I’ve been thinking lately about the way we talk about boundaries, particularly outside of therapy.
Spend a few minutes on social media and you’ll come across some version of the same advice: protect your peace, cut people off, don’t tolerate people who make you uncomfortable. There are times when this is exactly what someone needs to hear. Some relationships are abusive, coercive, or emotionally unsafe, and distance can be necessary.
But those aren’t most of the conversations I have in my office. More often, people are trying to figure out how to stay in relationships that matter to them without continuing to lose themselves in those relationships. A daughter loves her mother but leaves every conversation feeling terrible. Someone who has avoided conflict for most of his life is trying to say what he actually thinks without being consumed by guilt afterward. Another person is beginning to see how much of her life has been organized around keeping everyone else okay.
These relationships don’t fit very well into the language of healthy and toxic. Most relationships don’t.
I think we also ask boundaries to do something they can’t do. Someone says, “I need to set a boundary with my father,” but underneath that is often the hope that if the boundary is clear enough, her father will finally understand and stop doing the thing that hurts her. That’s an entirely understandable hope. We want the people we love to listen to us and care about the impact they have on us.
And sometimes they do change. But sometimes they don’t.
A boundary can’t make someone more emotionally available or willing to apologize. It can’t make another person understand something they aren’t ready or able to understand. What it can do is help us decide what we’re going to do with that reality. Maybe I end the conversation when it goes in a certain direction. Maybe there are things I stop discussing with that person. Maybe I need more distance. And sometimes there isn’t much to do at all. The work is accepting that someone I love may never be able to give me something I have spent years hoping to get from them.
There can be a lot of grief in that.
Over the years, I’ve also come to believe that saying the boundary is often easier than living with what happens afterward. We expect a healthy choice to feel healthy. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it feels awful.
People tell me they spent the rest of the day replaying the conversation. Was I too harsh? Did I explain it badly? Maybe I should call. Maybe I made too much of it. The impulse to go back and make everything okay can be incredibly strong, especially for someone who learned early in life that maintaining a relationship meant keeping other people happy.
I know something about that myself. Finding my own voice was never simply a matter of figuring out what I wanted to say. Most of the time, I knew. The harder part was believing I could say it and tolerate whatever came next. I could spend hours replaying a conversation, wondering whether I’d disappointed someone or made things worse.
That didn’t disappear when I got better at setting boundaries. What changed was that I became less likely to treat the discomfort as proof that I had done something wrong.
This is part of what I appreciate about Steven Hayes’ work on psychological flexibility. In A Liberated Mind, he writes about learning to move toward what matters even when difficult thoughts and feelings come along with us. I’ve found that useful when thinking about boundaries because so much of the work happens after the words have been said. Can I tolerate someone being disappointed in me? Can I feel guilty without immediately deciding that the guilt means I need to fix something? Can I allow another person to have a reaction that I don’t like?
My trauma training complicated my thinking about boundaries in another way. When we’ve been hurt in relationships, certainty can feel incredibly appealing. We want to know who is safe and who isn’t. We want clear rules for what we should tolerate and when we should leave. Our nervous systems are designed to learn from experience, and when certain experiences have been painful enough, we become very good at watching for them to happen again.
The problem is that the present doesn’t always require the same response that the past did.
This is why I spend a lot of time with clients talking about the difference between discomfort and danger. They can feel remarkably similar in the body, particularly for someone whose earlier relationships taught them that conflict, anger, or disapproval really did have consequences. But feeling anxious after saying no doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship is unsafe. Feeling guilty because someone is disappointed doesn’t necessarily mean the boundary was wrong. Sometimes it means we’ve done something unfamiliar, and our nervous system hasn’t caught up yet.
I want to be careful here because there are relationships in which the distinction is not ambiguous. Abuse, coercive control, threats, and repeated violations of someone’s safety need to be taken seriously. Boundaries in those circumstances may need to be firm, and distance may be necessary.
But most relationships live in a much grayer place. People we love disappoint us. We disappoint them. We misunderstand each other, become defensive, say things badly, repair, try again. Part of being in a healthy relationship is learning that we can have conflict without assuming the conflict tells us everything we need to know about the relationship.
Maybe this is why I’ve become somewhat uncomfortable with the idea that a good boundary is always a firm one. A boundary that made sense five years ago may not make sense today. I may need to be much more careful with someone who has repeatedly broken my trust, and less careful if that person has spent years showing me something different. I won’t have the same boundaries with my husband that I have with a coworker or a friend. Why would I?
That isn’t inconsistency. It’s responding to the relationship that’s actually in front of me.
My own healing has taught me how easy it is to experience the present through the lens of something that happened a long time ago. I don’t think healing means getting rid of that history. Nor do I think it means overriding the instincts that once protected us. It means becoming curious enough to ask whether what protected me then is what I need now.
There are times when the answer will still be yes.
And there are other times when healing may mean doing something that feels far less comfortable: staying in the conversation, letting someone be disappointed, allowing ourselves to be misunderstood, or giving a relationship enough room to become something different from what it has been.
I don’t aspire to reach some point where relationships no longer hurt me or where I never question myself after a difficult conversation. I don’t think that’s what healing looks like. What I want, for myself and for the people I work with, is more freedom in how we respond—to be able to listen to our history without automatically obeying it, to remain connected to ourselves without requiring another person to agree with us, and to make decisions about our relationships based on what is actually happening now.
For me, boundaries are part of how we learn to do that.