Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This...

...Wall

So, I've talked about this subject before. But, I've gotten an opportunity to exercise this area of my discipline regimen recently, so you get a refresher course on:

BOUNDARIES

A wet, sandy, cold, yet truly heartwarming incident happened recently (click here for details). This incident caught the attention of news agencies across the WORLD. This small-town boy and his freshly lassoed significant other found ourselves in the headlines of news articles from social media, network television, radio shows, and everything in between.

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This brings me to our topic, healthy/balanced boundaries and their importance in our recovery/wellness journeys. A lot of us have trauma-induced people-pleasing tendencies present while getting our recovery legs under us. Those of us avoiding the life of being a "dry drunk" heal ourselves past these toxic boundary-ignoring behaviors (in therapy). If you don't address them, you run the risk of creating a personal space bubble of overstimulation, which drags you towards the dark hole in the corner we refer to as relapsing. Affectively giving me the perfect excuse to maintain my self-medicating alcohol use. ...Not good.

"Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means." —Ronald Reagan

So what does one do when the reporters are relentlessly calling, texting, emailing, Facebook messaging, and even calling your place of work? What do you do when your day-to-day life becomes overstimulating? When the stress starts to affect things like parenting, work schedules, or even our moods and sleep time? If you're like me, in the beginning, you just pushed and pushed past your own healthy stress handling capabilities. This dug me deeper and deeper into a sad hole of depression with little grasp of self-care as a concept. (sad hole of depression... not sand hole)

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In my lived experience, you start with the world's most powerful and shortest sentence: No. That's exactly what I did back in my early recovery, day to day when my life gets stressful, and when I'm getting blasted with interview requests by reporters across the planet... fyi, there's more out than I ever imagined 😳 But, when the attention turned into feeling like the walls were closing in, I made the decision to decline all incoming interview requests. Never really watched Fox News anyways...

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And I'm sure this looks like bragging about being news famous, but I'm really trying to draw an analogy. Life's going to get stressful, sober or not, as Agent Smith would say, "It's inevitable". WE call 'em "sober people problems" here at 217 Recovery. There's a level of self-awareness required to keep overstimulation at bay. To keep us away from relapse land and the dreaded "day one".

So, I urge you to chase self-awareness. It's how we identify the need for the "NO" word boundaries I'm talking about. Also, be aware that applying boundaries to your life is going to add the need to protect those boundaries, which is difficult at first. You may feel selfish at also (that goes away if you hold your ground), and you may have to set multiple boundaries with the people benefiting from your previous weak boundaries (hint: they've been taking advantage of you).

I really hope this gets you at least thinking about your boundaries/stress levels. That's the first step in acting on them, and once you start that process, it gets easier over time.

Until next time.