Why Can't I Just Walk Away

If setting boundaries is hard, listen up.

Setting and keeping firm boundaries with what you don’t want will create the reality that you do want. I think most of us understand this idea, but then why is it sometimes so terribly difficult to say no or walk away from things that don’t serve us?

For those of us who struggle with boundaries, it’s really important to dive deep and understand where this struggle comes from. It really might surprise you!

Personally, I have spent my life priding myself on being a “good” person. My identity was rooted in being kind, generous, and strong. I let other people abuse me and use me because I knew that they were hurting and lost, and because I could take it. I felt that I was showing them true goodness by not setting boundaries. I felt that by being so loving and so good, I would transmute their pain and cause them to also start being good. Sometimes it even worked that way, but mostly it didn’t.

Since I spent my early childhood being totally and utterly neglected, disregarded, and disrespected, this type of treatment felt normal to me. It got to the point where I just expected everyone I met to disrespect me, to take advantage of me, and to treat me badly. It always hurt, but it also felt as normal as breathing. Fundamentally, I just felt unlovable so when people treated me that way, I was drawn to them for seeing what was my deepest felt truth.

When people came into my life who genuinely admired me or treated me well, I often thought they were desperate and pathetic. I was unfamiliar with being loved without drama. I didn’t recognize it, and so I demonized it as an undesirable trait in others.

I was manifesting hell for myself. I was manifesting toxicity, abuse, and misery in all of my relationships. Recently - more recently than I care to admit, I realized that my attempts to be “good” and “kind” are actually repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to get the abuse to stop. I thought I could potentially win my abusers over with my love and so I cycled with this false reality, experiencing abuse over and over again from different hands.

The worse the abuse got, the more I tried to appease my abuser. If I couldn’t appease them, I became fixated on getting them to love me. This developed into limerence or addictive obsession. The most danger I felt, the more obsessed I would become with winning their affection. This repeatedly put me into psychologically and physically dangerous situations. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t set boundaries and just leave! Other people in my life would beg me to walk away, but I just couldn’t.

Finally, (like literally two days ago after still mystifyingly getting physically and emotionally abused) I realized that instead of doubling down in being sweet and loving, I could actually try to solve my fear with another coping mechanism of shutting down or leaving. I recognized that I didn’t actually love my abuser, that I was just obsessed with getting him to love me so that I could feel safe. Once I realized this, I was able to see the other options that were now suddenly (finally) available to me.

The subconscious process finally broke open and I saw it for what it was. It was just fear hiding as goodness. I put a cape of love, patience, and understanding around my rage because those were more acceptable feelings than what was really there. I was suffocating myself and putting myself in harm’s way over and over again because I knew no differently. But I finally saw it clearly, and so the cycle could break.

In the past, setting boundaries had never been accessible to me because being nice to my abuser had worked for my whole life. It kept me alive during extreme neglect and abuse. It was a subconscious pattern that was formed when I was a kid and it was all I ever knew because it was the only option available to me then. It became like concrete in my personality.

Abused children have no escape. They must take responsibility for the abuse and attempt to solve it. Children under the age of 8 don’t have any ability to even see their parents as bad parents, let alone set boundaries with them. For these children, it is simply the reality. So, the onus of the abuse falls onto the victim, and they are raised with a subconscious belief that abuse is normal, that it is their fault, and they also develop subconscious coping mechanisms to try and stop the abuse.

These coping mechanisms usually look like fawning, or appeasing the abuser, or they can look like totally shutting down. Later in life this leads to relationship issues, as they are often anxiously attached with preoccupied, disorganized, or dismissive avoidant attachment styles. Often times, these dysfunctional adults pair up together and relive their trauma over and over in a cycle forever.

Even if your childhood wasn’t “so bad” there’s a good chance that it had an effect on your ability to set boundaries. If you parents never let you make your own decisions, there’s a good chance you don’t trust yourself.

If your parents didn’t stand up for you when bad things happened, there’s a chance you allow bad things to still happen to you.

If your parents neglected you, there’s a chance you neglect yourself. And on and on.

It’s easy to get angry at yourself for not seeing these patterns or being able to fix them, but they are deeply rooted in your pre-memory mind, so they feel as normal as your name, your face, your body.

If you are stuck in a situation with a toxic relationship, with a disrespectful job, with friends who don’t treat you right, or with any kind of dysfunctional behavior pattern like addiction, you are throwing off your electromagnetic energy body with mis-aligned energies. If you’re not happy with every aspect in your life, you CAN set boundaries and walk away.

1. Recognize you can theoretically live without the things that don’t serve you. Acknowledge your discomfort and your fear. It’s ok if you feel like you “can’t.” Start to feel comfortable with the idea that you can. You deserve to be happy - but more importantly, you deserve to feel OK with being happy.

2. Dig deep for the egoic attachment to getting abused. Do you pride yourself on being strong? Do you feel like you’re doing everyone a favor by staying stuck? How are you attaching to this situation?

3. See the patterns. You’re creating them. Take responsibility and go to addiction recovery meetings if they apply. There are addiction recovery groups for codependency, sex and love addition, gambling, over spending, over eating, being a workaholic, and on and on.

4. Develop new coping mechanisms. Instead of leaning into the abuse or addiction - break the pattern and do an opposite or alternative action. Start small.

5. Get to know yourself without the old pattern. Who are you if you’re free from this? What do you really like? What do you really want?

6. Pray and use quantum jumping. I have a PDF called Raise Your Vibration - Get Unstuck NOW that outlines different practices and tools you can use to vibrationally escape any situation.

7. Manifest from your new reality of having these boundaries.

Say NO to things you don’t want and the things you do want will finally be able to come in. All your wishes and dreams are waiting for you to be ready for them. Break these patterns and cycles and be patient with yourself. If it’s deep, like mine, it takes years of patient practice. But listen, the work WORKS.

Stick to it and trust. We are clearing thousands of years of trauma in this lifetime. Celebrate your wins. As you integrate more light into your body, your electromagnetic structure will become aligned. You will become instantaneously magnetic. This is your future reality. Congratulations!