Boundaries Give Us Freedom to Be Our True Selves

Oscar Wilde said it perfectly: “be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” We were created by God to be ourselves: The unique individuals that God empowered with a specific purpose for the betterment of our generation on this earth. So “rejoice” in who you are by choosing to see yourself in a favorable light, by retaining the personal power God blessed you with at birth and by using that power to bless humanity.

No one can take our personal power away from us. Even our parents weren’t able to do so when we were children. We freely chose to give our personal power away to Mom and Dad because we believed they had to be right and we had to be wrong. As disempowered children, we developed victim mentalities that caused us to give our power away to most everyone. As a result, we never learned to build good boundaries. When other children bullied us, we ran instead of standing our ground; when people insulted us, we took it on the chin while we quietly died inside ourselves; and when we became desperate for love, we learned to completely give ourselves away in order to please others.

That was yesterday. That was the bad old days when we made almost anyone the hero of our lives. Today we are learning to be our own heroes. Building boundaries helps us to become the heroes of our own stories. Boundaries give us our personal power back because they place demands on others. These demands force others to see that we do count in this world and that we will not be treated with anything less than proper respect. Yes. Boundaries demand respect. Boundaries also inform people what we want and need in our relationships. They tell others what we will accept as well as what we will not accept from them.

Likewise our boundaries command mutual respect. We now use them to honor the dignity of others and as guidelines to honor what other people find acceptable and unacceptable from us. We also use our boundaries to separate our problems and concerns from those of others. Boundaries help us to understand what we are responsible for and what we are not responsible for (i.e. other people’s lives and problems).

Best of all, boundaries help us to respect ourselves better. They are the result of a renewed sense of self-love and self-acceptance. They free us from our fears and allow us to become the persons that God always intended us to be. They transform us from lifeless depressed doormats into life-loving productive members of society.

Charlotte Vale, heroine of the film Now Voyager, is a perfect example and great role model for us. She, with the help of God and others, transformed herself from being a powerless victim of her overbearing mother into being a productive force for good in the world.

Charlotte nursed her poor self-love, and with the love of others, learned to build boundaries to protect herself from her mother. She took back her power to be her own person: to wear what she wanted; to read what she wanted; and to socialize with people she wanted. She set boundaries that earned her mother’s respect. She then learned to use her personal power to assist others in reclaiming their own personal power. So let’s refer to her as St. Charlotte, Patron of the Disempowered!

God, we thank you for the new boundaries and personal empowerment you have blessed us with today; and we rejoice! Amen.