Negotiating Boundaries with Mom
Whether with mom or anyone else, being able to set Life-Serving Boundaries consistently arises from the integration of the following three foundational orientations to self and others:
Honor and self-responsibility with regards to your needs.
Respect and care for the needs of others, while remaining grounded in your choice about how and what you are willing to do.
Making requests, and expressing what you are willing or not willing to do in concrete, specific, and doable terms.
Let's look at how these three orientations play out in an example with mom.
It’s a Friday evening and you have just arrived home from work. You receive a call from your mother. She asks you to come over tomorrow, and spend the afternoon helping her with a project. Feelings of dread and tension begin to fill you. Feelings alert us to what matters to us -- our needs (see the appendix for a list of universal needs). Wanting to honor them and take responsibility for them, you realize you want to identify what matters to you in this situation.
“Mom,” you say, “Let me call you back. I need to unwind from work before making plans for tomorrow. I will call you back and let you know before the end of the night.”
You immediately set a boundary by deciding not to answer the question immediately. After you unwind and eat dinner, you continue to reflect on the situation. You first identify your thoughts, feelings, and needs. You also consider other aspects of the situation. Your mother is terminally ill. Your thoughts about how you think you should behave with her trigger guilt. You remind yourself that you don't want to connect with your mom simply out of guilt, or a sense of obligation. So you ask yourself what’s keeping you from easily saying "yes" to her request? In other words, what needs are you wanting to take care of or meet instead of contribution.
The more you reflect, the more you begin to honor your own needs. You have worked a full week, and you need a break. You’d planned Saturday to be a day of rest, play, and peace. When you think of meeting these needs, a sense of lightness and relief wash over you. You realize that if you meet these needs before helping your mom, you will be able to choose from a place of generosity to help her with her project.
By not falsely placing your needs and your mom's needs in competition, you can consider her needs with care and respect. When you include the needs that are up for you as well as those up for her, you can show care and respect to both of you and to the relationship between you. Knowing that you are looking out for your own needs can create the security that allows you to attend to hers as well. If you thought that only her needs, or only your needs, could be addressed, you might feel a sense of constriction. Holding everyone's needs with care can lead to a more relaxed and generous approach.
As you feel into your needs for rest, play, and peace, you get a sense of what you would like to do to nourish those needs. When you get specific with your own self-care it becomes easy to enter into negotiation with your mom. Before calling your mom you look at your calendar and choose some times in which you can easily attend to the needs for support and companionship behind your mother's request. When you get on the call you immediately start the negotiation with your specific and doable request. It might sound something like this:
“Mom, for most of the weekend I need to rest and rejuvenate from my work week. I believe I will have my energy back by late Sunday afternoon. I could come over at 3:00 and then we could have dinner together. I would want to head home by 8:00. Does that work for you?”
When you propose a plan or request that is specific and doable it naturally sets boundaries and potentially invites negotiation within those boundaries. Notice how the sample proposal to mom focuses on what you are saying yes to. This moves the conversation forward into what’s possible. In contrast, expressing a request in terms of what you don't want to do moves the negotiation into abstract ideas about what one should or shouldn't do, a false competition of needs, or a stalemate.
Life-Serving Boundaries is the eighth Relationship Competency in Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD). As with all of the 12 Relationship Competencies in MCD, Life-Serving Boundaries identifies six concrete skills for you to learn and practice. As you dive into this work with boundaries, these skills can give you a place to come back to again and again. Learn more about Life-serving boundaries in our eight week course.
Practice
Choose a relationship or situation in which you find yourself saying yes when you want to say no, and no when you want to say yes. Use the elements above to help you get to the clarity you need to make decisions that use your energy in a way that truly serves life.