Tag Archives: healthy boundaries

Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys.

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A friend of mine posted this image on Facebook:
CircusMonkeys

It made my day. Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys. It is witty, and profound, and incredibly useful. There are days it is my mantra.

We have all had that friend at some point in our lives whose attraction to drama is matched only by their ability to suck you into it. After a phone call or a cup of coffee with them you find yourself worked up, drawn into their catastrophizing and anxiety. It may feel at first that you are just being a good friend, but after a while, it becomes apparent that you have been pulled into their special brand of crazy.

In moments like these- these six words are incredibly powerful: Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys. Knowing when to step back is vital. It is part of the maintenance of healthy boundaries- in friendships, in family and at work.

Let’s be clear, we all have days when we, or our own monkeys, are running the circus. Yes- it’s possible to attempt management of your circus and someone else’s, but it may not be advisable. And just as we do not want to get sucked into someone else’s circus, it’s important not to draw other people into our own.

The truth is that good friends are the ones who are able to empathize, but are also able to offer a perspective from outside of the circus. With compassion and kindness these friends are able to calm us down.

So when you feel yourself getting drawn in and spinning about someone else’s problems, remember: Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys.

Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys. Say it over and over until you are calmer. With this attitude, your own circus may even seem more manageable.

 

Six Ways to Know You are with the Right Person

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Love is in the air- or so all the commercials tell us.  Retailers sell us love and Hollywood and music sell us an image of what love should look like.  Not surprisingly, giant corporations might not be the best place for advice on our love lives.  So, if the flowers, the chocolates, and the diamonds are not the ideal way to tell if we are with the correct person, what is?  I offer six components to finding the “right” person (with the obvious stipulation that love comes in as many forms as there are people in the world.)

  1. The right person is the one you have fun with out on the town and at home on the couch. Valentine’s Day is all about going out and having an expensive night on the town. Commercials and popular culture tell us that romance and love are about excitement and glamor.  But long term intimate relationships may involve a lot of time just snuggling up at home.  You should be able to spend time with your partner wherever you find yourselves.
  2. The right person is the one, not without whom you could not live, but who has given you the strength to handle anything- including their absence. So often we think of love as the feeling that you could not go on without the other person.  There certainly is that kind of love.  But that love is not sustainable long term.  That kind of love consumes you as certainly as fire consumes kindling- hot, but depleting.  Lasting love is about a person who helps you find your own strength. You would, of course, prefer to be with your partner, but you know that you are stronger for having known them.  Their gift to you is a love that strengthens you as an individual as opposed to one that diminishes you.
  3. The right person is not only the one who holds your hand in public, but holds your head when you are throwing up. Romantic walks on the beach or holding hands at sunset are beautiful things. They are memories that you will treasure.  But life is composed of terrible times as well.  You will inevitably feel sick or weak (emotionally or physically.)  It is in those moments that you see the strength of your relationship. Is this person going to be there when times are tough as well as when you are flying high? The person who puts a cold cloth on your forehead when you are sick is probably going be able to handle life’s ups and downs.
  4. The right person is the one who is not afraid of your growth, but encourages your growth and grows along with you. If you are lucky enough to be in a long term relationship with another person, you will find that over time life changes you. This change, hopefully in the form of personal growth, is almost inevitable.  Couples “grow apart” all the time.  The right person is committed to helping you become the best version of yourself.  With any luck that person will grow along with you, increasing your compatibility.  It is not a sure thing- but it beats resenting the other person for their personal evolution.
  5. The right person is the one who knows all your deepest secrets and would never use them against you. If you trust your partner, you should be able to tell them your secrets and fears.  Moreover, intimacy means learning the good as well as the not so stellar qualities of your partner.  Being intimate with another person is about vulnerability and therefore, must also be about safety.  You need to know on some level that your partner will not use your weaknesses against you.
  6. The right person is the one who makes you laugh. They say that laughter is the best medicine.  It’s true.  Sometimes life is so absurd, or even so heartbreaking, that laughter is the only thing that will get you through.  The right person is the one who can make you laugh when you are happy, stressed or down. The right person can help you laugh at yourself and is open to being laughed at as well. Laughter doesn’t make hard times go away, but it can make those times bearable.

So, this Valentine’s Day, ask yourself if the person with whom you are sitting is the right person for you.  If they are, you are truly blessed. If they are not, it’s time for a change- either within the relationship, or moving on.

The Storms of Life

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As another winter storm bears down on New England, I engage in my pre-storm ritual: obsessively reading weather reports and blogs.  I love weather.  I love storm watching. I feel (despite much evidence to the contrary) that if I read everything I will know what the future holds. I will be able to predict what will happen and where. I will be prepared.

Of course, I am not. Meteorology may be a science but it is clearly not an exact one. Every storm teaches me that the future is unknowable, and therefore uncontrollable. My constant reading aside, the weather will do what it plans to do. Rain/snow lines will shift, low pressure systems will unexpectedly move in and my day will be affected in ways I hadn’t planned.

In short, the weather is just another area of my life over which I have very little control. The career I planned in my twenties is very different than the one I have now. The marriage I imagined as a child bears little resemblance to the one in which I happily find myself. The beautiful children I have today are very different than the ones I daydreamed about as I held my hand over my swollen belly all those years ago. What happened? Life.

