Hello! I am still struggling to know when to ‘drop the manual’ vs create a boundary for myself. We all have emotional blind spots and behaviors/ beliefs we don’t even see or recognize in ourselves. For example, the realizations Brooke came to regarding race issues.

So, I am struggling with knowing when I should do the work to try not have an expectation of someone/ drop the manual versus respecting myself/ creating boundaries. How can we know if we are using the model to tolerate someone’s actions we think are hurtful or disrepectful by saying it is just our manual vs using the model to justify creating a ‘boundary’ that we find reasonable due to our ingrained thoughts/ patterns/ beliefs that don’t really serve us in the end?

I hope this makes sense. I keep vacillating between the thoughts “I just need to let this go” vs “I need to have my back and stick up for myself”. I know I can just choose one and move on, but that seems rather flippant. I guess the underlying issue may be how to know when we are using the model for or against ourselves.