Boundaries are hot.

The following transcription is from my most recent podcast episode, which is an excerpt from Ky’s + my recent Valentine's Day “Liberated Love” workshop.

In this episode, Kylie and I explore the concept of liberated love and advocate for diversified relationships to fulfill various needs. We discuss the importance of establishing healthy boundaries and practicing self-care to achieve authentic connections. Kylie and I share our personal experiences and perspectives on reconciling after a breakup, emphasizing mutual growth and trust-building. We also explore the importance of self-trust, clean anger expression, and the transformative power of self-discovery.

Tune in to this episode to learn how to navigate relationships and personal evolution with wisdom and openness, or get the full recording here.

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[Mark] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mark Groves Podcast.

[Kylie] For those of you I haven't had the honour of connecting with, I'm Kylie.

[Mark] Who's my wife. 

[Kylie] I'm excited to be in this conversation with you as we explore what is liberated love.

We can't rely on just one person to meet all of our needs. You know, we have that template in our culture where it's like one person is supposed to meet all of these things... 

[Mark] Or I'm supposed to meet on my own.

[Kylie] Or yeah, we're supposed to be... independent right? Whereas we need to rely on and lean into multiple channels of connection, like sisterhood and brotherhood. I remember when Mark and I got back together in Relationship 2.0, one of my main things for Mark and being in relationship with him was that he cultivates connection with other men. That he joins a men's group or creates a brotherhood or something. I was just like, you need another space where you can go to be resourced.

And just like I needed to cultivate and heal my own sisterhood wounds so that I could be in relationship and resource from other women. This isn't just romantic and I just felt called to share that interdependence is a whole ecosystem of relationships that we're being invited into in healing because codependency doesn't just show up in our romantic fields. They show up in our business and friends…

I have to tell you, it's wild. When we started working through codependence in our relational dynamic and in my family system, then it started to show up everywhere. And I was like, oh, my gosh.

[Mark] I started to notice it on the Internet. You know, now I have a joke that for whatever wound you have, there's a troll for that.

[Kylie] Right. Well, I felt that on a planetary level. I remember talking to Mark. I was like, I feel like I'm healing codependency with the earth right now. Like I'm not fully choosing to be here. 

[Mark] We're extracting from it and it's over giving. 

[Kylie] It was just like, no, you're fully here. You need to choose life. I need to choose being here on the earth at this time.

Anyways, that's how deep it goes. It feels that deep to me at times.

[Mark] Yeah, so I wanted to touch on this idea of like, we're either a doormat or we're an island, right? We're either giving everything or we're Mr. Independent. But what we're really saying is that at the core of a really healthy relationship and liberated love is the centring of yourself, which is different than being self-centred.

Being self-centred is you at the cost of everything, even intimacy, connection, vulnerability, as where being centred in yourself is a reverence and regard for who you are as a human and what you need and want and what you want to create with your life, your dreams, your passions, your values.

And when you have a deep, sacred relationship and reverence for that within yourself, you have it for the people you're in relationship with. It's like when you discover boundaries – we talk about boundaries in the book too – we start to honour other people's boundaries and we start to actually encourage people to have them. Boundaries are hot. I don't know if anyone else has figured this out but they're like the hottest thing ever. If you're like, “Yeah that doesn't work for me,” the other person's like “Well, what does work for you talk to me daddy…”

[Kylie] Oh my gosh.

[Mark] But it's so true! They're so hot. And when they're authentic, when they're like, “I am a self and I've got my back,” because ultimately that's the thing you're asking yourself… is, “Do I have my own back when my needs bump up against someone else's? Can I acknowledge they have needs? And right now it conflicts with mine?”

Relationally, what we do is we figure out how to actually meet both, if possible, or meet one and then the other. So no one loses.

[Kylie] Yeah. And as you're describing that, though, the word that just keeps jumping into my consciousness is, that's safety. Safety to be who you are, safety to name what's here, safety to have needs, to be in a relationship, because I trust that you have your own back and that you're being authentic.

So anything in the underbelly of that isn’t present. Do you know what I mean? Like there's no underlying narratives or hooks or anything. No inauthenticity. It's adulting, really.

[Mark] Yeah. And, you know, this is this centring of self. Because when you are boundary-less and you are a doormat and all of a sudden you're like, “Hey, I have needs,” the other people are like, “You're being selfish.” And you're like, fuck, and then you collapse again because there's this fear.

And Hillary Jacobs Hendel, I love how she referenced this, is that guilt is usually the emotion that makes us collapse. But we can actually learn how to increase our capacity to hold guilt without engaging in a behavior.

