Uncovering Pieces of Myself: Setting Emotional Boundaries
Everything starts with self-acceptance.
I wish my readers knew that getting to where I am today didn’t happen overnight. It was a long and winding journey of self-acceptance and learning how to set strong emotional boundaries to navigate what we call life.
Let me take you on a ride!
My self-acceptance journey started over 16 years ago, from the moment I left my parents’ house to go to university. In the beginning, I felt good about myself without knowing why.
It was a year later when I realized that I would need help in figuring out who I am.
Trying therapy
The first time I went to therapy was when I was 19. I was trying to overcome a situation from my adolescence with my family. Psychotherapy didn’t work for me.
The 2nd time I went to a psychotherapist to get to know myself better and realized that the psychotherapist who was following me wasn’t a match for my personality at all. Couldn’t or was unable to understand who I am and what I seek from life. And there my contact with psychotherapy stopped for a while, a long while.
Stopping
I stopped because I got elected President of IAASWorld and moved to Belgium. The two years I was leading the Association on the global level were two of the best years of my life. And sometimes, after the hype and success, come the low points in life; at least in my life.
From October 2013 to May 2014 — my third and last year in Belgium, I withdrew from social and IAAS gatherings, stopped meeting friends or went to university. I ended up leaving my room once per week only to buy food. It was then, that I experienced the need for psychotherapy in my life, and as I couldn’t afford it, I explored other options.
Exploration
My exploration brought me to the Art of Hosting and The Circle Way (two different movements). I started to learn how to host myself first and be able to sit with my feelings in silence and explore them rather than ignore them, and how to host meaningful conversations.
In the beginning, all those definitions of hosting, circle, check-in, check-out, talking stick, the center, open space, world cafe, chaordic stepping stones and more seemed alien to me. But, I was committed to finding out what the heck is happening in my life.
My first battle with depression
Looking back to 2014, when I was in Belgium withdrawing from all kinds of social interaction, I was heavily depressed and didn’t know it. The symptoms were evident however, I was so deep into it I never noticed them. A few of them were:
- withdrawing from social life;
- inability to fall asleep;
- binge-watching series;
- no human interaction whatsoever;
- avoiding friends;
- inability to wake up;
- spending days in bed;
- losing or gaining weight;
- not wanting to meet people.
When people describe depression, they often talk about drowning in blackness. The only thing that kept me from drowning was my love for soft-skills training and in a way it saved me.
What woke me up and took me out of that depressive period, was a specific event that happened in June of 2014. Its title was “Into the journey: Discover your inner self”.
The event that shaped my life
That was the first time in my life that I felt an event calling me. Something inside me was telling me “Go, Lyda, go”. So, I applied to it and went. The event was mostly about group sharing, reflection, being present and at the moment, meditation, and discovering who you truly are.
And there, I came in contact with people from all paths of life, from all around the globe, and in 4 days my life completely changed. I learned many new things, the three most important were:
- Why should I keep a journal, write down my emotions and how they develop; whenever I was feeling stressed, frustrated, angry, extremely happy, in love, empowered, etc. I wrote about it and where in my body these emotions manifest and reflected on it. I learned that it’s not ideal to sit with extreme negative or positive emotions for a longer period.
- Emotionally healthy people have strong emotional boundaries — and that’s been a constant struggle to first comprehend and then learn how to create these emotional boundaries.
- Finding out about my-selves for the first time — As mentioned in a past post “Uncovering pieces of myself: gender identity, sexuality” I found two spirits within me, two me.
Two of Me
So there are Lyda and Linda.
Lyda is the quiet, reflective, sometimes happy, sometimes moody person, an extroverted introvert, playful, an explorer, and more suspicious towards others, the one who people meet when we meet for the first time.
Linda is bossy, flirty, funny, more sexual, sometimes a drama queen, sometimes a clown, ambitious to do things, the rebel, the one who likes rules because you can break them!
Both love many things such as traveling, training, and exploring. They have many things in common and not in common.
The main thing here is that until 2014, I was led to believe by the therapists I saw, that the “darkness in me” as they characterized it needs to be erased. In June of 2014, I got to know my inner self, a self I didn’t know I had, though I needed to understand first to decide if I want to change it.
Getting to know myself
The first step to getting to know myself was keeping a journal and writing about my emotions, thoughts, and situations that were happening in my life that I wanted either to remember or analyze.
The first journal was given to me at that event with a quote about exploring a new path, which I found fitting as I love traveling. In that first journal, I wrote a lot about that event, coming back to Greece, after traveling the globe, staying a whole summer with my parents, moving to Thessaloniki, and living with my sister.
