How To Set and Maintain Boundaries When We Get Sober

The inability of people in recovery to establish and set healthy boundaries is one of the biggest struggles I see with people when they are building their new lives.

In fact, this is the method I see most people trying to set boundaries which is exactly what I did for the first many years I was sober:

If someone does something that upsets us, we react negatively to it with maybe anger, sadness, storming out of the room, passive aggressiveness, or whatever your preferred method is to show you are pissed off.  Then we assume they know what they did, why it pissed off us, why they shouldn’t do it anymore, and then we assume that we made ourselves clear.  Then the person does it again and we repeat the cycle to only get more and more upset each time.

So how do we establish healthy boundaries?  How do we communicate them to others?  What should we do when people don’t respect our boundaries?  And how do make sure we are respecting others’ boundaries also?

Well, that is exactly what we are going to be talking about in this episode.