Approaching your Boundaries
What are Boundaries?
My parents taught me that I should treat others the way I wanted to be treated if I wanted to earn their respect. Religion taught me that the path to salvation was to put others before myself, because self-sacrifice was heavenly. Life taught me that it was safer to step back rather than step forward, because I was unworthy of being seen. But only through the debilitating pain of loss and rejection did I learn the language to tell others how they should treat me
Boundaries are sometimes described as the psychological limits that define where one ends and another person begins.
In Aristotle’s description of the Golden Mean, he suggests that virtue lives in balance. Specifically, the balance between two extremes: too much and too little. Not in the mathematical sense of the middle, but rather in the space where awareness, intention, and wisdom guide us toward the right response for the situation.
Boundaries are not about controlling others, but about understanding what is mine to feel, to carry, and to respond to—and what is not. When those limits are unclear, we begin to give away parts of ourselves in an effort to maintain connection. If we set little or no boundaries in our relationships, we self-abandon. If our boundaries are too strict, we risk emotional isolation.
Healthy boundaries live between these extremes—between disappearing from ourselves for the benefit of others and shutting others out completely.
For years, I disappeared from myself—not all at once, but in slow painful increments. In each relationship, I chose keeping the peace over my emotional and ethical needs. My attachment fears, insecurities, and lack of emotional regulation left me reacting rather than responding or retreating into emotional obscurity.
A boundary is not created in the moments when we feel stressed or uncomfortable; they emerge as we come to know ourselves over time. And you cannot set healthy boundaries if you don’t know who you are. So, you need to understand your needs and values in terms of:
Someone expecting you to manage their feelings or fix their problem
Communicating your limits of available time and energy
Addressing disrespect without escalating
Saying no without over-explaining or abandoning yourself
Healthy boundaries are not about pushing people away. They are about remaining present without losing yourself in the connection.
Abandoning Yourself
There is an unremitting cost to constantly sacrificing your needs for others. This behavior may have begun as your way of expressing love, being generous, patient, and understanding. The person others can rely on. Over time, your perception shifts. You begin to notice a nagging chord of unease.
No matter how much you pour this type of love into someone who is unwilling or unable to pour back into you, no matter how far you step back to make space to accommodate them, your ego continues to drown in neglect.
When you consistently override your own needs, your own boundaries, your own internal signals, you are not choosing someone else—you are choosing to disconnect from yourself. And the more often you do that, the easier it becomes to ignore your own voice.
There is a difference between being considerate and being consumable. Between being supportive and being self-sacrificing. One is rooted in choice. The other is rooted in fear of rejection, of conflict, of being seen unfavorably if you stop giving in.
At some point, that fear has to be acknowledged. Because connection that depends on your self-abandonment is not connection—it is compliance. Compliance simply cannot sustain intimacy. Healthy boundaries begin the moment you understand that not everything you feel belongs to you—and not everything they feel is yours to carry.
And love—real love—does not require you to disappear in order to maintain it.
The one thing, perhaps the only thing I understood about dignity is that it is not something anyone can bestow upon you. It is something you must foster and embody within yourself. Every time you silence what you need in order to cling to connection, you quietly compromise that dignity. Not dramatically, but in small, recurring moments where you tell yourself: this doesn’t matter as much as they do.
But it does matter. Boy, does it matter. Because you matter.
Justice in Love
If you are someone whose relationships are often endless cycles of disillusionment and regret, you may, like me, expected others to share the same values as yourself. If you believed others’ potential over their reality. If your well of patience, forgiveness, and love was drained to depletion—and never refilled—you have no boundaries.
Love should not feel like you are carrying the entire emotional weight of the relationship. Everyone has shadows attached to their light. Everyone goes through periods of darkness. Everyone carries the pain they have survived in their past.
Love does not demand that we eliminate or ignore those sides of ourselves. Love does require that both people contribute to emotional safety, effort, and repair.
Justice in relationships is not a 50/50 proposition. Two people cannot always be in exactly the same emotional state at the same time. You should, however, expect and demand that there is enough shared responsibility to create balance over time. So many people get caught up in the emotional states of romance and excitement. In their unrealistic desire to remain in that feeling of euphoria. They equate love with:
Giving more to others than themselves
Being more patient with endless excuses
Tolerating more disrespect of themselves
Justice in love isn’t measured by how much we sacrifice ourselves, but by the degree to which both of you are willing to be accountable for reciprocity.
Who is the person you fell in love with? Is it the person they could be—or the person they are. How much time are you taking from your own growth to feed their potential? Are you waiting for a promise of transformation that never comes. Not setting clear boundaries allows attachment to maintain a death-grip onto potential. It is a delusional state of being. Love lives in reality.
