My grandmother never once said the word boundaries. She lived by an order that had twelve of them in it.
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The PA Dutch Way of Living & Loving
What is the PA Dutch Way?
The way I was raised. Grandparents and parents both made it to 50+ years of marriage. It comes down to three things. Not a program I invented. A way of living and loving.
Twelve Boundaries
Agreements you keep with yourself. One clear line each about what is yours to carry and what isn’t.
Four Qualities
Authenticity. Congruence. Equity. Sovereignty. Hold all four and you’re holding a winning hand.
One Promise
Be free. Be happy. Not someday, after everything is fixed. Today, stopping to reflect and appreciate at the end of each day.
Why there are twelve
Twelve beams
A barn is too big for one family to build alone, so the whole neighborhood shows up. At the start there are twelve big beams, and each one has a single job. One holds the left wall. One the right. One carries the roof. One braces the door.
Not a single beam tries to hold up the whole thing alone. If it did, it would snap, and everything resting on it would come down with it.
- 1TruthSay what’s actually true.
- 2ResponsibilityHandle only your own stuff.
- 3ReciprocityLet it run both ways.
- 4CapacityCarry what you can carry.
- 5TimingDo it when it’s time.
- 6IntegrityMatch the inside to the outside.
- 7StewardshipTend what is yours.
- 8ContributionGive and receive.
- 9DiscernmentDecide what belongs.
- 10RestorationRest on purpose.
- 11LegacyHand down what is worth having.
- 12ConcordanceSpread the weight.
Eleven rest on one post. The twelfth needs two, because it is the only one you cannot do alone.
“Perfected doesn’t mean perfect. It means practiced.”Tammy Leitzel
Start here
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries
Everyone tells you to get real. Nobody hands you the tools. These words and ways of living and loving are the tools. Written in plain speak, and you can use it the first day you read it.
- The exact step-by-step process. Run it, watch what comes back, adjust your approach.
- Mindmaps for finding who you are and what you actually want.
- All twelve boundaries, each with the broken path, the real path, and one move to make today.
- The Barn. Why there are twelve and not five or twenty.
- Frequently asked questions, answered as best as I can.
Get the ebook on Kindle — $6.99
Ready when you are. No countdown clock, no “was $97.” It will still be there if you come back tomorrow.
Then do it
The Twelve Perfected Boundaries Workbook
No one ever grew a backbone by reading about it.
Thirty days. Two or three days on each boundary. An 8.5 × 11 paperback with room to write on nearly every page.
- All twelve boundaries, one at a time.
- Five positions you run every boundary through, the same five questions every time.
- The daily practice. Real in the morning, truth at night.
- A plain test for sorting what is yours to carry from what belongs to somebody else.
- One page written specifically for women. One page written specifically for men. All others apply for both.
Start with either one. The ebook is the door. The workbook is the room.
About Tammy
50+ years of lived PA Dutch experience.
I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country. My grandparents’ marriage lasted more than fifty years. So did my parents’.
She was Mennonite, and plain in every sense of that word. Nobody would have called her the strong one in the family if you were only looking at the outside.
She was, though. Her strength was on the inside where it counts, and it held everything else up.
She never used the word boundaries. She kept them anyway. When I write about this, hers is the voice I hear.
The word on the spine of my grandmother’s Bible was CONCORDANCE, and it was also the life she lived, all day, every day.
What I teach is the way of living and loving that I grew up inside. Plain speak, honest work, planning for tough times, and the warmth that gets made when everyone plays a part in how it was intended to be.
This isn’t therapy. It isn’t even what I’d call coaching. It’s honest feedback from lived experience. The kind you’d get when you have nothing left but the ground you are standing on… and someone wants to take that from you too.
I still work a day job. I wrote most of this on breaks.
Tammy Leitzel · Femessence®
The Posts
Plain speak, posted.
Short pieces on the twelve boundaries, living & loving, and life as I grew up in it.
Free
The Four Daily Questions
Four questions. One page. You can run them tonight.
They’re the ones that kept my grandmother’s twelve boundaries true, and they’re the same four I use before I say a word to anybody.
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Be free. Be happy.
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