Boundaries in Human Relationships

true confidence is not about never making mistakes: it’s about being able to make a mistake and being confident that you can deal with it and learn.

Even the ancient redwoods change over time. It is your relationship with Time that enables you to perceive and experience yourself as a dynamic, ever-moving, ever-changing process.

Through Time.” This is when you experience yourself as continually changing, as infinitely capable of evolving.

As you mature, your external values and standards get tempered by your inner responses to experiences. They become modified by your feelings and your sense of what’s important, separate from what your friends or parents think is important. Gradually, you form your own unique emotional definition of values that become the standard against which you evaluate yourself, others, and the world.

When you look at someone and you notice how he’s different from you—he’s shorter, fatter, older, younger, more talkative, or any number of different characteristics—you’re establishing separateness, not isolation.

Dr. Milton H. Erickson, psychiatrist and one of the world’s leading practitioners of medical hypnosis and hypnotherapy (1902–1980) maintained that “every experience, no matter how painful, is a potential resource.”

order to learn from your mistakes and failures, you must experience the future as different from your present and your past.

If there are walls between your inner definition of a value and your actual experience of it in the world, and if your definition doesn’t include your emotional responses, then it’s impossible to know when you’re achieving your value rather than the ideaof that value as passed on to you by family or society. When walls are present, you don’t know when you’re smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough, or when enough is enough for you!

With boundaries, Jim will learn that true confidence is not about never making mistakes: it’s about being able to make a mistake and being confident that you can deal with it and learn.

A little boy of 18 months is sitting in his high chair waiting for his dinner. He is hungry, and he starts to holler and bang his spoon. His father gets a little frazzled and hurries to give him his pasta. Now, as an adult, whenever he doesn’t get what he wants when he wants it, he starts to yell and carry on. It’s not very useful behavior in a grown-up man, but it’s become an automatic response.