 As a supervisor for Provisional Psychologists, I want to offer a vision of empathy that helps us stay connected with ourselves while also connecting with our counselling clients. One of the best ways to foster both kinds of connection over the long term is to develop and maintain boundaries that feel like a good personal fit. In this post, I offer some questions to help us develop a reflective practice so we can begin rethinking our boundaries in the counselling profession.
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 Note: this post was adapted from a newsletter I wrote in November 2019. I usually call this time period “No Work December”, but since this year I won’t be travelling until February, I'll be working until December 18 before taking a break, as a trade off. While I will still be around Edmonton during that time, my plan is not to check email and instead to focus on rejuvenation. Okay, here it is!
As we go into December, I'm winding down with clients for the year. Some of you may be familiar with my inclination to take the month off client work and engage in a mix of travel, other projects, and rest. I started doing this a number of years ago, mostly at the prompting of my parents, who kept telling me "you work too much!". I wanted to share what this means to me. So, why take an entire month off?  One of my strongest convictions is that the body sends us signals about what does and doesn’t feel good inside. If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll be familiar with my motto of “listen to your body”. However, many of us have been taught to override these signals in order to feel safe and connected with others. In this post, I want to tell you more about experiential psychology and mindfulness, and how I use them in my practice to help people better listen to their bodies to understand their boundaries.
 In my last post, I talked about scarcity as one of two main barriers that usually get in the way of setting and sticking to our own boundaries, in order to respect our needs. Today I want to talk about a second obstacle: guilt.
 Sometimes, we might consciously know what steps we should take to care for ourselves, but still feel like we can’t follow through. It’s not that we’re unaware that going to bed will probably serve us better than staying up all night answering emails. Or that taking a 5-minute break will give us the energy we need to keep going on a project. So, what really gets in the way of respecting our own needs and the boundaries we’ve set?
 One of the biggest sources of emotional resentment is being in a caregiving role and not knowing how to say no when we need to. It’s incredibly important to learn how to set (and stick with!) our boundaries.
 *Originally posted on PsychCentral as an expanded version of an earlier post.
A few months ago I was facing some tension with an acquaintance (caused entirely by his unwillingness to hear my very reasonable “no” to his request), when I caught myself in a dangerous thought. The stress of having tension between us was really getting to me, and I found myself thinking, “maybe I should just compromise after all, to make it easier”.  In my work, two of the biggest themes I talk about a lot are burnout and shame resilience—I even have an online workshop on How to prevent burnout and my most recent one is about Shame Resilience Skills. If you've been following me for a while, you might already know this. What you might not know yet, though, is that there’s an overlap between the two.
 Boundaries are all about being in touch with what our head, heart, and body are telling us, so in this way, it’s not at all about giving other people ultimatums. And at the same time, some of you have probably noticed that when you’re in relationships with other people, what you need on a deep level may come into conflict with what someone else needs on a deep level.
 I work with all sorts of people in all sorts of relationships. I have seen a wide variety of monogamous and non-monogamous relationships, and there doesn’t seem to be one particular boundary that makes for success or failure. Where I have seen it fail is when one or more people are saying “I’m okay with this” while, on a bodily, emotional level, it’s clear they’re not. When you push past your own needs and do what you think you “should” be able to, whether for someone else or for some moral ideal, this leads to a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering.
 I get this question a lot in therapy, in one form or another. "What boundaries am I allowed to set?" might come out as "What is it okay to ask for?" or "Are boundaries selfish?". Really, people are asking, "what should I do?" And here's my answer:
 Note: This article was originally published on "The Anti Hustle Project".
When I first joined Instagram, I came across some ads about growing my social media following and building my list, directing me to "get 10,000 followers now!" The ads usually featured women with a trendy yet relatable vibe, and I’ll admit it – I clicked. Getting 10,000 followers was appealing on some level, and if other women in the helping field were doing it, maybe I could too. I even signed up for a free webinar on growing my list. As a result of that one click, IG started showing me more of those types of ads, some of which I’d pause upon, until before long those were all the ads I saw. And the result? It absolutely made me feel not enough. I felt more anxious and caught up in getting likes than I ever had.  For those of you doing office-based work or work with clients, I know there can be a real tendency to work the whole day through without a break, continue working until the project is done, and be available to answer email or calls at all hours. With a lot of people working from home right now, the boundaries between work and home might feel even more blurry than usual, and it can be tough to turn “off” at the end of the work day. Some people are having a hard time separating from the work, and some people feel guilty when they do.
I had so much fun doing the recent webinars on boundary foundations that I decided to create a 5 minute video on boundaries too. In it I cover how setting boundaries is about listening to your emotional and physical needs, and I talk about finding a way of honoring those needs.  Note: This was originally published in A Liberated Heart in 2018.
Ask almost anyone to name the biggest area we’re taught to put others before ourselves, and the answer will be mothering. It begins with the pressure to become a mother, to do so in a particular timeframe, and then to parent in particular ways that can feel practically impossible to live up to. Women in our culture are expected to give 100% of our time and energy to mothering, and, here’s the crucial part – we’re expected to do all with complete satisfaction and enjoyment, as if it’s our only life purpose.  I think it's so neat that in addition to the amazing local, in-person resources I often share with clients, there's a ton of really cool online offerings these days. From my perspective, these can be a great adjunct to therapy or a standalone resource, depending on what you're looking for. I think these resources look amazing and hope you will too.
 Over the years I’ve worked with a number of people trying to make hard decisions, and these hard decisions usually boil down to this: “should I stay or should I go?” What people struggle with most is knowing whether the situation they’re in (a workplace, a relationship, etc) is one that will get better by working on or not. I watch people struggle for months and sometimes years, caught up in the distress of trying to make a decision that’s best for them.  It’s not uncommon in my therapy office to talk about social media. Specifically, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about wanting to not be on social media but having a hard time stopping. When people bring up the topic of their social media use, it’s usually said with a bit of a guilty look, and can come across as a shrug off comment. “I really shouldn’t be using my phone so much,” they might say in an off-hand way. But, since people are paying me money to notice things, I don’t just shrug it off. Instead, I invite them to talk about it. So many of my clients are finding that they’re on social media more than they actually want to be, and that it’s causing upset in their lives. These are some of the things we’ve been talking about in those conversations.  It’s hard saying no. For a lot of new therapists, we really struggle with the idea of disappointing someone in our care. It can be easy to feel that because our clients need something, we need to be the one to give it to them. I hear new therapists say things like “but they need evening hours – they can’t make it during the normal workday“ or “they need a sliding scale – they can’t afford the full fee”.  As a partner/friend/lover/ally of someone who is working on boundaries, you may be noticing some changes. Like most changes, this can feel pretty scary and you might be unsure or hesitant about what’s happening. That’s why I wanted to write you this letter. I think it’s normal to feel afraid in times of change, especially when the change involves something unfamiliar.
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AuthorNicole Perry is a Registered Psychologist and writer with a private practice in Edmonton. Her approach is collaborative and feminist at its heart. She specializes in healing trauma, building shame resilience, and setting boundaries. About the Blog
This space will provide information, stories, and answers to big questions about some of my favorite topics - boundaries, burnout, trauma, self compassion, and shame resilience - all from a feminist counselling perspective. It's also a space I'm exploring and refining new ideas.
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