How I’d Help You Express Your Needs, Feelings, and Boundaries Without Questioning If It’s OK to Have Them

Expressing your needs, feelings, and boundaries can be a daunting task when you’ve spent your whole life reading the room and adjusting yourself around it. 

Inside Bold Belonging – my four-month somatic coaching experience for mixed race people who feel a lack of belonging in their families – I help you build an intentional support circle of at least 3 chosen family in 16 weeks - even if you’re afraid you’re “not enough” or “too much.”

The Bold Belonging Approach

Here’s a sneak preview into what that might look like if we work together.

Assess Your Boundary Style

We begin by assessing your relationship with boundaries and your boundary style. Do you tend toward more porous boundaries or more rigid boundaries? And how does that actually show up in your relationships?

If you have more porous boundaries, you might suppress your own needs, or make non-threatening requests when really you know what your limitations are.

If you tend toward more rigid boundaries, you might express everything as an ultimatum, when really you just need to make an ask and see if it can be met or not.

Inside Bold Belonging, we really slow down and flesh this out with a somatic exercise in the very first session. Then we work on building out a more balanced boundary practice, so you can communicate your limits clearly without overexplaining, disappearing, or cutting people off unnecessarily. 

Your boundary style is likely shaped by what felt safe or unsafe in your previous relationships - family, friends, community, romantic partnerships. In coaching, I facilitate exercises to help your body find a sense of safety so that you don’t feel like you have to resort to your survival tactics of cutting people off or being overly accommodating.

Develop Metrics for Making Decisions

It can be helpful to have a more manual process for making decisions when you’re starting to show up more authentically in your relationships. My DEF framework covered in the last blog is a great example, and I offer others inside of the Bold Belonging vault, a resource library that has everything you need to build self-trust and elevate your communication skills and start having bold, brave, honest conversations.

I created these frameworks because I myself used to need a lot of validation anytime I had a need or boundary. The work we do around this topic will help you assess your needs and make relationship decisions without asking everyone and their mama for validation – because I can tell you from experience that that doesn’t always work out the way you hope. It can leave you feeling confused when everyone has slightly different takes based on their own values and internalized shoulds.

Communicate with Courage and Compassion

I know boundaries are scary because it could feel like you’re pushing people out. But, as embodiment teacher Prentis’ Hemphill puts so well, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” Boundaries are ultimately relational - when we express our needs and boundaries, we aren’t always pushing people out – we are also showing them how we want to be loved. 

If you’re used to being the caregiver, slowing down and opening yourself up to be supported can be terrifying. I use what I know about the somatics of belonging to help you get more comfortable with receiving care, being seen, and being held. Because the hypervigilance that helps you navigate monoracism, predominantly white spaces, and other challenging social situations is the same thing that makes intimacy feel impossible. 

To feel fulfilled in your relationships, you need to learn how to ask for support, receive care, and build relationships where your needs are allowed to matter too. But first, your body needs space to share what’s scary about being so vulnerable, based on your life experiences to date.

Build Somatic Self-Trust

Last, but not least, a main component of our work centers on building a somatic sense of self-trust. This is about building the capacity of your nervous system to do and experience hard things with ease.

We start by exploring the underlying tensions, the shoulds, and what you’ve learned and internalized. I facilitate somatic dialogues during sessions, and teach you how to do the same when you’re on your own.

Then I teach you how to better attune to your body and listen to the messages it’s sending, which are often dampened when you’ve been conditioned to focus on everyone except yourself as a survival strategy.

Finally, we explore exercises that will expand the capacity of your nervous system, so that you can tolerate the activation that comes with being authentic and honest. I think of it as boss-ass I got this energy – and YES, you can cultivate it (trust me, as a recovering people pleaser).

How My Client Stopped Hiding In Her Relationships

I once worked with a client who was extremely self-directed in their life – they were actually a therapist, and super skilled at supporting everyone else. But when it came to their own relationships, they found it hard to assert themselves. They even continued to work with a therapist who they felt really didn’t understand their experience as a mixed race person, because they were afraid of naming how that felt for them, or ending therapy to look for a new therapist.

The work we did together helped them enhance their somatic self-trust. They felt safer in their body and more connected to themself. As a result, they told me they were able to feel more trusting of others, letting them in on their feelings and struggles so they could be supported.

How Somatic Coaching Can Help You Communicate Clearly and Confidently

All of this sounds relatively simple at face value, but you and I both know that in reality, changing these patterns is easier said than done. That’s because your mind and body have such strong neural pathways around being the easy, reliable person in your loved ones lives. 

Somatic coaching is helpful because we move beyond an intellectual understanding of these concepts and work with the deeper, more implicit, emotional elements of these patterns. If you’re trying to do this work alone and coming up short, that’s because you need not just an intellectual understanding, but also support and the embodied skills to follow through without back pedaling or experiencing a three-day guilt hangover.

Inside Bold Belonging, we also get to work through your real life examples. You get to ask me whatever questions are coming up, and we work on developing custom scripts that you can use in your actual relationships based on the unique intricacies of what’s coming up.

Book a free call today and we can talk about how Bold Belonging can help you be more honest and authentic so you can actually feel SEEN in your relationships.