Hi there, welcome to the Mathias J. Parker Podcast. My name is Mathias and I'm a psychotherapist here in Spokane, Washington.

And this is a podcast about mental health and moving towards what matters, even despite hardship.

And today we're talking about boundaries,

we're talking about how to create meaningful and well-connected relationships

with other people that are reciprocally beneficial, that are reciprocally enriching, and maybe how to

spot and then how to address some of those spaces within our relationships where I feel like

that we don't know how to navigate, that we don't know how to make better, like we don't know how to navigate that we don't know how to make better

that we don't know how to still interact and still be close to this person with the

presence of this painful or frustrating dynamic and so that is what we're talking

about today.

Next week we have a pretty exciting guest and I'm pretty pumped for it.

So be, make sure, make sure, make sure it'll be on the lookout for conversation with, should I tell you?

No, I'll just surprise you.

All right, let's get to the episode. So today we're talking about boundaries and I kind of used to hate the conversation

around boundaries because I didn't really understand what they were and they seemed just kind of like these

self-congratulatory ways of being rude to people like that was my perception of them like every time I've seen someone like I'm setting a boundary. It was just them being rude and like demanding that the other person do with the way they saw fit and it was like manipulative and just like I don't know really off-putting and so I to be honest with you I didn't really give much mind to any discussion like around boundaries or even as it presented in psychological literature just kind of

avoided it all together because I didn't really see the utility in it it just seems

like a way of being rude but lo and behold I found this book by Cloud and Townsend, yeah, on boundaries.

And it totally changed my perspective.

Like, it was pretty wild.

So it's written from a Christian perspective,

which was meaningful to me, being Christian.

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