Knowing Where We End And Someone Else Begins
The word boundary gets used a lot. Sometimes correctly. Sometimes as a more socially acceptable way of saying: “You need to behave the way I want you to behave.” Those aren’t the same thing.
As I have come to understand and practice them, boundaries are not primarily instructions for controlling another person’s choices. A boundary establishes what we will participate in, what we will accept within a particular relationship, and what we will do when certain conditions are met. That distinction seems simple until someone makes a choice we don’t like. Then it becomes considerably harder.
We Don’t Control The Other Side Of The Line
Suppose we tell someone: “You cannot speak to me that way.” That sounds like a boundary. But the other person absolutely can speak to us that way. We don’t control their mouth, thoughts, emotions, choices or behavior. What we control is our participation.
A more accurate boundary would be: “If you continue speaking to me that way, I will end the conversation.” Now we have identified something within our control. They remain free to continue. We remain free to leave. This is one of the most important distinctions I’ve found in understanding boundaries: A boundary doesn’t determine what another person is allowed to choose. It establishes what their choices mean for our participation. That places responsibility on both sides where it belongs.
A Boundary Is Not A Demand
There is nothing inherently wrong with asking someone to change their behavior. Relationships require communication. We can say: “Please don’t do that.” We can explain why something bothers us. We can ask for consideration. We can negotiate. We can compromise. We can tell another person what we need if a relationship is going to work.
The problem begins when we confuse our request with authority over their decision. They can say no. They can disagree. They can decide that what we’re asking is unreasonable. They can understand exactly what we’re saying and still choose not to accommodate it.
At that point, the question comes back to us: What are we going to do with that information? That is where the boundary actually lives. We can communicate our conditions. We cannot make another person accept them.
Boundaries Require Participation Too
A boundary cannot depend entirely upon someone else enforcing it for us. If we say: “I will not remain in conversations where I am continually insulted,” and then remain through the next hundred insulting conversations, our behavior is communicating something different from our words.
That doesn’t mean every crossed boundary requires ending a relationship. Our responses can exist at many levels. We may correct something. We may stop a particular conversation. We may reduce access. We may change what information we share. We may stop participating in a particular activity. We may alter the nature of a relationship. At the far end, we may decide that continued participation in the relationship itself is no longer acceptable.
What makes sense depends upon the boundary, the circumstances, the relationship and, importantly, the pattern. But eventually our own behavior has to support what we say matters. Otherwise, we are asking someone else to maintain a limit that we are unwilling to maintain ourselves.
A Boundary Gives Us Information
This connects with something I consider fundamental to self-observation: learning to observe before immediately deciding what an observation means. When someone crosses a boundary, we have learned something. That information does not necessarily tell us everything about the person. People make mistakes. People misunderstand. People become angry. People have bad days. People fail. So do I.
One event may call for nothing more than a conversation. Repeated events begin creating a pattern. If we clearly communicate something important, the other person demonstrates that they understand it, and the same behavior continues repeatedly, eventually we possess more information than we had after the first occurrence. At some point, continually explaining ourselves may stop being useful. We may need to start making decisions based upon what we have actually observed. There is an important difference between giving someone an opportunity to understand us and endlessly waiting for their behavior to become something other than what it consistently is.
Understanding Does Not Require Agreement
Someone does not have to agree with our boundary in order to understand it. They may think it is excessive. They may believe we’re making a mistake. They may decide they would never establish the same boundary themselves. That’s their decision.
Likewise, we don’t have to agree with another person’s boundary to recognize that they have the right to establish one. This leaves us with a more useful question: Can these two people continue interacting under conditions both are willing to accept? Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes we negotiate. Sometimes we discover that what initially looked incompatible can be adjusted without either person abandoning something important. And sometimes the answer is no.
Incompatibility does not automatically mean either person is evil, abusive, selfish or defective. Sometimes two people simply require things from a relationship that cannot coexist. Recognizing that can hurt. It can also be considerably healthier than spending years attempting to force compatibility into existence.
Boundaries Reveal The Relationship
We sometimes worry that establishing boundaries will damage relationships. They can certainly change them. Some may even end. But boundaries also reveal what kind of relationship was actually there. If a relationship functions only while one person never says no, what happens when they finally do? If someone respects us only while we remain useful to them, what happens when we stop providing whatever they wanted? If someone values our honesty until we honestly disagree with them, what exactly did they value? If affection depends upon obedience, what happens when we choose differently?
Boundaries introduce information because they require relationships to tolerate differentiation. Can we remain ourselves while allowing another person to remain themselves? Can we disagree without requiring surrender? Can we say no without becoming enemies? Can another person disappoint us without becoming our enemy? Can we allow someone else to choose differently without interpreting their independence as an attack upon our own? Those questions tell us considerably more about a relationship than endless agreement does.
Not Everyone Has The Same Access To Us
Boundaries also involve access. Not every person we meet occupies the same position in our lives. We don’t have to give everyone the same degree of trust, vulnerability, time, information, intimacy or emotional access. Those things can develop through experience. Someone can be an acquaintance without being a friend. Someone can be a friend without becoming family. Someone can be important to us without receiving unrestricted access to every part of our lives. Relationships can be understood partly through what has been earned, demonstrated and entrusted over time.
