Episode 111: How to give away your power

Today I’m going to talk about three important concepts: Emotional Childhood, Manuals and Boundaries.

From our training manual, “Emotional childhood occurs when grown adults have not matured past childhood in terms of managing their emotions. They react to their emotions, act out, or avoid emotions rather than taking full responsibility. In short, emotional childhood is not taking responsibility for how you feel.”

This is a concept we focussed on during certification at TLCS.  Our coach/mentor Brooke Castillo taught that often, the way that we’ve been raised is to believe that our feelings are caused by the external world.

Think of how parents often talk to a child, “did that classmate hurt your feelings? Or did your sissy push you over (even if it was an accident) and make you cry?  Or picture a young child who is hungry, sick, in pain, and so on.  They will cry or maybe act out in some way in order to get something (attention, food, a blanket, a pat on the head w/ an assurance everything will be ok) to change the way they feel because they do not see the source of their feelings as internal.  Everything around them is causing it and they are attempting to change it.

Brooke: “Most of us are still functioning as emotional children.  It’s not something we do on purpose—most of our parents still function as emotional children which perpetuates the cycle. When we are functioning as emotional children, we are blaming other people for how we feel, how we act, and for the results we get in our life.”

Even as we increase our self-awareness and start become more familiar when we are acting in emotional childhood vs leaning into emotional adulthood, it’s not a one and done thing.  It is an on-going process that ebbs and flows.

We do not use this concept to demean or shame ourselves or others.  This can be used as a tool to help us determine when we are acting in our power vs. giving it away, or redirecting it using blame or in a place of self-counterfeit (victim role).

Part of this responsibility is then honoring what you need by placing Boundaries or acknowledging if you are stuck in a Manual of the way things are “supposed to be”or how you think a person should be acting or what they should be saying.

As Brooke puts it, If we can figure out how to be emotional adults, everything changes because most of us are taught, raised and groomed into emotional childhood well into adulthood.

So I mentioned “Manuals” and Boundaries.  Let me take a minute to define these concepts.

According to Brooke, “A MANUAL is an instruction guide we have for someone in our lives about how we would like them to behave so we can feel good and be happy. We generally don’t tell the other person what’s in our manual; we usually don’t even realize we have it or see the pain it causes us.

We’ve created a manual and believe the other person should just “know” what to do and how to treat us.

Brooke makes a very important point, “While it may seem justified to have expectations of other people, it can be very damaging when your emotional happiness is directly tied to their behaving a certain way.”

This is an instruction book that we’ve subconsciously written about and for other people to follow so that we can feel good.  If you are living in emotional childhood, believing that others or external sources are responsible for how you feel, then it follows that you have “written” manuals with expectations placed on external sources of how to behave/what to say so that you can feel good.  A manual —It’s instructions for others, an attempt to control circumstances.  None of this is real; we’ve created it in our brain.  But we live our lives as tho it is due to lack of awareness.

For instance ‘drivers shouldn’t flip other drivers off, people in line at the pharmacy should be polite waiting on their prescriptions, teachers should be patient with students; it’s rude to walk in the exit door and cut someone off; children should be seen and not heard, only believing (whatever that means) members of this congregation should be allowed to participate in xyz event” and so on. 

All beliefs taken from a Manual. 

In relationships, it could sound like “If my kiddo had only gotten a 4.0 they would have gotten into xyz college” or “ the reason I have nothing is because is because my siblings “borrowed” money from my parents (inheritance) and never paid it back—it’s their fault I don’t have more for retirement” and so on. 

Brooke’s example, Rebecca hates her ex-husband and blames him for everything she’s currently struggling with She often says, “If it hadn’t been for him, I would be successful and wealthy” or “He’s the reason I have no money and no happiness” Rebecca has been divorced for twenty years, and she’s still giving this man power
in her emotional life She’s letting her story about him—who he was and who he should have been—cause her to be miserable She has been dedicated to hating him and feeling that hate each and every day for more than twenty years!

So many wasted years. Manuals stem from the belief that we/you would be happier if someone in your life would change.

We’re giving all our power to others when we are living in EC, have created Manuals that we expect them to live by, and have a lack of boundaries.

That brings us to the final concept I want to touch on, BOUNDARIES.

From Brooke: A boundary is something you create for yourself, and it’s used in coaching to achieve life changing results.  It can be mistaken as a way to control other people, but that’s really not the function of a boundary. 

An emotional boundary is very much like a property boundary—it delineates where one person ends and another one starts It’s a way of “drawing a circle” around our behavior and ourselves.

A boundary includes a request you make of someone to change a certain behavior and a consequence of what you will do to self protect if they violate the boundary again.

Because healthy boundaries promote self responsibility and empowerment, they lead to closer relationships with others By contrast, weak boundaries promote enmeshment and emotional childhood behavior, which only distances us from others.

When you do xyz thing, I will excuse myself from the room.

When you arrive home past curfew, I will take the car keys off your hands for two days.

Some boundaries, do not need to be spoken out loud.  Some are just for you, a commitment to yourself of how you will behave when a personal boundary is crossed.

When my boss speaks to me disrespectfully, I will no longer engage in the discussion.  And then you define what disrespectful means to you.

If my spouse speaks to me with a raised voice, I will state, “I will continue this conversation when you lower your decibel level” and then politely excuse myself.

What is coming up for you as you are learning about EC, Manuals and Boundaries.  Maybe you have areas in your life that could use a fresh perspective to bring insight in how to navigate some of your relationships.

I’d love to chat with you.  Bring your thoughts to my First Fridays Free coaching group or schedule a one-on-one 20” call.  If you’d like to go a little deeper, schedule a SToryMapping session.  For a limited time, if you opt to work with me, the amount of your StoryMapping session will be applied to your coaching package. Use the link in the show notes to schedule any of these ways to work with me.

Thx for joining.  Until next time!