Dr. Nicole LePera

Okay.

Perhaps the reality that other people have contributed, whether it's in childhood or now, to our discomfort, our suffering, our habits, our hurt, our pain, because that's part of the journey is to acknowledge ourself, the impact that others have on us, especially if it's

early childhood, our parents impacting us by not meeting our needs to the best of their ability or well-intentioned even because they didn't have the tools.

That's how I always understand that.

But if we don't do that, then a lot of us just continue to suppress

the way we feel about what happened, the unmet needs, and all of these habits we continue to repeat based on those unmet needs.

So we are doing ourself a disservice, though we can be very savvy at doing it because it feels better.

We don't have to feel the grief, the pain, the anger, which are very natural feelings that arise when we discover or live into the reality that, hey, despite the best of intentions, our family, our loved ones, or even our partners, right, aren't showing up in the way that we would like them or need them to.

However, I think to develop maturity, we have to expand and be able, and also to not just then stay stuck in that feeling and just doing ourself a disservice by just being like, oh, they didn't mean it.

They hurt us and maybe stuck in the anger and the resentment.

We have to make space for both, how we feel about what happened.

So we're giving our feelings some space, but also like you're wisely describing, step into then the path of agency.

And I think sometimes we confuse even, I just want to kind of go perhaps on a little bit of a tangent around, sometimes we confuse what a boundary is.

So we think that when we come to the awareness that someone's hurt us, they've caused our problems, that the best solution is to demand that they're different, to give them a consequence, an ultimatum, to be different.

That, though, is still giving away our agency or our control, right?

It's saying that I will only feel a certain way unless you show up the way I need you to.

That's very limiting, right?

What a boundary really is, is saying, right, you've hurt me.

This has happened.

I feel this way about it.