So what we're saying is this is not a single-layered thing. This is like, okay, let's look at where we came from and why do we do what we do. And what do I want to create and how do I change that? And how do I actually increase my capacity from a nervous system level and also connect with community.

What happens when you connect with a community is you start to unconsciously source support from them and regulate with them and they make you more powerful. That's why it’s so powerful when you have people around you who are like, “You got this, we've got you. They might leave you, but we won't leave you and you won't leave you.” When we're around people who are like, “We're not going anywhere. We want to see you as powerful as possible.”

I think a lot of people identify with separating themselves or being afraid of other people's power. And when someone's a people pleaser, the other person is often extractive or taking from the people pleaser, not always consciously, but part of the role of creating equal eye-to-eye, no hierarchy, is that, yes, one person has to stand up and raise their voice and find it and really stand as an adult. But the other one also has to step down a little bit from the position of power to create space and safety for the other person to step forward.

[Kylie] Yeah. What you're saying is healthy hierarchy. There's no exploitation of power dynamics. There's more of a mutuality instead of an exploitation. That's the difference.

The energetic difference in my experience is creating space for space.

[Mark] Space is so healthy, it's also super hot. There is something very attractive about the distance between us and others, right?

So through Kylie and I's own experience, we were broken up for ten months and when we came back, Kylie messaged me and was like, “Hey, I'd love to have a coffee and chat, catch up.”

And she came over and she was like, “Look, I'm interested in trying this again. And I'm ready for that. And I remember saying, “I know you say you choose me now, but I don't believe you.” Like, I don't trust what you're saying. And she was able to say, I hear that.

So, when you break up and you get back together, there actually needs to be a restoration of trust, a repair and atonement. And everybody has the right to do whatever they need to do to actually create the bedrock again, the foundation of the relationship.

That's why getting back together, you know, sometimes some people are in relationships that have so much contempt built up that if you were to say to them and they were being real with themselves, like, do you actually want to put this work into your relationship or would you rather start over with someone else?

Sometimes people will say, I'd rather start over with someone else. That's true. I think everybody is capable of excavating, but not everybody wants to. And I do think what has to happen is both people have to want to, because if you have the pattern where you're like, I'll read all the books, I'll do all the things, I'll do that, and that'll be enough for both of us. It'll never be enough for both of you. Do you think?

[Kylie] No, not necessarily. Not if what you crave is liberated love.

[Mark] Right, right, exactly.

[Kylie] If that's what you're after, then it requires two willing participants that are wanting to use truth, that are wanting to use connection and relationship as a tool for liberation.

[Mark] What about long-term friendships? People who've been around you a long time? Look, when you actually start to cultivate a deeper understanding of yourself, you will change all the relationships in your life. You'll probably change your relationship to food, to your body… because you really start to trust yourself.

The people around you are going to have to orient to you differently, especially if you're someone who has spent your life orbiting around other people, accommodating other people. And so when you start to become, you know, I think Gen Z calls it “main character energy.” And I'm like, yeah, have main character energy.

Have you ever written a script where you're the center of the script, as opposed to reacting to other people's roles? I think that can kind of be poo-pooed on because it's seen as like narcissistic energy. Narcissistic energy is void of empathy and it's not relational. Because all relationships when they're healthy are generating something. Narcissism is not generative.

And so this is this opportunity to step into your main character energy and really say like, what do I want in this life? What do you think?

[Kylie] I think I love love. What a day to love.

I mean, I do. I think our hearts are catalyzing us collectively at this time, our hearts and souls, to ask these questions. You know, they're sending us down paths. They're transforming us. And it's a beautiful thing about love, about the heart, is it wants to flow.

[Mark] Love wants to be liberated. It wants you to heal your stuff! And you know, I won't get too deep into my metaphor on dragonflies, but what happens with the dragonfly is it actually lives the majority of its life as a nymph and it lives underwater.

And when it emerges from the water, it actually doesn't live long as a dragonfly, which is kind of wild to think that it spends the majority of its life preparing. And then when it actually gets out of the water – I didn't know any of this by the way, but I had a whole thing going on with the dragonfly that made me look it up – and it actually develops a new thorax and wings emerge from it but it actually uses the water residue from its time in the water. So it like crawls out on a fucking stick –  and could you imagine the call of that and its intuition? Like, “I should walk up this fucking stick.” But it's also like, “I've never walked on a stick. I've never left the water. Why am I doing this?” But intuition and instinct are saying walk.

So it walks out and it goes through this transformation, that we know, in the result for the human, as one of the most beautiful flies or bugs or whatever you want to call it that we see.

But I say all that because one, it uses the residue of its past life to transform. And it can't say no to it. And I tell you that because what is trying to emerge from you through the frictions of your relationships and your life is actually that. What's trying to emerge from you is a greater version of you. Even the fact that you're here means that you are being initiated.

