The struggle is the same.
http://christywright.com/2015/06/stop-helping-everyone/It doesn’t matter if you work in nonprofit or work in a ministry, whether you run a business or just run to keep up with everyday life—the temptation is always the same: to help everyone everywhere.- See more at: http://christywright.com/2015/06/stop-helping-everyone/#sthash.2D1naxi4.dpuf
We are called to be who we are and who we are becoming, but we are not called to be everything to everybody.
We are not even supposed to be the magic band aid that fixes everything for any other somebody.
We are supposed to be the one's who keep our own lives in order and in balance so no one else needs to come in and be our shining knight on the white stallion.
Even Mother Theresa did not aspire to help everyone. From what I have read, she simplified her own life down to a few essentials and THEN devoted herself to helping the one in front of her.
If we have a high needs dependent child, that would be our assignment, but only after taking care of ourselves.
Mother Theresa did not live such a long life by denying her own physical, spiritual, emotional or medical needs. She simplified her wants to meeting her own needs so she could serve.
As wives and mothers, we are NOT supposed to try to *keep everybody happy*. What a waste of a human life- trying to keep someone else from melting down-- NOT my assignment.
I did, as my mother did before me, try for decades to keep my people happy, until I realized that all my accommodating others was erasing me.
I decided I wanted to be me right out loud in living color again. I wanted to meet my own needs, exercise my right to be, to be heard, to have a say, to take care of me and nurture me-- because it wasn't anyone else's job to do that for me and-- having no infants or toddlers left among my children-- It was no longer my job to do that for anyone else.
That is how I would describe learning to have Boundaries. The funny thing is, if I had NOT begun to exercise healthy Boundaries, I would never have stopped trying to keep everyone else happy-- and I would never have begun to recognize how dysfunctional all my people were always on the verge of a meltdown or withdrawing from basic life responsibilities and expectations.
I would have NEVER seen that there was a pattern to all the craziness that had the diagnostic label of Asperger's Syndrome.
Boundaries in dealing with my family saved my life, but I still have to choose daily how to set my boundaries with other needy people.
I have stopped helping everyone. It was never my assignment. I am my first assignment.
When my basic needs are met, I am in a much better place to be of help to someone else IF they are my assignment.
With Love to Karen at http://confessionsofanaspergersmom.blogspot.com/2015/07/life-in-living-color.html