This is also why I distinguish betrayal from ordinary negative behavior. Someone who has never been trusted can behave badly toward us. We observe it. We learn from it. We respond accordingly. Betrayal requires something more. For someone to betray our trust, they first have to occupy a position in which something meaningful has actually been entrusted to them. The behavior may look similar from the outside, but the relational meaning is different. The relationship itself was part of what was violated.
Other People Have Boundaries Too
Personal sovereignty means very little if we believe only in our own. If we claim the right to decide what we participate in, then we have to recognize that same capacity in other people.
Someone else may establish a boundary we dislike. They may refuse something we want. They may limit our access to them. They may leave. They may decide that we no longer occupy the same position in their life. We can disagree. We can explain ourselves. We can challenge their reasoning. We can decide that their choice changes our own relationship with them.
But we cannot meaningfully claim sovereignty for ourselves while denying it to everyone around us. That isn’t sovereignty. That’s control wearing different clothing. Respecting another person’s autonomy does not require liking what they do with it. It means recognizing that their choices belong to them just as ours belong to us.
Boundaries And Attachment
This is where boundaries begin connecting directly with attachment. Maintaining a boundary is relatively easy when nothing important is at stake. The real test comes when maintaining it might cost us something we desperately want to keep. A friendship. A relationship. An opportunity. Money. Approval. Belonging. Security. If we believe that we absolutely cannot lose something, that thing possesses leverage over the boundaries surrounding it. We may know exactly what our limit is and still find ourselves moving it repeatedly because the possible consequence feels unbearable. This doesn’t necessarily mean the boundary is wrong. It may reveal the attachment surrounding it.
Sometimes maintaining a boundary means accepting that another person may choose an outcome we don’t want. If we tell someone: “If this continues, I cannot continue participating,” we have to recognize that they may choose to continue. That choice belongs to them. The difficult part of the boundary may be accepting what their decision now requires from us.
A Boundary Is Also An Agreement With Ourselves
When we establish a serious boundary, we aren’t only communicating with another person. We are making an agreement with ourselves. If this happens, this is what I will do. That requires self-discipline.
It is easy to announce consequences while angry. It is much harder to follow through calmly after the emotion passes. And it becomes harder still when following through means accepting a loss we hoped to avoid. This is why boundaries should not be established casually. We don’t need to threaten consequences simply to make ourselves sound serious. If we communicate a consequence, we should be prepared to live with what we have said.
Otherwise, over time, we teach both ourselves and the people around us that our boundaries are temporary emotional statements rather than meaningful information about our participation.
Compassion Does Not Mean Unlimited Access
Understanding why someone behaves a particular way does not require us to continue accepting the behavior. We can understand someone’s history. We can recognize their wounds. We can see the fear beneath their actions. We can recognize how their experiences may have helped create their current patterns. We can even love them. And we can still say: No.
Compassion does not require unlimited participation. Understanding someone does not obligate us to surrender our judgment to them. Sometimes compassion may mean patience. Sometimes another opportunity. Sometimes confrontation. Sometimes distance. Sometimes the relationship has to change. What matters is that compassion remains something we consciously choose rather than becoming an explanation for why we continually abandon ourselves.
Influence Is Not Control
None of this means we have no influence over other people. Of course we do. Human relationships are built partly upon mutual influence. What we say matters. How we behave matters. Our presence, absence, approval, disagreement, affection and decisions can all influence the people around us.
The distinction is that influence does not guarantee outcome. We can explain ourselves perfectly and still be misunderstood. We can treat someone well and still be treated poorly. We can offer another person every opportunity to change and watch them choose not to. We can also establish a boundary and discover that someone values the relationship enough to reconsider their behavior.
But their response remains theirs. Our responsibility is not to guarantee their response. Our responsibility is to decide what we will do with it.
Knowing Where Our Authority Actually Exists
Ultimately, I don’t think healthy boundaries are primarily about constructing walls around ourselves. They are about understanding where our authority actually exists. We don’t control another person’s thoughts. We don’t control their emotions. We don’t control their choices. We don’t control whether they understand us. We don’t control whether they agree with us. We don’t control whether they respect us. And ultimately, we don’t control whether they remain in our lives.
We can influence many of those things. But we cannot own them. What we can control is what we communicate, what we choose, what we accept, what we offer, what access we provide, how we respond, and whether we continue participating. At first glance, that can sound like less power. I have come to see it as considerably more.
When our boundary depends upon controlling someone else’s behavior, our stability remains dependent upon their cooperation. The boundary succeeds only if they obey it. When we take responsibility for our own participation, the decision returns to the place where we actually possess authority.
They choose what they do. We observe what their choices tell us. Then we choose what we do. A boundary is not a tool for controlling another person’s behavior. It is a declaration of the conditions under which we are willing to participate—and an agreement with ourselves about what we will do when those conditions are no longer being met.
