Boundaries, Negative People, Chocolate

February 14, 2008

On Moms Morning Show last week, we talked about being positive in life and business. And more specifically, we discussed setting limits with negative (even toxic) people.

The discussion first centered about a book called the 5 Love Languages. If you haven’t read this already, it’s a must read. I consider it one of those have to books. It can teach you so much about relationships and the information applies to family, friends, marriage, and parenting.

There were a lot of things I wanted to say on this show, but I kept myself muted out because I had a lot of background noise going on. For one, ladies talked about how they managed with people they were in relationship with who were extremely negative… beyond simply annoyingly so, even toxic kind of people. For some, setting limits on how much access they allowed that other person to have to them was a coping mechanism. For others, cutting off the relationship entirely was necessary for their own emotional safety.

I had a thought that with some people (for instance close relatives or even a mate), cutting off the person entirely from yourself may not be possible or desirable. But you can set an invisible boundary inside yourself. When I’m with a person like that, I envision myself with a force field around me. I know it sounds corny, but it works for me. It allows me to disengage emotionally and not get sucked in.

But in order to do this, you must have done some boundary work first. AND you must also have the safety of loving relationships. If you can’t disengage from someone’s toxic personality, it may be because you don’t have a safety net.

Moms Talk Radio

Posted by carrie | Filed Under Blogging, Misc 

More Posts By Carrie:

Comments

One Response to “Boundaries, Negative People, Chocolate”

  1. carrie on February 14th, 2008 7:25 am

    Carrie,

    I hope you’ll stop by my blog soon to meet other bloggers named Carrie! http://watibg.blogspot.com/2008/02/carried-away.html

Got something to say?