You get what you tolerate.
As part of recovery, we must set healthy boundaries with anyone who was part of our active addiction. Unfortunately, we often think that setting boundaries is about putting limits on other people’s behavior. For those of us who’ve tried to do that (i.e., all of us), we quickly learned that it doesn’t work. Other people don’t want to be controlled by us any more than we want to be controlled by them. Healthy boundaries are actually about our own behavior, not the behavior of others. Healthy boundaries recognize that the only behavior we can control is our own. If someone is a danger to our addiction and we allow that, it’s our fault, not theirs, so the boundary we set must be about ourselves.
Task for Today
Think of at least one recent occasion where you wish you’d said, “You are not my problem to fix,” and then minded your own business.