(Reminder – One reason I began with examples from childhood was to remind us that we already have some foundation for creating inner peace.)

What are some of examples from your own life of where you have learned to avoid being manipulated and to strengthen your boundaries?

My mother tried to inflict her fears on me, tried to make me responsible for how she felt, tried to make me feel guilty in order to manipulate me. She probably wasn’t so much conscious of this. She just worried a lot about things I felt were pretty silly, like being afraid of dogs. And her mother had instilled a lot of fears in her that she had readily accepted. I refused to live according to her fears and learned not to inflict my own fears on other people. It took me until high school, but I also learned not to let her inflict guilt on me for supposedly creating her feelings. Again, this probably wasn’t her conscious intent, but it’s how it came across to me and how I reacted. It came full circle when I was 45 and she was 85 and she wanted to live up a flight of stairs. I didn’t let the concerns of my brother and sister for her safety limit where she could live. I trusted her to know the capabilities of her own body and make her own decisions. It goes back to people being responsible for their own stuff, their own thoughts, beliefs and feelings. This goes right along with being responsible for our own actions. Also, setting and knowing our own boundaries. But not being so rigid with them that we behave like porcupines to other people. We can quietly maintain our boundaries without having to get in people’s faces about it. Even now, there our times I yell at my brother when he steps on one of my invisible boundaries and it simply doesn’t need to be handled that way.