Do you know how to set limits? Do you recognize a toxic person? Have you set priorities in life? the psychologist Tomás Navarro gives us his keys to achieve this and remove from our day to day toxic people who, in addition to bringing pain, remain and nullify us.
PHOTO EFE/Pedro Pont Hoyo
In his latest book “Your red lines” (Zenith) Navarro provides the keys and “tools in a very practical, simple and clear way” and with the “rigor” of psychology to set limits, take care of yourself and protect yourself emotionally from those who hurt you, as he states in a interview with EFEsalut.
“We are not here to waste time. It’s for people on the street who have, for example, a partner or a mother or a toxic boss and I give real, necessary resources, that’s what’s in the book”, explains Navarro.
Set priorities
He confesses that he decided to change and start setting boundaries when his daughter was born. Since then, she has been his priority, and he defends that you cannot make a deep change if you do not make another one on vital priorities.
It advocates abandoning the priority of feeling like a good person or giving more importance to the needs of others and invites you to start putting yourself first.
“I am against bonism, bonism is over. These people who cause pain are bad, toxic and you have to protect yourself because if you don’t, your mental health will go down the drain,” he says.
“There are people who exceed limits and you have to mark them”, insists the psychologist who emphasizes that to convince us that a person is toxic we need to ask ourselves what emotional mark they leave because “many times we ignore this pain and take for granted things that they are not”.
To the question of when to set limits, the answer is resounding: “When you say you have to set limits, you are always late”.
Six keys to succeed in setting boundaries
It establishes six key concepts to be able to do this, all of them equally important, as highlighted by the psychologist who starts with self-esteem and not to “self-sabotage”; also for self-respect, which is “responsibility towards oneself”.
“You have to be demanding with the treatment, you can’t tolerate it depending on the treatment, if you don’t respect yourself you normalize it”, points out Navarro, for whom the act of eating an entire bag of chips or not making some something so that the partner does not get angry, it is the opposite of self-respect.
It also bets on the “proportional assertiveness” and in this sense he comments on one of the examples he gives in the book to explain the concept: “I can’t put out a fire in the kitchen with a seaplane and a forest fire with a household fire extinguisher”, he emphasizes.
Self-care is another of the keys and on this point he qualifies as “paradoxical” that there are people who take care of others but not themselves.
And self-protection and self-advocacy are also vital to being able to set boundaries. “They seem like similar concepts but they are not, the first is so you don’t have to defend yourself, it’s about putting up some barriers, and the second is when you’re already being attacked”, explains the psychologist.
PAL concept
That is why he defends a concept that he sets out in his book, what he calls “PAL”: the ‘P’, for “prioritize”, the ‘A’ for ‘warn’, to this person that you do not want to follow this path; and the ‘L’ for “limit”.
All this can also start from childhood and for this reason the fundamental thing is to treat children not as objects, but as people. Adapting the speech to his age and letting him, within some possibilities, make decisions.