Throughout the healing process, survivors have good days and bad days - good seasons and bad seasons. It's important to create a foundation for health and safety ahead of time that you can fall back on when you struggle.

 

In Best Practice #3, we talked about Boundaries being at the heart of living a healthy life. Pre-establishing your response within the healing process is like setting Healing Boundaries. Without them, difficult times are filled with a myriad of subjective choices that are far too often hindered by feelings of fear, anger, abandonment, shame, depression and despair; your wounded inner child or a PTSD type response to a childhood memory.

 

Setting Healing Boundaries is a process of determining unhealthy states of being that do not support your intention for your life and deciding ahead of time when you're in a good season what action you will take to get yourself out of that unhealthy state. These personalized boundaries provide a mechanism for objective decision making when you may not be thinking very clearly. Here are some examples:

 

 

When you pre-establish your response to unhealthy states of being and you take the identified action, it allows you to continue to choose based on your intention for your life rather than letting the past control you, even during difficult times. This process allows you to create the future you always dreamed of, one choice at a time.