And in Francis Weller's work, he talks about how you know you're in an initiation. And the first one is the world you once knew no longer exists. The second is who you know yourself to be no longer makes sense. And the third is you can't go back.

There's a reason you can't go back. 

[Kylie] You're not supposed to.

[Mark] Right, exactly.

And, you know, I think there's something so powerful about the recognition that it is actually a gift to yourself to become everything that is possible for you. It's actually a gift to your relationship –  and whoever is in your future, if you're single. This is a true story of hope. A true story of possibility. It's a gift to yourself and which is a gift to others.

And how you restore that trust to yourself is you keep your word to yourself. You keep small promises every day.

[Kylie] You honor your intuition, your instincts. You feel your emotions. You honor your emotions. There's no self-minimization. There's no self-blame. There's no self-shaming.

There's no self-hatred. There's a return back to honoring and having a reverential relationship with your whole sense of self so that more of you can come online. That's what restores trust. That's integration of “I'm no longer going to operate or self-oppress myself in these ways,” which are adaptive, of course.

But instead, “I'm actually going to turn towards all of these parts of who I am, and I'm going to allow them to take up space internally and externally in my life.”

Self-trust is, you know, for me, when I think about self-trust, so much of my self-trust journey came with being able to have access to clean anger and, to be able to access anger in my nervous system so that I could somatically feel what it felt like to protect myself. I didn't have access to that for the first 30 years of my life.

I had never allowed anger to really operate internally because one, it wasn't safe for me to access anger or to have boundaries or limits. And so I kind of shut off and went into freeze mode. And we have a whole chapter on that in the book as well. It's like we've been living from the neck up and this this journey is getting back down to our roots and actually being in integrity with our whole being. For women, womb up.

[Mark] What's for dudes? Dong up?

[Kylie] I mean, sure. Roots up, you know, roots up.

What do I mean by clean anger? I mean, clean anger is self-protective. It's loving. It's not destructive and toxic anger. When we don't honour another's boundaries, when we pummel somebody whether verbally, emotionally or physically, that is when we're not actually dealing with anger, because anger says “Something is off here. Something needs to change. There needs to be a boundary or limit put in place because this isn't safe or something doesn't feel good.

And so it's utilizing that information, that somatic information, to shift the environment instead of shifting ourselves. For those of us who are disconnected from anger or have been disconnected from anger, it's really a huge step in this restoration of self-trust. It's like, I can trust myself to have my own back. To say no. And to put boundaries and limits in place. I can trust myself to advocate for my needs and to honour my body and my felt sense of what a yes is and what a no is.

[Mark] You need access to anger because what actually happens when you start to relate to it differently is you see that anger can be constructive. Clean anger is constructive. But if you look at your childhood and you go, how was anger? What was it like? What did it result in? Was it clean? Was it destructive? Was I on eggshells?

We will often have a hard time being in relationship with anger because we don't know how to do it without doing that. So this is about increasing your, as Ky is talking about, somatic nervous system capacity. Our book covers all this, how to resource yourself, how to change, how to increase your capacity. Because there's the logistical work, like the “where does this come from?”

The importance of the “where does this come from” is that it allows you to have context to why you do what you do. And let me just tell you right now, there's nothing wrong with you. The reason you do what you do is actually the perfectly designed survival strategy to get you to this moment.

So the reason I say that is because if you orient to your change and your transformation from the place of there's something broken in me and I need to fix it, that is shame.

And we're saying there's nothing broken in you. There's an opportunity to change and transform, and your relationships are offering that. But the way you feel is.

And you know, I think in a world that says, if you have sad feelings, then there's something wrong with you. If you have anxiety, which, how do you not? Just turn on the fucking news, open your phone, and have it feed you shit that makes you scared, right?  How do you not? Like, it just means you're paying attention.

And so my point to you is that when you have negative emotions, there's nothing wrong with you. It is your environment that is making you feel a certain way. And instead of teaching you that you're broken, we're saying you're actually incredibly wise. So what happens if you orient to the feelings you have from a place of wisdom and it's actually inviting you to change your life and your circumstances?

You know, Gabor Mate, I remember watching a talk he gave at a psych conference and it was on ADHD. And he said, “ADHD is the fear of the present moment.”

Now, I think there are a lot of layers to this because we also have such short videos and short pieces of information that also reduce our ability to focus.

[Kylie] Yeah, technology has completely changed our brain structures.

[Mark] Yeah. It has. And so we have to take into account all these influences on us.

And what we're saying to you is there's nothing wrong with you. If you start to orient to the information that's coming up in your body, it is saying, “How do we change? How do we transform?”