My 2nd battle with depression
A move I hated but didn’t have the financial independence to avoid; I used to call the apartment I stayed with my sister for 3 years in Thessaloniki — my prison. That was another dark period of my life again and became darker around April — May 2017, before it could become lighter, when I got depressed again and my relationship with my sister changed forever.
I spent a whole month inside my house. I was sleeping at 7 am and waking up at 7 pm, binge-watching series, eating junk food, and repeating the sleeping thing. It felt like the blackness had finally swallowed me. I was afraid to get close to my windows at night because I got thoughts of jumping from the balcony.
Luckily, I got over it and this time I realized how important it is to be able to talk to friends, to open up about subjects like depression. And this is the reason why I’ve included these parts in this blog post.
Self-acceptance anyone?
After 2 battles with depression, I finally understood that I need to truly love and accept all of myself for others to love me. In this journey of self-acceptance what helped were:
- reading: E-books and articles
- Writing: doing a Quest through Tracking Wonder. (It’s a quest that takes place throughout December with questions to answer in your journal/post on FB group and read the answers of others).
- Watching: TEDx talks like this one → “The person you really need to marry” by Tracy McMillan
- Joining events: Going to Art of Hosting events happening online or offline.
Myselves are dating!
This TEDx talk (mentioned above) was the one that re-shaped my life and changed my view of self-acceptance. The first time I watched it, I found it interesting and continued with my life. Then, 2 months later, I watched it again and decided I was ready to follow through with it, i.e. to marry myself.
But first, I decided to date myself (dating =being able to sit alone and enjoy the silence, not having someone around to distract me). Lyda and Linda did a lot of things together:
- going to a movie,
- out for a glass of wine or beer,
- eating in a restaurant,
- reading books,
- traveling,
- exercising,
- arguing
- being fully present and at the moment without touching the phone, not even for a single second!
With me, I always carried “my journal” as I was referring to it, and wrote down what we both felt. After two years, it started getting better.
And getting married!
As strange as it sounds, I did marry myself or more specifically Lyda married Linda on 27/3/2017 in a park by the sea in my hometown, found two small pebbles to throw at the sea to symbolize the new beginning, and I wear a ring that reminds me of that day.
Accepting yourself by understanding your emotions
I didn’t know it back then, though without understanding your emotions and learning to sit with them, you can’t understand yourself.
One of the first articles I read about Emotional Intelligence was this one. From there, I continued searching for other articles, TEDx talks, and books on the topic of EI. What helped me a lot was becoming a trainer. As I usually say to the new trainers I mentor, “you need to sort your emotional baggage to be able to connect with others while delivering.” Though, you don’t need to be a trainer to be more emotionally intelligent. You just need to want to self-develop!
Setting strong emotional boundaries
It was after a Training New Trainers event in November 2016 and 2017 that I realized that after 10 days of them, I was emotionally, physically, and mentally drained.
From the moment I started delivering long training events, I remember that something like this was happening a lot, and then depending on the event, the trainers’ team, and my connection to them, it ranged from good to okay to bad. These events in 2016–2017 were the worst for me.
It was the first time in my 5years as a Trainer that I was so drained and subsequently sick for a month! I knew then that I needed to find a solution.
The solution came while I was scrolling on the web, reading articles, when I stumbled upon “The Guide to Strong Relationship Boundaries” by Mark Manson which was eye-opening and mind-blowing. While I was reading it, I felt like I was one of the cases examined by the author, and by the end of it, I decided I am going to learn how to create strong emotional boundaries and utilize them moving forward.
The process I followed was deciding to get real, brutally honest, and get to know myself as deeply as it gets. I went back to all the relationships, romantic and not, training and not, friendships and not, and started examining how they were, how I felt, different moments where I was emotionally blackmailed, guilt-tripped, or felt pretty negative emotions. I wrote down examples where I was always to blame because my partner/friend/fellow trainer didn’t know how to process blame or even accept it.
What I’ve learned
Through this process, I learned a few important lessons such as:
- How to recognize the signs of emotional blackmail
- How to recognize needy people for love, someone to blame, someone to make them feel the center of the universe
- How to say NO and mean it when the 2 above situations appear on my doorstep
- What I lose when I give in situations like 1 and 2
- That I need to care more for myself and not view self-care as an indulgence but more as a discipline. No one will care for me if I don’t!
- A person with strong emotional boundaries understands that they may hurt someone’s feelings sometimes, but ultimately they can’t determine how other people feel.
- A person with strong emotional boundaries understands that a healthy relationship is not controlling someone else’s emotions, but rather each partner supports the other in their growth and path to self-actualization.
An ongoing process
The deeper I get to know myself, the better I become at maintaining the strong emotional boundaries I have set for myself. Setting and maintaining strong emotional boundaries is a work in progress as is everything in life!
