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Why do I have a problem with limits?

“I have a problem with limits because deep down I find it hard to finish things.”

If this resonates with you, what follows may help you see something about yourself. It is a real self-inquiry — one person’s inner dialogue on this question, unaltered except for readability.

Self-Observation on why I have a problem with limits

What’s causing my problem with limits?

  • I get irritated easily. This is true for most things around me. Be it people, situations, the food I eat; almost anything ‘outside’ of me.
  • I have this internal image that situations are irritating and hard and are always like this.
  • I know it is a cliché but I can trace this feeling back to my childhood.
  • I have this feeling – an image – that I am in a situation that I don’t like and this situation wants something from me that I don’t like. But I need to stay in this situation.
  • So I am just sitting in it and getting ever more irritated.
  • I feel I always need to fight not to let things into my own space. 
  • I just realize that the problem is mine. I mean, sure situations are hard but I find every situation hard.
  • Oh…There is something behind the irritation that I kind of see now.
  • It is not the irritation but the fact that it is hard to ‘live with it, hard get out of it’. I mean that now I find it is ok to be irritated by things that are in fact irritating. My problem is that I find it literally impossible to solve it for myself. And that is because I find everything so hard to ‘solve’, finish. This is the key for me.
  • My problem with limits and my view that it is hard to finish, and ‘accomplish’ things are not in a cause-and-effect relationship. What I mean is that I can not separate one from the other and say that one causes the other. They are together.

Where in your life right now are you sitting in something irritating — unable to leave, unable to finish it?

If you want to sit with this question, SelfChatter’s journal is built for exactly this kind of inner work.