I had a busy day today and had not had the opportunity to write my Wednesday’s Well-being Blog, despite being full of ideas about what I could write, given that our well-being has the capacity to embrace whatever is relevant and important to us as individuals. I sat in the garden with my beautiful 15yr old daughter (my baby) at 6pm thinking “I’ll just have 5 minutes relaxing and then I’ll go inside and write my blog”. FIVE HOURS later we wrapped it up and came inside. The relationship mattered and the time we spent together listening to music, chatting and eating chips mattered, because relationships REALLY matter!

I LOVE that quote! Simply because we so often don’t see the potential that we have and we need relationships with others, young and old, to help us to realise our potential. We also often have the relationships with people that we ourselves have “allowed” to happen. We can often kick & scream on the inside because of the way people treat us, We wish they would consider our feelings! We wish they would be kinder and nicer to us, because let’s face it, we’ve always been nice to them, but yet they still treat us badly, right? It’s soul destroying and really affects our well-being in a detrimental way. We try all that we can to be kind and considerate to them, dropping HUGE hints, in the hope that they’ll notice it BUT THEY NEVER DO!!! Right? We don’t like confrontation and we are praying that they’ll suddenly see their lack of consideration and change their ways. But then they don’t, so what do you do?

You have to put in healthy boundaries. Now in an ideal world you wouldn’t need to do that, and with a lot of your family and friends you, thankfully, don’t have to. But with some people you do and that’s difficult but necessary. Some people live their lives violating other peoples boundaries and have no awareness that they’re doing that and usually leave a trail of broken relationships behind them. The narrative they may carry is that people are always mistreating THEM and they cannot understand what’s wrong with everyone else. Unaware that they themselves are causing the problem. Most people know people like this and they can cause a lot of heart ache and confusion.

Relationships are important and have a huge impact on our well-being, so it’s important that we decide HOW we choose to be treated and have healthy boundaries. As I’ve mentioned before we often have the kind of relationships that we allow to develop and that can often be a difficult truth to digest. It can make us feel weak. Life is a journey and we are always growing and developing on our journey so just because you may have felt unable to manage a difficult relationship in the past it doesn’t mean it ALWAYS has to be that way.

Take some time today to reflect on your relationships and some of the challenges you may face and decide TODAY how you want that relationship to be. To be stronger doesn’t mean you have to be mean or aggressive. Sometimes people can get assertiveness mixed up with aggression and feel that to address the balance they have to be really HARD!!! Not so! You can be assertive and stand up for yourself by being gentle and kind. But be prepared ~ if you have a difficult relationship and you are needing to put in healthy boundaries for your well-being then sometimes people can react badly at first. They may:

• Go absolutely crazy and get really angry with you.
• Go really quiet and moody and freeze you out.
• Leave you completely because they can’t cope with this new you.
• See the light and change their behaviour because they value your relationship.

People who appear to live boundary-less lives and cause all manner of confusion and potential harm to others have usually had a very challenging childhood and not had safe boundaries put in in their own lives so they don’t actually intend to be a pain in the butt, they just don’t realise they are being and often times lack the self awareness until someone has the courage and frankly the kindness to let them know. Don’t worry if when you put in healthy boundaries people end up leaving as you are an important aspect of their journey and they need that more than you realise. Just BE KIND and STAND FIRM in love and they, and you, will come through this either together or apart. Remember some relationships are only there for a season, and that’s ok.

I hope you give some love and kindness away this week, just because you can, and I’ll see you next week! Love & blessings, Sam xx