SETTING BOUNDARIES

You know how sometimes you look around your house and realize that your house is full of homeless orphaned drug addicts and you’ve gone broke paying for your brother-in-law’s best friend’s new car and you’re still feeling sore from donating your kidney to someone you saw on the news? Don’t you hate it when that happens? 

JUST KIDDING!

The paragraph above is a huge exaggeration of something that really does happen to compassionate people. Sometimes, we want so much to help everyone that we drop our personal boundaries very low—so low that our efforts to care for others leave us completely exhausted.

As we roll into spring, we might all remember something Brené Brown found in research on compassion. In one study, she said, researchers found a group of amazingly compassionate people, a group so kind and loving they made Mother Teresa look a little anti-social. 

What other trait did these ultra-compassionate people share?They had very high, very solid personal boundaries.

Most of us don’t get a lot of instruction or support learning to set our boundaries—in fact, most of us are socialized not to. So here are a few hints that might help when you feel “caretaker syndrome” burning your bones...