town, we're not getting on the freeway or not taking a long trip on the highway, then I'm willing to ride with you. If we're going to take any kind of trip where we're going to be on the freeway, then I will either need to take my own car or I will drive, and that's how I'm willing to ride with you. And again, if you, you know, thinking back to the steps, that is an example of this person, the spouse has the power to make this happen. And so they're saying, this is how I'm willing to do this with you. And it's a very effective response to a broken agreement or a boundary violation. Because what typically happens is that people do the same thing over and over again. And so they say, well, you know, you didn't do what you said you were going to do, but they still keep doing the same thing. And of course, they don't get different results. And you know, to be fair, sometimes people forget or they're having a bad day or whatever. We're not talking about that. We're talking about when there's a chronic situation, like let's say in our example, that the person continues to do it day after day after day, it's not just a one off kind of a thing, or it's something very egregious, a very high level boundary violation. But I just want to give you a picture of what that looks like when you, what I call, you increase your level of self-care, you have to take your boundary work to the next level when you're dealing with a boundary violation. Because if you don't, you are probably going to get the same results. And again, I cannot emphasize this enough, increasing your level of self-care, making your boundary work stronger by, like the example I gave where you essentially take it into your own hands. These are the ways I'm willing to ride with you. It's not for punishing the other person. And I'll tell you, too, that you will find out if your intention was to punish because you will not be able to follow through with the boundary that you set. So I can think of examples from my own relationship where I set a boundary, one time I made a request of my husband that I said, "This is something that I need for you to do." And until that happens, this thing over here is what I'm going to do. And I don't want to go into the details of it because it's actually still going on right now. But I've really stuck to that. And the reason I've been able to stick to it is because it was not done to punish him. It was done because of my own self-care. But again, you will know if your intention is for punishment or for self-care by whether or not you're able to follow through consistently. So I want to just read to you. I'm actually going to read to you from moving beyond betrayal. I don't think I mentioned this before, but the five-step boundary solution process is outlined extensively in moving beyond betrayal. The book was written for betrayed partners, people who have experienced chronic sexual betrayal. But as I said before, this five-step boundary solution process is applicable to boundary work of all kinds. So I want to read to you what can happen when boundaries essentially "don't work." So if your boundary missed the mark, you've got to ask yourself these questions. Did I follow through on the action I committed to in step four? So if you had the power to create the action, did you follow through? And if you didn't, you will need to recommit or you will need to re-evaluate the action. And then if you made a request, was the agreement clear, and we talked about that a little bit, that sometimes when agreements aren't clear, they're not followed through well because they weren't clear. So it's not that the other person really intentionally violated it. It just wasn't clear enough. Like the example I gave of, you know, he drove nine miles over the speed limit instead of 10 to 15. So if the agreement isn't clear, you just return to step four and you recreate the agreement that you had. And then if the agreement was broken or it was a boundary violation, I really encourage you to determine how important the issue is to you. The one we've been talking about today, it might not be a really big issue to you. It might be a huge issue to you if it's a matter of safety or danger. Are you have young children? There could be a lot of ways that the example I've given today could be extremely important to you. But I encourage people to rate these kind of issues on a scale of one to ten. And this helps you determine what your next steps will be. So that's what you do for broken agreements and boundary violations. And then lastly, just to remind you, if there is a broken agreement or a boundary violation, you have the following options. You return to step four and you repeat your request or you can ask for a repair. And we don't have time to go into that today, but it's about making amends or asking the person who essentially make up for what they did in some way. There's a lot of ways that can look or you return to step four and you take the necessary action to create the result you want. The example I gave here was about when you decide how you're going to be in the car with your spouse, for example, or you return to step one and you essentially rework all of the steps all the way over. The last option is that you do nothing and you accept powerlessness. And most of the time when people hear that one, they think, "Oh, that's the worst one." When you're powerless, but sometimes being powerless is an experience of clarity and it's not necessarily a bad thing and sometimes when people get to a place of powerlessness, it's actually very freeing to them. In this case, in the example that we use today to walk through the five-step boundary solution process, you really wouldn't get to powerlessness because you have the power to, for example, drive your own car, assuming that you have your own car, I'm sure there's probably situations where you might be somewhat at the mercy of that person, but you could just say that I'm not willing to ride it, unless you-- You have only one car. You could say, "I'm not willing to ride in the car with you unless these things happen." And you'd have to figure out if you could do that. But every situation is complex. But the point is that when you do reach a place where you're powerless, it's something that you will need to let go of. And most people find when they reach a point of powerlessness, that it's an invitation to let go, to maybe release something to their higher power or God or however they conceive of a higher power, but like I said, it can be a moment and a point of clarity and also a freedom. All right. So today, we looked at an overview of the five-step boundary solution process for identifying and creating and maintaining healthy, effective boundaries. And in future episodes, I will talk even in more detail about some of the more complex parts of each step, especially when it comes to how what we make up, for example, impacts what we do or how we approach a problem or sometimes even whether or not we say something to another person or make a request or what to do about broken agreements or boundary violations, for example. And until next week, I hope that you will embrace the power you have to create the boundaries you want so that you can get the space you need and the connection you crave. See you next time. Thanks for listening to BeyondBitchie Podcast. Head over to BeyondBitchie.com for show notes, the BeyondBitchie blog, and other resources to help you master the art of boundaries. Until next time, remember, boundaries aren't bitchy.