How to set boundaries with your jerk boss

Abuse of any kind involves boundary crossing. Abusers can selfishly take without asking, including your kindness, patience, and need for respect.

But targets aren't helpless. In her Psychology Today article "If you set a boundary, expect to deal with anger," Susan Biali M.D. says that "in most cases when our boundaries are crossed, we’ve allowed it. As a child, we may have learned to allow it because we were helpless and depended on the big boundary-crossers for survival. But as an adult, unless a situation is extreme, we usually participate in the violation of our own boundaries by failing to properly defend them."

So what do we do when we were raised as children to accept boundary crossing, maybe from a parent or sibling? How to we begin to defend our boundaries? Says Biali:

I remember a few years ago, when someone wanted me to make a major change in my plans in order to accommodate their plans. My plans had been in place for months, they had just...

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