Choose Guilt Over Resentment

Boundaries Part 2, just in time for the holidays 🚧🎄🚧

Danielle & Greg Neufeld
December 01, 2025

We’re putting together a Q&A episode and want all of your burning questions! Anything you’ve been wondering about building family culture, leadership at home, or the messy, beautiful work of raising humans is fair game. Hit reply (or shoot us a text) and send us what you’re curious about, and we’ll weave as many as we can into the episode.

Hi friends,

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope your week has been full of good food, rest, and connection.

As we head straight into the thick of the holiday season, it feels like the perfect time to talk about a topic that tends to get tested right about now: Authority.

Nothing challenges our "integrated capacity to lead and be led" quite like navigating family gatherings, old dynamics, and the endless expectations of the holidays. It’s easy to slip back into "pleasing the group" rather than standing firm in what works for your immediate family.

So, this week on TMIT 38, we’re wrestling with what it really means to claim authority, without losing your cool.

Here’s what we break down:

Claiming authority by moving out of “please the group” mode into values-aligned choices for our family
Boundaries 2.0: revisiting decisions we made in the early years of our family (aka “survival mode”)
Submitting to legitimate authority (staying teachable) and how it can be hard to rewrite lessons from the past
Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, and how those styles shape the way we set boundaries, take advice, and hold authority in our home.
A mantra for this season: “Choose guilt over resentment.”
- Why saying no may come with guilt—but saying yes when we shouldn’t often breeds long-term resentment
- How we’re trying to model this for our kids in how we protect our time, energy, and family culture.

This episode is about claiming your spot as the leader of your home, even when it feels awkward, and learning to disappoint people for the sake of your family’s peace.