The Guide to Strong Boundaries

• you feel like people take advantage of you or use your emotions for their own gain.
• you feel like you’re constantly having to “save” people close to you and fix their problems all the time.
• you find yourself sucked into pointless fighting or debating regularly.
• you find yourself more invested in a person than you should.
• you tell people how much you hate drama but seem to always be stuck in the middle of it.
• you spend a lot of time defending yourself for things you believe aren’t your fault.

Having healthy personal boundaries means taking responsibility for your own actions and emotions, while NOT blaming others.

People with high self-esteem have strong personal boundaries. And practicing strong personal boundaries is one way to build self-esteem.

People who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as a victim, eventually someone will come to save them.

People who take the blame for other people’s emotions and actions are always looking to save someone.

Predictably, these two types of people are drawn strongly to one another, yet completely fail to meet each other's true need to feel loved. The real solution would be for both to take responsibility for their own problems.

Victims and savers both get kind of an emotional high off one another.

• For the victim, the hardest thing to do in the world is to hold themselves accountable for their feelings and their life.
• For the saver, the hardest thing to do in the world is to stop fixing other people’s problems and trying to force them to be happy and satisfied.

Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for the people you love.

The catch is that if you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing it.