endorphasMIC
Join Erica each week as she delves deep into all things wellness, fitness, nutrition, entertainment, entrepreneurship, and spirituality. These intimate, deep, and often intense conversations go beyond the traditional podcast. They are designed to provoke, educate, inspire, and empower you to discover, uncover, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self.
To live. To feel alive. Because I can. Because I’m human. Because my humanity demands it! Movement. We weren’t wired this way by accident. Our physical and mental health is by design, dependent on movement. We are designed to feel good when we move because survival depends on movement. This was an obvious truth when hunting, gathering, and farming; our existence depended on our ability and desire to do survival tasks, so our bodies are chemically and hormonally designed to make us feel good when doing them. It is a much less obvious truth in modern society, but no less relevant. The endorphasm is the moment during movement you feel anything is possible. Clarity. This podcast is the exploration of movement as the foundation for a productive, fulfilling, rewarding, most excellent life.
endorphasMIC
Setting Boundaries and Adjusting Expectations for Healthier Relationships
Can holding onto unrealistic hopes trap you in emotional exhaustion? In this episode of Endorphasmic, Erica Porter navigates the complex terrain of adjusting expectations and setting boundaries in relationships. Discover the true cost of clinging to false hope and learn strategies to assess others' willingness to change. Erica discusses the importance of grieving idealized versions of relationships to move forward, highlighting the dual paths of setting boundaries to protect well-being or practicing radical acceptance to appreciate people as they truly are.
Embrace the potential for change while safeguarding your self-respect. Erica delves into how significant personal transformation can occur with therapy or healing work, yet stresses the importance of managing expectations rooted in present realities. Understand how to set adaptable boundaries that meet your needs without making you vulnerable. This episode is a thoughtful discussion on living in the present, avoiding the pitfalls of baseless hope, and prioritizing self-care to foster healthier, more respectful interactions. Tune in for practical insights and strategies to enhance your emotional well-being and relational clarity.
Welcome to Endorphasmic, where we talk about all things endorphasm. I am your hostess, erica Porter, and when I mean we're talking all things endorphasm and the endorphasm mindset, let's talk about something that has hit very close to home for me and I just feel like I need to share Adjusting expectations. That is the key to peace in a lot of situations. I think that initially, disappointment often feels like anger, but over time you realize that these disappointments are a two-way street and for someone to consistently let you down, you first needed to hold them to an expectation they consistently didn't meet. Their behavior is a problem, so are our expectations of them. Adjusting our expectations to reflect reality is key to stopping the cycle of letdowns. Key to stopping the cycle of letdowns. It helps us find peace and establish boundaries so that we feel protected and respected and basically well. And to do this, we must adjust our expectations of others to match how they truly act, who they truly are, and their level of emotional maturity and sometimes our own level of maturity.
Speaker 1:I think that many of us have unrealistic expectations based on wishful thinking rather than evidence, keeping us trapped in cycles of false hope. And you might hope that after years of whatever behavior we want emotionally or physically one-sided conversations, whatever they are or whatever is disappointing us. False hope traps us in painful cycles of disappointment, and we constantly expect more from others and are repeatedly let down when they don't rise to the occasion, wishing that this time will be different, despite evidence to the contrary. False hope is emotionally exhausting. It is energetically draining. When people fail to meet our hope-fueled expectations, we feel this kind of crushing disappointment. We get our hopes up only to watch them burn down, and I think that I know for myself. We have a tendency of growing more resentful with each cycle, and our reasonable needs for affirmation, reciprocity, affection, kindness, respect, both chronically unmet, and expecting others to change sometime in the distant future means we aren't dealing with reality and we fail to protect ourselves accordingly. And our job is to assess whether the current situation meets our needs and, if not, to set boundaries accordingly.
Speaker 1:So I think that it's important to look at the evidence. Consider the behavior or trait you are constantly hoping the other person will change, and maybe it's your partner's unavailability, or your parents' emotional, I don't know immaturity or anger, or your family member's addiction, or your friend's self-centeredness. And then you have to ask yourself how often do they exhibit the upsetting behavior. When, if ever, have they shown a willingness to change and made a concrete, actionable um changes in their behavior? Have they demonstrated sustained change over time? If they promise to change, have they backed up their promises with actions? Are these actions intrinsically motivated, without incessant reminder or guilt trips from you? I think. Sometimes, when we're constantly reminding people, that gets even more exhausting. And if they've apologized, has their apology led to changed behavior or just more upsetting interactions followed by more apologies? And as the saying goes, best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. And I don't always want to believe that, but sometimes that's the case.
Speaker 1:And taking a long, hard look at the evidence helps us temper our wishes with reality. And often this analysis reveals that the treatment we've been hoping for has inconsistently rarely or never been shown us before. I hope that kind of makes sense. So I think one of the big pieces of the process is allowing yourself to grieve, and I don't mean that in like a lost my mother kind of grief. I mean adjusting our expectations of others, including giving ourselves permission to grieve the relationship we wish we had with them. And this pain is largely why we avoid adjusting our expectations in the first place. I think that releasing false hope can be extremely painful, bringing us face to face with the fact that the people we love can't or simply won't meet us in the path to acceptance, and I think that we have to release our vice grip on false expectations to make space for the reality of what is and I don't always like the saying it is what it is, sometimes it is and I think that holding on to false expectation never improves our lives and we never had what we wanted or needed and our moods and hopes are kind of like on this wild roller coaster of highs and lows. And I think, with the clarity that comes from accepting what is, it allows us to kind of chart a course forward, and that course is once we've adjusted our expectations.
Speaker 1:We can take two paths and I think one path forward is setting boundaries and, unlike request which asks others to change, I think that boundaries are what we will or we will not tolerate. I think that boundaries require us to say I accept that this situation is not and hasn't been meeting my needs. I also accept that they are not changing and, given this, how close and connected to this person am I willing to be? And our answer to this question defines our boundary and it usually involves time, distance, space, increased privacy or an emotional boundary. And maybe through this exercise we realize that to protect our well-being and needs, that we're not willing to spend as much time with that person, or we're not willing to hang out as often with that particular person, not willing to discuss certain topics with those people, not willing to keep enabling or saving others from the consequences of their own bad choices.
Speaker 1:And then I think that another path forward is radical acceptance. So, after you examine the evidence and you go through the grieving process, you could decide to radically accept the other person as they are, without setting any additional boundaries, and it might sound like what you were doing before, but it is powerfully different, because before our acceptance and I put that this is who that person is and this is how they will be, and this kind of acceptance might enable us to appreciate them for the things that they can do or the ways that they do love us, instead of resenting them for what they can't do or how they don't love us. I hope that all kind of makes sense. I think that if you're choosing radical acceptance, you have to be incredibly honest with yourself and I think that ensuring that you've fully surrendered the hope for change and truly accept how things are now, it is a power move. And I think before, when we're expecting something and then we want that change, that leaves us feeling powerless. And now you're making a self-aware and intentional choice to accept that person fully for who they are.
Speaker 1:And I believe that people can and do change, and sometimes it's very radically, especially after seeing a therapist or doing some kind of healing work. But I think that adjusting your expectations doesn't mean that you're not open to the possibility of change. It just means that you're not waiting around and being vulnerable and exposed, with your needs unmet and waiting for change to happen. And you can set boundaries according to your current needs and if that individual changes in the future, you can always adjust those boundaries or set new guidelines for the relationship. But until then your obligation is to yourself, and holding out for hope when the evidence says otherwise, it is a recipe for resentment and disappointment and ultimately you owe it to yourself, to the gift of engaging in reality as it is. So it's that of health and happiness and always much respect.