When you continually accept behavior that is antithetical to your relationship values, and you do not feel safe to confront those needs with them, you are teaching your partner that your needs are not as important to theirs. You are teaching them that it is okay to take you for granted.
Eventually, your feelings in this connection will be expressed as resentment, not love.
Ideally—before you reach this point—you need to have a discerning look at how both of you are actually behaving and showing up, not the hope, not the delusion, in reality. Are you the one who is constantly chasing, adjusting, and left emotionally alone? Justice in love is demonstrated in equity, not equality. In cooperation, not competition. In mutual growth, not petty games. In authenticity, not artifice.
The beauty of clear boundaries is that they establish the framework for how both of you can show up in the relationship in ways that are emotionally safe, balanced, and mutually satisfying.
Healing in Boundaries
There came a point in my life when boundaries stopped feeling like defiance and started feeling like healing. Not because the world suddenly became easier to navigate, but because my relationship to myself changed. I never had an issue with loving deeper or harder. I was always keen to understand others better. But, when it came to intimate relationships, I was still struggling to find the right person for the right reasons.
I used to call myself a hopeless romantic. Now, I consider myself more of a recovering romantic. Don’t get me wrong, I still fawn over a good love story, but I had to learn what real love looked like after the masks get put away and reality sets in. I’ve made countless mistakes in relationships, and at the root of most of them was that I was consistently focusing on what the other person needed to change, rather than asking myself what I needed to understand.
I was trying to manage the things outside of me while neglecting those within me.
What I had to learn was that not everything I felt was someone else’s responsibility to fix. Everyone is responsible for their own reactions, patterns, and wounds. Not in a way that blames, but in a way that empowers.
Healing in boundaries is about no longer placing yourself in situations that consistently diminish you. My mistake was that I made myself easier to love, but harder to live an authentic life. The hardest truth to learn is the difference between protecting your peace and avoiding discomfort.
You will know you’ve reached that truth the moment you stop asking,
“How do I make this work?”
and begin asking,
“Why am I trying so hard to hold onto something that is not holding me?”
While you are healing, you will begin to notice patterns rather than reacting to specific moments. The conversations that leave you drained. The relationships where you feel unseen. The moments where you say yes, but something inside you says no. This type of recognition is rarely comfortable—but, once you see it—you cannot unsee it.
It is in that stark awareness where real healing begins.
Within this process there is a deeper layer, one that goes beyond relationships. As you begin to set and hold your boundaries, you will begin to notice something unexpected: that you can no longer remain the person you used to be. That version of you that tolerated everything, that adjusted constantly, and that shaped you to fit what others needed.
You are outgrowing that version.
That process can feel incredibly unsettling, but you should hold on to the fact that you are becoming a more authentic version. You are not losing yourself. You are returning to yourself.
Do not expect this process to happen immediately. It will happen, not all at once, but in the small, firm, quiet decisions in which you:
choose to pause instead of immediately responding.
listen to your internal signals instead of overriding them.
set a boundary without over-explaining.
allow someone to be disappointed without trying to fix it.
And over time, those small decisions begin to transform your relationships—not just with others, but with yourself.
Love as an Active Practice
I’ve had to comes to terms with the understanding that love is not something we simply feel. It is something we must practice.
Love is not found in the intensity of emotion,
not in the promise of potential,
but in the quiet, consistent ways we choose to show up—for ourselves, and for one another.
For much of my life, I believed that love meant giving more. Being more patient. Being more understanding.
Love does not ask you to abandon yourself in order to sustain it.
It asks you to know yourself. You do not have to be complete in that process at the start of a connection, but you must be willing to commit to consistent growth. You must be committed to taking responsibility for what is yours to carry—and to release what is not.
To stand in your dignity, even when it would be easier to fold.
Love simply cannot grow where responsibility is shared unevenly. It cannot deepen in an environment where one person is doing the work of two. And it cannot be sustained where boundaries are absent and one voice is consistently silenced.
Real love requires participation.
It asks that both of you show up—not in perfection, but honestly.
Not from a place of fear, but from awareness.
Not from who they are trying to be, but from who they are willing to become.
And that begins with you—With your willingness to stop negotiating your worth. When you finally stop shaping yourself to fit what others need, and stop confusing endurance with devotion.
To stand firmly in the belief that you will not abandon yourself to maintain connection.
You must begin to embrace that It will not be immediate—It will not be without effort. But that it is built in the small, deliberate decisions you make each day to:
pause instead of react.
honor what you feel instead of dismissing it.
choose clarity over comfort.
remain present without losing yourself.
This courageous shift frees you to stop chasing connections that lack balance— to no longer confuse intensity for love—to no longer show up as fragments of yourself, but as a whole being.
This is where love becomes something different:
Not something you get lost in,
but something you grow from within.