Who Moved My Cheese?

Who moved my cheese?  is a neat little  book about  two mice, Sniff and Scum and two other beings, Hem and Haw in a labyrinth in search of cheese. And the title comes from what they all say when the cheese they had goes missing.  It is a fable about adapting or not to change. For me, the title triggered another dastardly situation.

Has anyone ever moved your “cheese”? How did you feel? Me? When someone moves my things, my “cheese” without asking I can get pretty mad! So I made a pact with myself that I would not move or use anybody’s stuff without permission.  Add to that, I hold others accountable to the same value.

Does any of that ring a bell with you?  I’ll bet right now you are remembering when it happened to you, or when you committed such an act and the impact it had, intended or not.

It’s called “boundary failure” – someone violates your boundary by messing with you stuff, or you do it to someone else.  It is sure sign that someone, you or them or both lack functional boundaries.  And that condition can go beyond “stuff”.  It shows up in our emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and sexual lives.

I think we (me too) let it happen TO us, because we want folks to like us, so when someone harangues us with things like: “You shouldn’t feel that way!” or “How could you think that?  Let me tell you what should think!”  On an even deeper level, “You believe in what? That’s pretty dumb!  Here’s the real deal is!” And so on, and so on.

Those challenges always got me. They would get to the place where I hold my values, the core of who I am, , and stir them up,  sometimes  to where I didn’t know what to believe. Did I do something wrong? Are they right?  Am I that blind to the truth?  I would begin to feel like I had no “self”—that I was just the sum of a bunch of other people’s opinions.  It still happens, but not so much anymore.

It can really come to roost around sexual boundaries.  And that is whole ‘nother conversation!

Let’s just say that I, you, we need to have boundaries around our physical world – our stuff, our space, our bodies; our intellectual world – what we know and understand and think; our emotional self – what we I feel, when we feel, and how intensely we feel; and our spiritual being – what we believe in or not and if we even care.

The healthy truth is that we get to choose what works for us and what to push away in all those areas. You get to choose for you. I have no business telling you or anyone else what values to hold, unless you give me permission to share my observations, beliefs, judgments, or opinions. Your job during that conversation is to discern what does or does not work for you. You get to choose!!

Where in your life right now do you feel like you are being run over by someone else, where you feel like you are be subjected to their opinion about what you should think, feel, believe or do? What would happen if you drew a line and said “Stop! NO! I am not going to listen to that. I am not going to let it in.”  What would that feel like?

It’s my stuff, my space, my body, my heart, my brain, my “self”, my “cheese” and I choose what to let into it and what to keep out.  That’s what functional boundaries are all about.

How are yours?