Unconditional Love And Minimum Baselines

All right, hello my beautifully fierce friends and welcome to this week's episode of Simply

Stable. This is my fourth attempt at recording this. I had unplugged my microphone so the sound

quality might be a little different this week. For some reason my microphone kept shorting out

and ending the recording, or at least I hope it was the microphone and not pod bean, but we'll find

that out here in a minute. So March, we're in the March episodes. I am recording these early.

Today is actually my wife's birthday. And we've had a lot going on and a lot of thought about

relationships and love and how love plays into the relationships. And here's what I want to

throw out there first. I grew up in Southern Baptist Church, right? So God is love.

Love is the greatest of all things. Love your nature, your neighbor as you love yourself.

But I think what happens a lot as women, especially in society, is that we are essentially

taught to love others before ourselves. We serve others, we pour into others, we give to others.

If other people are mistreating us in a way that we should remove ourselves from our initial

impulse is, well, if I did better, if I cooked better, if I looked better, if I talked better,

if I sounded sweeter, if I if I if I if I if I then they would love me.

Instead of us going into I am inherently worthy of love and boundaries are okay.

And so you'll see this play out in a lot of ways, especially I was doing some coaching around

unconditional love recently and the person that I was talking to that I was just thinking through

this concept with was like, well, if we unconditionally love someone, doesn't that mean that even if

they're hurting us, we would let them stay in our lives. And that's a very interesting question.

And I think the answer is no. So let's let's think about it. If we love someone else,

and we know that hurting someone also usually blows back and hurts ourselves, right? We we're not

going to let that person continue to hurt us. And also I would just like to assume the best that

the other person doesn't, especially if the other person doesn't know that we at the very least

perceive their behaviors as hurtful, then we're not giving them the opportunity to grow and

learn how to love us or even other people in a healthy way, right? And that's not saying that

we say that them not buying us flowers or them not doing the dishes or things like that

aren't loving us because those are just thoughts. But if someone is feeding us crap food every time

we're with them or insisting that we do drugs with them or emotionally manipulating us or

belittling us or making us feel codependent on them, then we get to draw a line because essentially

we get to love ourselves enough to say when you do these things, I'm going to remove myself from

the situation. And we love them enough that our action isn't against them. And so this gets really

tricky in some situations. When you think about all the things going on in the world right now, the

way that I get back into empathy is basically thinking about what another human being had to go

through, how they had to be raised, how they had to be conditioned, what trauma they had to have,

what exposure they had to have or what bit of humanity they have to go through their life

missing to take those actions. What little death they have to die every time that they're unhealthy

to themselves or someone else. And now that doesn't mean that I agree with them. It doesn't mean that

I let them continue to harm me or themselves in my presence. It doesn't mean that I don't

voice my opinion and say, hey, when you vote like that, when you light up around me or this or

that or whatever it is, then that I don't perceive that as loving. I perceive that as harmful.

And then to take it a step further as a parent, sometimes we'll see our children have relationships

with friends or whoever and children still feel it as love, right? And so it is our job.

It is our job as parents to have the hard conversation because

it's our job to keep our children safe and to show them how firm boundaries look. If we're

constantly letting people around us in front of our kids that belittle us, that encourage us to

engage on unhealthy habits, then our children perceive that as okay. So as a parent, it's even more

important that you can love that other person, be it a spouse, a friend, a family member, a parent,

we can love them but also know that you don't get to be taken those behaviors around my children.

My children do not get to see unhealthy relationships without seeing me remove myself from them

because I love myself. I can unconditionally love the other person but I also have to keep in mind

unconditional love for myself. And if I love myself in the situation, then I don't get to let

someone else harm me. So that is the way we have to think about it moving forward. Otherwise,

what happens is we stay in relationships that we shouldn't stay in because we love them so much

and maybe we're the problem or we continue going around the person that something just doesn't

feel right until something happens and we do it because well, we love them. We thought that they

would never and but we knew that they would and we didn't draw boundaries. So unconditional love,

right, I can love someone no matter what they do, no matter what they say because they were born

because they're human because they have something of the sacred in them. That is something that

applies to ourselves just as much as everyone else. In fact, I would argue that that's something that

we have to have for ourselves before we have for anyone else. And that, to me, the way that I've

built unconditional love for myself, the way I started softening to my past self and the things

that she did and the self-harm that she caused and the external harm that she caused is that she

was doing the best that she could with what she had at the time. But really, that stubborn-ass

girl at many points decided to turn to habits that built strength bit by bit, maybe not continuously,

like sometimes I would meditate and sometimes I would read and sometimes I would write and sometimes

I would think and sometimes I would hit the gym and sometimes I would live weight. And she started

piecing together what my future healthy life would look like. And for that, I'm so grateful for her.

I love her. I love, despite everything that she's done or hasn't done or will do, I love her so,

so much. Now, that doesn't mean that I get to continue hurting myself. It means that when things get

hard, I have these habits and these boundaries and kind of a minimum baseline. That was another idea

that I was kind of kicking around. What is my minimum baseline for myself? What is the least

that I can do in a day that I will accept from myself? And so, right, I can love myself and

set heart boundaries with myself. And then that is how I take that into other relationships,

knowing that it's not coming from any place other than love. I can love you, but here's my,

here's my minimum. Here's my minimum for you to be physically, emotionally or mentally part of

my life. Otherwise, I'm going to love you from over here. And that's okay. I don't need any,

any love in my life. I don't need any person in my life that isn't adding to the health of it.

And that's a minimum that has become a minimum part of my life. But it took me building where my

minimum line with myself is over time. So, 7,500 steps is usually a minimum line if I'm not in the

thick of it. Right now, I'm 23 days into 10,000 steps a day being my minimum. Two to three job

applications a day is my minimum because I am looking for a new job for us to move to Santa Rosa.

60 ounces of water is a minimum. Eight hours of sleep is a minimum. What's your minimum baseline

for yourself? How do you love yourself healthfully every single day? And then you build from there

and the line moves. It definitely moves and it should move. And you will find as your line moves

that it becomes easier to move the line with other relationships, too, to hold that unconditional

love, but also to know that like this person, this person where they're at right now or the

actions, it's not the person really. The actions that this person is partaking in that they're choosing

does not meet my minimum baseline for my peace and my stability and my growth.

And that is really what I wanted to say. And when somebody brought it up to me, it really just

shocked me to my core that we could think that unconditional love for someone else means that

they get to do what they want to us. And that's just not the case because we love ourselves too.

Unconditional love for someone else never ever overrides your love for yourself. Let me repeat

that again, even for your children. Unconditional love for someone else never ever overrides your

love for yourself and your boundaries and your minimum baseline. I love you all so much.

I honor you. I thank you for tuning in for listening. I know the podcast probably maybe sounds

like a different person every week. But this has been just a beautiful journey of going on a year

and a half now of talking to you every Tuesday night. And I can't wait to see what's ahead of this

on this journey.