THE KINGS IN THE DECK OF CARE ENCOURAGE YOU TO SET BOUNDARIES - RULES FOR HOW YOU ENGAGE WITH THE WORLD TO ENSURE THAT YOUR NEEDS ARE BEING MET.

The Kings are a natural extension of the Five of Clubs (Exploring Unmet Needs) and the Nine of Hearts (Meeting Unmet Needs). Sometimes, the best way to meet your needs is to change how you engage with someone or something outside of yourself - either in general or in the moment. When it comes to boundaries with other people, this may mean asking another person to do something for you (if they can help meet your needs), to stop doing something (if they are harming you), or setting rules on method or time of interaction (if they are taking too many of your resources). When it comes to rules for yourself, this may mean setting time, place, or quantity boundaries on any kind of consumption you engage in (think cell phone time limits, worry windows for the news, or restrictions on what desserts you keep in the house).

The overall goal of boundaries is to protect your energy and to ensure that your needs are being met. When done effectively, they can improve your relationships by preventing the buildup of resentment and fostering healthy interactions. They protect your mental and physical health by creating clear boundaries for how draining or negative experiences can enter your life and keep clear blocks of time and energy for you to invest in your wellness. They can also increase your sense of time abundance by removing low-return, harmful, or distracting/sporadic ways of spending time, freeing up your resources to engage in the things that are most important or full of passion.

Last, boundaries will help you quickly identify toxic relationships because others in a toxic relationship will persistently violate your boundaries no matter how well they are expressed. In these situations, offer yourself lots of kindness because it is hard to engage with someone who doesn’t fully respect the inherent worth of your existence. It’s usually best to draw strict time, place, and topic boundaries in toxic relationships, or to cut them out entirely. There is no general life duty to be anyone’s punching bag - or an endless one-way resource for another person.

When it comes to creating boundaries in situations where you aren’t comfortable fully expressing your feelings or needs, state them plainly without trying to justify them through lengthy explanations, and understand what consequences would follow if they aren’t met. At work, this may mean looking for a new job if your boundaries are persistently violated, and in your personal life this may mean reducing contact or cutting ties with someone. It is perfectly acceptable to ask for behavior with only the reason that it is necessary to have your needs met, and to enforce consequences when others refuse to engage with you in a needs-responsive way.
If you do feel safe expressing your feelings and needs, non-violent communication offers a powerful framework to express these, and to have a more free, open, and creative conversation for how your needs can be met. The framework for communication is [1] I noticed X behavior, [2] and it left me feeling Y, [3] because my need for Z was unmet, [4] in the future can you instead do U. This form of communication allows the second person to fully understand what’s going on in your body, and to help you think of ways to meet those needs beyond your suggestion if that is unworkable for them. When you’re engaged in a healthy relationship of compassionate giving, putting all of this information on the table helps to foster a needs-responsive dynamic.

King of Hearts - Guarding Your Energy

The King of Hearts encourages you to limit your exposure to experiences that drain your personal energy. We all have regular experiences that bring large amounts of negative energy or take disproportionate life force from us - think reading bad news, commuting to work, or being always-available via our cellphones. The King of Hearts encourages you to think through these parts of your life and change your relationship with them either by (1) setting clearer time and place boundaries like worry windows, blackout periods, or response slots, (2) cutting them out entirely, or (3) finding ways to reduce the severity of their presence in your life. Some examples of these kinds of boundaries are:

1. Lumping your email or text responses to a certain window each day, so that your day isn’t broken up by small responses. You can use auto-replies to set this expectation with others so that they know when they’ll hear back

2. Using do not disturb settings to not always be receiving notifications

3. Limiting your news consumption to a small window of time each day

4. Blocking off black periods that are for you to decompress or do focused work

5. Creating quantity limits for your consumption of social media, or time and place barriers around situations that may trigger social anxiety (bars, parties . . .)

6. Deleting social media accounts, or removing / unfollowing people or pages who bring in a lot of negative energy

Your time and energy are finite so the King of Hearts encourages you to try to make the most of them by limiting the amount that leaks out in activities under your control, especially those that you find unpleasant.

King of Diamonds - Professional Boundaries

Unfortunately, we live in a corporate, capitalistic society where the standard expectation is to surrender all of your energy for a salary. In order to pay our rent and buy food, we all have to give up a great deal of control and energy to a system that is largely out of our control. While there are exceptions, this machine (for most people, your employer), will bleed you completely dry without regard to your well-being. For most people, it falls on them to set appropriate boundaries with their paid employment in order to guard their well-being. The King of Diamonds encourages you to do just this - to set professional boundaries that preserve life energy for you to use outside of work. Specifically, the King of Diamonds encourages you to set clear time boundaries around your work so that you have an opportunity to shut off and disconnect, allowing you to engage fully in your personal life. You can crystallize these time boundaries with a ritual - like taking a walk, working out, or meditating - to create a clearer boundary between the two.

