Would you go wash your neighbor’s car in their driveway if it were dirty?
Plant a tree on their lawn?
Paint their house?
Throw a wild party in their backyard?
Of course not. And if someone did these things to us, we’d feel massively violated because there’s a thing called legal property lines that most of us are well aware of and respect (even if we can’t see them).
There’s also something called personal property lines, but many people aren’t aware of them, and some just flat out don’t respect them (even though these boundaries are just as important as or more important than the ones on file at city hall).
For example, many of us don’t think twice about allowing a friend’s addictive behavior to keep our lives in upheaval because we think always being there means we can fix him. Or we let a coworker’s abuse and bullying denigrate our sense of self-worth because we’re afraid to stand up to her.
In both cases, we’ve let those people bulldoze across our personal property lines. And in a very harmful way.
I love the way author Melody Beattie writes about this subject: “If another person has an addiction, a problem, a feeling, or a self-defeating behavior, that is their property, not ours. If someone has acted and experienced a particular consequence, both the behavior and the consequence belong to that person. Other people’s choices are their property, not ours.”
Author and podcaster Mel Robbins also covers this topic beautifully in her best-selling new book The Let Them Theory:
“When you say Let Them, you’re not giving up or walking away. You’re releasing that grip you have on how things should go and allowing them to unfold the way they will go. You’re freeing yourself.
“You’re making an active, empowered choice to release control you never truly had. You stop giving power to other people and forces outside of you, and you reclaim it for yourself.”
If we’ve let people violate our property lines again and again, it can be hard to suddenly start enforcing our boundaries. To tell that addicted friend: “I love you, but your behavior is unacceptable to me. I can’t help you, and until you get professional help, you can’t be part of my life right now.” To tell that colleague: “Your comments about me are inappropriate and demeaning, and they need to stop now.”
This is where we take our power back. It’s really necessary for our own emotional, mental, and physical health. And it’s so freeing.
