Resistance Is Inevitable

While boundaries remain critical to healthy relationships, they sometimes develop on faulty information or impaired thinking. Caregivers inevitably collide with such boundaries while caring for loved ones. These flawed boundaries may look like resisting rehab for injuries and/or addiction issues, refusing medications, respecting others’ time, or a whole host of other issues.

Confronting those disputes requires deftness and wisdom from caregivers—particularly when a loved one is “dug in” behind years of stubbornness. Sometimes, all that’s needed is to clearly explain consequences of behaviors.

But when confronting someone with addiction or impairment issues for example, all many caregivers can do is provide buffers to minimize the damage while remaining at safe distances as circumstances deteriorate. In other cases, a caregiver must often bite her tongue and learn to like the taste of blood as a loved one experiences the outcome of stubbornness.

Trying to force a solution against the will or boundaries of another usually ends in conflict and failure. Despite resistance or even desired results, we can learn to be at peace with our powerlessness over others’ boundaries—and instead focus on maintaining our own.

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