More broadly, the King of Diamonds encourages you to set boundaries with your work for how much of your energy you are willing to give up for it, and in what ways. At the highest level, this means being willing to say no when the work goes to a level beyond that which you’re willing to give (think broad boundaries like not working more than X hours). On a day-to-day basis, this can take other forms to protect your ability to stay productive and feel successful, like:

1. Limiting how many meetings you will take, and requiring co-workers to use other means of communication like shared documents when they would be more effective

2. Setting the expectation via auto-reply that you don’t reply automatically to emails, but only do within certain time windows

3. Blocking off time on your calendar for deep-state work

4. Clearly communicating your work priorities, and saying no to low-importance work that would detract from them

5. Setting communication boundaries when it comes to respect and refusing to engage with co-workers when they treat you as less than a human

6. Setting service level expectations for ad-hoc work by creating a timeline for when you expect to be able to respond to different types of requests to push back against a constant onslaught of urgent requests. Simultaneously, set expectations for when others need to reach out to you if they have a future expectation of a deliverable.

7. Create systems, processes, and standardization when possible to avoid getting caught in work that takes a lot of your time for low-value modifications/individualizations.

8. Document your frequently asked questions answers and record your trainings so that you can point others to those resources when they email you with questions.

It’s terrifying to set boundaries at work, especially when you live in a society without much of a social safety net. It’s important to try, though. Usually, when communicated well, boundaries end up being advantageous because they can help you gain respect with others, and to more consistently deliver on your promises. Sometimes, it will go terribly wrong, and in those cases you may learn your work situation is beyond redemption. In those cases, boundaries can help you learn when to cut off employment and look for something new.

Regardless, it’s critical that you protect your wellness in your work dynamics because your employer will never do it for you.

King of Spades - Personal Relationships

The King of Spades encourages you to think through your personal relationships, and ask whether each has a foundation of ensuring both of you are getting your needs met. For the most part, you should expect that your relationships with others will be additive to your life (will make your life in some way better for their presence) - and meet at least some of your needs. To varying degrees, though, everyone has toxic relationships - those that add little or no value to our life or actively harm us while draining our energy. Some of us are even born into them. This card challenges you to identify them and try to change that dynamic.

For relationships with a foundation of trust and safety, this may mean being vulnerable and openly communicating your needs. No one in your life will be able to fully understand your needs and wants without you communicating them, so the only way to set up your relationships for success is to be transparent about what you need in the relationship. For anyone who cares about you, if you kindly and non-judgmentally communicate your needs, they will usually try to find a way to be there for you.

For relationships that you don’t feel safe in or that you don’t feel are worth long-term investment, it may mean setting space and time boundaries (limiting your interactions or the types of situations you engage in together), or rules for communication (such as having the other person ask if you have space before unloading hard topics on you). It may also mean cutting off the other person entirely. You have no obligation to allow someone else into your life if they are actively harming you, or aren’t helping you thrive. 

As you go through this exercise, bear in mind that no one person will ever meet all of your needs and that you will always need a network of support to draw from. One healthy way to look at this exercise is asking in what ways people in your network meet your needs so that you understand when it’s best to reach out to whom and in what contexts. Like all self-care tools, you should try to use your support network in ways that are most responsive to your needs, knowing that not everyone will be the right support for a given moment.

It is also perfectly normal to maintain some space and tolerance in your life for one-sided relationships because setting boundaries is itself fatiguing and sometimes the healthier option is just to tolerate something. Many one-sided relationships are fleeting or transactional, and over long periods of time all relationships will have points where one person is receiving more than the other. The King of Spades encourages you not to focus on these kinds of relationships, but instead ask whether anyone who is structurally rooted in your life is persistently neglecting your needs.

King of Clubs - Finding Safe Spaces

The King of Clubs encourages you to take a more proactive approach for establishing your rules with engagement for the world by finding safe spaces in which you can show up fully present as yourself. We all have a need to be seen and accepted, and we thrive in shared identity communities. The King of Clubs encourages you to seek out places and social networks that can accept you fully and that you relate to on fundamental levels (think values, goals, and gifts). By finding and filling your life with these spaces, you create an environment for yourself to thrive. It will also help you to keep a baseline for how you want to feel and be treated, which will help you from slowly normalizing toxic behaviors in other environments. When you have a place in which you’re treated as you want to be treated, it will be easier for you to draw boundaries in the places you’re not.

Final Thoughts

When setting boundaries, it’s important to remember that your perceptions, feelings, and unmet needs are always valid even if they’re ostensibly an irrational response to your environment. We all carry some level of trauma, and we all have irrational responses to environmental triggers when they are hitting an old or sore wound. Respect your feelings and needs fully - and don’t diminish the felt harm you’re experiencing because the real-world engagement is rationally small or seems like a burden you are capable of shouldering. Often, these small actions but big felt consequences offer the highest return opportunities for boundaries. They’re usually small things that you can ask for that have an extremely disproportionate impact on your mental health because of the chain of harms they trigger within you. Usually, they’re things that the other person isn’t giving active thought about, and will happily change when they learn it creates a disproportionate harm in you for some reason.

So the next time your friend leaves a coffee mug on the counter instead of the dishwasher, and it sets off a horrid chain reaction in which you perceive them as uncaring and inconsiderate - take it seriously. (Or whatever your go-to on the surface irrational response is). Odds are your friend is just a bit different than you and didn’t even think about that, and will happily put the coffee mug in the dishwasher if it makes sure your needs are met. (Or make whatever small behavior change it is that will make you feel better). Small asks often reap big, long-term benefits.