Healthy personal boundaries help you to gain access to your authentic self.

They support you with
• clear limits for how you choose to allow other people to act in your presence
• connection to your personal values
• essential building blocks for fulfilling relationships and nurturing self care habits.

Establishing and strengthening your personal boundaries, involve more than gathering the courage to say “no” to invitations and behaviours of others that do not serve you.

It is not simple, nor easy, to make sense of your own needs when you have ADHD. ADDers very often have to overcome the pernicious belief that they are worthless, due to expanded negative experiences with regards to other people’s remarks, observations and behaviours, as well as the lifelong struggle with their own perceived “failures” and accompanying tiresome need for others’ approval.

People with ADHD are oftentimes disconnected to their own emotions and how it manifests energetically in their bodies. Being unaware of and unable to speak about one’s own emotions, usually also refer to having weak personal boundaries and a lacking ability to set them.

If you learn to honour your emotions through awareness of its manifesting energy in your body, they can become your truthful inner guidance system by helping you to realise what you experience and that you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect by others AND firstly by yourself.

One effect of having weak, collapsed or nonexistent personal boundaries, is that you will most likely keep on creating situations in an unconscious way in which you attract people who’d like to control you and who you actually grant permission to for making you feel miserable.

Most important is to become aware of your own inner experience. Only then will you be able to learn the skill of  communicating your feelings and how another’s behaviour is affecting you in an empowering way. In this way you’ll grant yourself the gift of a magnificent transformational tool.

The rewards for taking a firm stand for what you know is most important to yourself, based on your personal values, will outweigh the scary, uncomfortable parts by far. With practice, it will become easier and second nature to take responsibility for creating positive experiences for your self.

Our boundaries will always be tested, so it is worth the effort to take special care in building and keeping quality boundaries which will nurture yourself within a quiet and grounded energy.

FINE TUNE YOUR INNER AWARENESS:

(Writing your experience and discoveries down in a  journal is of great support to ADDers)
To help you identify situations where you may need to strengthen your boundaries or your experience of self worth, here are some questions to explore:

• What don’t you want for yourself? Check what your main complaints are about.
• Where do you feel less than yourself?
• Notice your physical response to someone’s statement or behaviour (e.g. wanting to cry, an energy drop, muscles knotting up, feeling a fist in your guts, etc.)
• Explore what you experience inside yourself. What do you ignore? Do you feel scared, intimidated, rejected, angry, etc.?)
• Which of your habits contribute to feelings of wanting to run away and hide? Of picking a fight?
• Who’s opinion do you need to catch before it hit you in order to allow yourself the ablity to choose your response?
• Where do you allow other people’s “stuff” to perpetuate negative experiences for yourself?
• Distinct between what you are saying to yourself versus what is being said to you. How are you attacking yourself from the inside through self sabotaging thoughts and self talk?
• Thoughts are not facts. Which thoughts have you assumed to be true?
• Who do you try to please?
• Where do you find needy and disrespectful people in your life?
• Which conflict are you trying to avoid at all costs?
• What are you tolerating?
• Unmet needs run us in a negative fashion. Name your unmet needs.
• Which of those unmet needs are you ready to get met? What would be the value to you of having those needs fully satisfied?
• What expectations are you placing on yourself? How is that serving you?
• Where do you need to clarify others’ expectations of you?
• Where do you need to clarify to others what you expect of them?
• Where does it feel you need more personal space or power?
• What is your gut telling you?
• Finish this sentence with multiple responses:
In order to protect my time and energy, it’s okay to ….