Boundaries: Say No Without Guilt, Have Better Relationships, Boost Your Self-Esteem, Stop People-Pleasing

There are multiple doors leading off the hallway. Each one has a name plate on. They say: Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Safari, BBC News, Music, Games and Pinterest.

Walk down the hallway: you’ll notice that different sounds/smells exist behind each door. Perhaps there is the clatter of typewriters and the smell of coffee from behind ‘e-mail’; ‘Facebook’ may be the front for the giggles and guffaws of friends; from behind the ‘Twitter’ door you can hear whispers and arguments; ‘Instagram’ is shielding the smell of fresh grass and you see camera flashes under the door.

Which doors are you drawn to? And which doors do you need to enter? For example, you might need to enter the e-mail door as you are waiting for confirmation of an appointment. But as you walk towards the e-mail door, you hear the giggles from behind the Facebook door. You may say to yourself, ‘I’ll just pop through the Facebook door for a minute,’ but once in you find it hard to leave. By the time you extract yourself and head back to e-mail, 30 minutes has passed. Do you head into e-mail now, or check the News instead?

Take a moment to consider. If there was a webcam that filmed the inside of your Wi-Fi House and your behaviour, what would you see? How often are you dashing in and out of the various doors? How much time are you in e-mail, compared to the other, more recreational rooms? If you speeded up the film, would it look like a comedy, with you constantly dashing in and out of rooms with no apparent logic or control? Now, leave the hallway and the house.

Have you noticed there are no bedrooms in the Wi-Fi House. Why do you think that is?

And how would you feel if you lost the key to the Wi-Fi House? (We’ll talk about how to master your key below.)

Note down your observations in your Learning Journal.

The Wi-Fi House masquerades as a ‘home’ because you may feel you are connected to others, but you are actually alone. Of course, there is some value in the connections you make and what you learn, and there is no harm in being entertained – as long as you remember you are in control of your Wi-Fi House, not the other way around.

FOMO

FOMO – or ‘fear of missing out’ – might be something you associate with teenagers who can’t bear to miss a party or a conversation but FOMO is at the root of many problems with online overuse. When you have experienced connectivity on this global scale – joining in hundreds of conversations via social media – it is inevitably quite difficult to extract yourself. It’s all just so exciting and new, like a modern child in an old-fashioned sweet shop. Perhaps our evolutionary genes are also coming into play: our ancestors knew how vital it was to collect knowledge as a way of staying safe. Maybe we are instinctively doing the same – on a grander scale.

BRING IN THE BOUNDARIES:

Your Online Plan

Here’s how to start managing the e-mails in your inbox, your social media and its allure, staying safe online and, most crucially of all, mastering the key to your Wi-Fi House.

E-mail protocol

We talked in the introduction about Victoria’s e-mail exchange, which was hugely improved by the introduction of self-boundaries.

Let’s take a moment and reflect back on the body of Victoria’s first draft e-mail:

‘I am so sorry to say that I feel I cannot help with your plans towards putting on this event. I am really busy with work and childcare at the moment, so am finding it hard to make time. Obviously, I will still do what I can to be useful and don’t forget to ask me to invite those people we mentioned, but I think that will have to be my input for now. Do call if I can do anything else.’

After reading it, Jennie says she pictured Victoria and the other person standing on either side of a large lobby in a railway station – in between them are lots of different-shaped bags. When one looks closer at the bags, they all have different labels. These read, variously: ‘I am sorry’, ‘Help me’, ‘Watch me, I’m juggling’, ‘Look how busy I am’, ‘Don’t forget, actually I am still helping you’ and ‘No, really, I will help you’. But there is also one very small packet over on the lost property desk, labelled ‘I can’t do this’.