Setting Boundaries For Mental Wellness

Dr. Shainna Ali is a mental health counselor, educator, and advocate who is dedicated to highlighting the important role of mental health in fostering happiness, fulfillment, and overall wellness. She is the author of The Self-Love Workbook, The Self-Love Workbook for Teens, The Self-Love Planner, and Luna Finds Love Everywhere, and is the owner of Integrated Counseling Solutions, a counseling and consulting practice.

In her practice, she uses a strengthsbased approach that empowers clients on their journey of self-love and mental wellness.

Her new book — a workbook actually — Designing Healthy Boundaries: A Guide to Embracing Self-Love, Building Better Boundaries, and Protecting Your Peace breaks down the process into steps with selfreflection opportunities and exploratory exercises. Here are some excerpts from some of the chapters.

Healthy Boundary Design

The entire boundary process serves as a practice of self-respect. As you reflect on which boundaries to set, you acknowledge what matters most to you. As you design those boundaries, you artfully attune to your values and honor yourself by articulating the best ways to protect them. When you remain connected to this purposeful process, you inevitability reap harmony among your thoughts, feelings, values, and actions. When this becomes a common practice, you can find yourself feeling more calm, secure, stable, genuine, confident, happy, and empowered.

Obstacles to Creating Healthy Boundaries

Even if we do realize how important boundaries are, we may still miss the mark in evaluating exactly how much time and energy is required to support healthy boundaries. For example, we may aim to establish boundaries, but we may not begin with the prerequisite reflection that is crucial for a sturdy boundary-setting foundation. Without this assessment, we may miss important considerations in our boundary-setting process, such as the purpose of the boundary, who is involved in the boundary, signs that the boundary has been overstepped, and how we can best support the boundary over time.

Challenges to Designing Healthy Boundaries

Designing healthy boundaries is no easy feat. It takes a lot of time, energy, awareness, and dedication. You may have caught yourself daydreaming about a perfect world in which boundaries wouldn’t be needed — no need to think about them, no need to create them, no need to communicate them, no need to fine-tune them, and certainly no need to heal through them. Regardless of who you are, you will likely encounter challenges in your boundary journey. A variety of common challenges can crop up as you create, assert, and heal through the process.

Setting Boundaries with Self-Love

The process of self-love begins with the mere task of being able to appreciate you for you. It is crucial to be kind and considerate toward yourself; however, self-love is more than a sentiment. Beyond your ability to tend to yourself, you must remember that self-love is an intentional practice to learn and cultivate. While others and society will be considered, the primary focus will be on you. From time to time, especially in challenging moments, it may feel like there is heavy emphasis on the self even when there are other factors to consider beyond you.

Boundary Domains: Who Are You?

Self-love serves as a catalyst for establishing purposeful parameters. You can begin to set a foundation of self-love by asking four core questions: Who are you? What do you believe? How do you find balance? Where do you have the opportunity to grow? We are all unique. Each of us is a special combination of traits, preferences, abilities, beliefs, interests, desires, and connections. These parts coalesce to form our overall identity.

The process of self-love begins with the mere task of being able to appreciate you for you. It is crucial to be kind and considerate toward yourself; however, self-love is more than a sentiment. Beyond your ability to tend to yourself, you must remember that self-love is an intentional practice to learn and cultivate. While others and society will be considered, the primary focus will be on you.

Boundary Domains: What Do You Believe?

Tuning in to your thoughts and beliefs gives you a window to the world around you as well as the world within you. Further, you can see how your inner world and the environment/experiences affect one another — or, at minimum, how you perceive them to affect one another. For example, consider your views about how you want to spend your days. If you believe that life is best spent with your loved ones, then that could inform the importance of creating boundaries to protect that connecting time.

Boundary Domains: How Do You Find Balance?

Balance offers a path of wellness. When key areas of life are stable, we’re able to experience a sense of peace. Our minds become calm, and moments occur with ease. We may find ourselves fortunate to arrive to a sense of harmony across our values, feelings, choices, and actions. Balance can look different from person to person, and the formula can shift for one person over time. Additionally, some phases in our lives may challenge our footing more than others. A key aspect of boundary design is to understand what balance looks like in your life and what boundaries you could benefit from forming in order to evoke, maintain, and protect your well-being.

Boundary Domains: Where Do You Have the Opportunity for Growth?

Though the boundary-design process can be challenging, with challenge comes the chance to grow and develop perseverance and resilience — thereby expanding our knowledge of what we’re capable of. As an added bonus, all this can serve our boundary design in the future. When you shift your focus from the end of your path, you offer yourself the ability to cultivate self-love as you expand in the ongoing opportunity to grow. As you trek, you can live, learn, and thrive as you explore your inner world and the world around you. women

Excerpted from Designing Healthy Boundaries by Dr. Shainna Ali.

Copyright © 2023 Ulysses Press. Reprinted with permission from Ulysses Press. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

The book is available on Amazon and other online outlets. For more information, follow Shainna on Instagram @DrShainna or visit DrShainna.com.