Many people – myself included for a long time – allow things into their life that they really don’t want there, and find that people often take advantage of them, treat them in disrespectful and inappropriate ways, and disregard their needs. Conflict inevitably results, whether it is internal conflict within the person being treated in these ways because they don’t know how to make it stop, or because when they try to instigate a change in that dynamic they’re met with harsh resistance and drama from the other person or people in that dynamic. This happens to both men and women.

Episode #20 of this podcast was titled “Your Boundaries Create Your Reality”. In that episode, I spoke about the power of defining, articulating, and enforcing our boundaries as an important tool in conflict prevention. If, after listening to today’s episode, you are wondering if there are boundaries you need to set in your life and how to do that, you may find it useful to go back and listen to Episode #20 to get some ideas for that.

After that episode, I received several letters from listeners. One of them was a woman in California who had never heard of the concept of personal boundaries and recognized that much of the great unhappiness in her life was because, in the absence of boundaries, she let other people rule her life. Over the little more than a year since, I have heard from her several times, and today, with her permission, I’d like to share some of our exchanges with you. I think we can all see something of ourselves, or people close to us, in the situations she has experienced that involved her boundaries, or the lack thereof.