Dear S:

You are welcome and thank you for your kind words.

“Maybe it is time to break that tension release service- but it feels so scary. I know that I will have to establish firm boundaries but I have become so used to this, I feel guilty, spend hours thinking about what I could have done or justify my actions to the other person”-

– You rationally agree that “it is time to break that tension release service” (let’s refer to the habit of Providing  Tension Release Service as PTRS), but you know that fear (“it feels so scary”) and guilt (“I feel guilty”) will follow, as they already have, when you break the PTRS habit. It is so because we are creatures of habit, like other animals, and emotions= chemical reactions enforce our habits.

Once we learn or adopt a certain behavior, we are chemically and biologically not meant to change that behavior. Initiating and going about changing a habit is an option available only to humans because of our evolved thinking/ using an elaborate language to think, read, write and think, and it takes a long time and persistent practice.

Being caught between good rational thinking aimed at ending the PTRS habit,  and powerful emotions aimed at continuing the same habit, is indeed emotionally exhausting (the title of your thread: Emotionally Exhausted”).

Understanding this concept, that it is relatively easy to change our thinking, but very difficult to change our emotions and habits, and expecting the difficulty, will make the change of habit possible. When you consider setting a boundary and you feel very scared and guilty- you won’t get that alarmed and distressed because you expected this to happen, and you have a plan- what to do when overwhelmed with the expected fear and/ or guilt.

When feeling guilty you are used to “spend hours thinking about what I could have done or justify my actions to the other person”- not spending hours doing that is possible, but it will require an alternative plan: what to do instead of spending hours thinking what you could have done, etc.

“Now that I am discovering the beauty of my own self and establishing boundaries, I am slowly losing people. This conflict makes my inner (abandoned) child afraid”- would you like to elaborate on that: who are you slowly losing? I am asking because it is most important to attend to this clearly stated conflict.

anita