All the preparation in the world, all the good advice, all the self-help and parenting books, could not prepare me for the ways that life intervened. I could not have predicted the ways that love, economics, ambition, violence and illness would affect the trajectory of my life.  All the reading and planning could not have prepared me for the ways in which life would alter and change me- shifting priorities, values and beliefs.

Control is an illusion.What mattered more along the way was knowing myself and being open to learning more.When life challenged me, my willingness to adjust, go with the flow and when needed, set limits, allowed me to grow as a person- to not only survive, but thrive.

We focus a lot in our society on being prepared. And preparation is important. Too often though, we focus on the wrong kind of preparation. We prepare for life’s storms never realizing that forecasts change and that the storm we prepared for is seldom the storm that arrives. We cling to dogma and ideas about the way things should be instead of looking within to build strength to find our own truths.

What I have learned is that flexibility and humility are my lifelines; knowing what I can and cannot control and learning to ask for help when I am tossed in the waves of life’s hurricanes.

I suppose that I like to watch storms because it provides me with an illusion of control. But I know now it is an illusion. I know that I can no more control the storms of my life than the storms in the Gulf Stream. But with the weather I can pretend. So, today I’ll buy the loaf of bread and the gallon of milk and enjoy watching the storm, if and when it hits.

The Pros and Cons of the Curated Life

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As a Communication professor, I often give my students an assignment that they have dubbed the “cyber stalking” assignment.  I ask them to choose a friend and find out as much as they can about that individual online.  I tell them to use a critical eye, as if they were a future employer.  What do they see? What are the implications of every photo, every comment, every update?  All of it communicates something about the individual.

After this assignment, my students are invariably shocked at the picture that has emerged and I then urge them to scrub their own digital presence (no more photos holding red plastic cups!).  I explain that the internet has become a log of our lives, an addendum to every cover letter and resume we send out, an attachment to every performance review at work.  I stress the importance of curating your online presence.

But lately I have begun to see the downside of a curated life.  All those students and friends who have taken to heart such warnings now present themselves well online.  They post beautifully constructed facades of vacations, achievements, happy accomplished children and the results are, well, isolating.

For many of us with friends scattered around the country and the world, social networking sites (and even the holiday newsletter) are the primary way that we learn about each other’s lives.  But what we learn from the curated life is only half the story.

The child who starred in the dance recital or won MVP in little league or came in first at the spelling bee, also has meltdowns over homework, suffers from anxiety attacks, talks back and slams doors, is bullied or is a bully. The friend with the great promotion works 80 hour weeks and hasn’t seen her friends or spouse for dinner in 6 months.  The college friend who always looks so cheerful in her photos is deeply depressed over losing her job, but is too ashamed to post it.   But to read the updates you would never know.

The result of this is that it makes it harder for everyone to talk honestly about the meltdowns, anxiety attacks, conflicts, bullying, the challenges of working, living, and parenting.  The result is that we are all left alone to cope.  Coping is especially hard when we believe we are the only ones.

The curated life turns each of us into our own PR agents.  We may look great on the screen, but the process leaves us little room to be real.

The answer may not be to stop curating, but to pick up the phone, or better yet, meet in person.  Call a friend and tell them what’s really going on.  When you are with others, be real about what is going on in your home.  More often than not, the other person will feel relieved and open up about their challenges as well.

Time Sanctuaries

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Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish philosopher and teacher, once spoke about the Sabbath as a sanctuary in time. Though not a devout Jew, I often think of his words. It is difficult to create sanctuaries in time these days because time is in such short supply. Making time requires setting limits and, as any parent knows, that is often hard to do. We are wired, our work is wired, and even our children are wired. In our era of constant connectivity, of time measured in the nanosecond and new and improved ways of breaking boundaries, we are increasingly poor at creating them.

And boundaries are important. The ability to set healthy boundaries in personal relationships allows us to know where “You” end and “I” begin, and only with that knowledge can we hope to build an “Us.” The ability to set healthy boundaries at work allows us to differentiate the office from the home- something too many of us with our smartphones on the dinner table seem to have forgotten. The ability to set boundaries in public life creates civility and the ability to self-govern.

We must erect such boundaries so that we can build our own sanctuaries in time. We need sanctuaries in time; spaces within our lives that are not overscheduled, over stimulated, drowned out by the sound of iPods, talk radio, or cluttered with twitter, Facebook or the latest social network site.

For Rabbi Heschel, the Sabbath, one of Judaism’s most sacred sanctuaries in time, was about contemplating the holy. For me, sanctuaries in time have come to be about regaining contact with what it means to be human in an increasingly computerized world. For me, sanctuaries in time are deeply connected to family.

Like any edifice of worth, my sanctuary is being built slowly. I have to fight the urge to check my phone every two minutes for an update. I have learned to sit quietly for a little while each day. I have fought against my children’s desires to be online all the time, informing them that there are hours during the day when all electronics must be off. But as I enforce the screen time rule in my house, and make the dinner table a place where technology is not welcome, we are setting up a boundary around our family. We are finding space to relate to each other as humans and we are learning to enjoy each other. My family and I are erecting something profoundly human and perhaps as close to the divine in this world as we are going to get- a Sanctuary of Together Time.