Do you need better boundaries?
Shimla, Sept. 13 Tina Saxena
Would you say that you tend to give people more chances than they’ve earned?
Many of us are taught to be nice and kind. We are told that patience is a virtue, that if we stay calm, stay generous, stay understanding and compassionate long enough, people will eventually understand our good heart and intentions and meet us where we are. We have also been told that holding on is a sign of strength and that walking away is a kind of failure. Therefore, we continue giving of ourselves generously and find ourselves drained, without understanding why. In the long run, this impacts our health and wellbeing.
Researchers who study relational patterns say that the people who struggle most with boundaries are usually the ones who care so much for others that they have stopped noticing when care isn’t being returned. This is an energetic imbalance because relationships are at their core an exchange, a free-flowing give and a take, not one-way streets! These people have often been conditioned to disregard caring for themselves.
Psychologists point out that healthy relationships depend on a basic sense of reciprocity, being seen, heard, and met with the same effort you offer. When that reciprocity disappears, and we keep giving anyway, it is no longer the noble devotion we have been taught. It is a symptomatic slow erosion of self-respect, one small accommodation, one compromise, one more chance given to the other and none to ourselves at a time.
The important question here is whether you are giving yourself the same chances? Whether you are respecting and loving yourself just like the others.
The Bible says, ‘Love thy neighbour, as thyself.’ You have learned well the first part, and glossed over the second, which is the precursor for the first!
The fear underlying a lack of boundaries
We have confused being loved with being needed, and for a long time, they felt like the same thing, so we are scared of setting boundaries because we fear losing the people around us. We fear loneliness. The fact is that the people you lose by setting boundaries are often only loyal to the version of you they can control and manage on their terms.
Somewhere early on, many of us learned that our worth was tied to how useful we could be to other people’s comfort, to how well we could anticipate what someone else wanted before they had to ask. No one taught us that who we are is inherently worthy, deserving and valuable. That kind of conditioning doesn’t just disappear because we understand it intellectually. It lives in the body and shows up as guilt or even shame the moment we say no, as a tightness in the chest when we imagine we may disappoint someone by being less than nice.
A boundary feels like a risk, a belief that if we stop overextending, the connection itself won’t survive, and we need our tribe to survive as a primordial need for safety.
Underneath that fear lies a quieter one, the real fear of finding out who actually stays around us once we stop overgiving. If someone only shows up when we’re accommodating everything, then losing them by holding a boundary would mean they were never really choosing us at all; they were using us, and what’s more, we allowed them to! That’s a hard thing to digest, and it is easier, for a while, to keep performing niceness than to test whether the relationship can survive honesty.
But, as we grow in awareness and tolerance of distress to seek the truth for ourselves, we see that the discomfort of setting a boundary is temporary while the exhaustion of never setting one is not. Fear tells us that boundaries will cost us people. Often, what they actually cost us is the illusion that those people were ever truly ours to keep.
How to go about it? Firstly, decide to love and care for yourself, provide for yourself and then, and only then, give outwards and cater to the needs of others.
- Say it once. Explaining yourself is an act of respect. Explaining yourself repeatedly is an act of self-abandonment. The first time you explain something, you’re being clear, the second time, you’re being generous, but by the third time, you’re negotiating with someone who understood you perfectly well the first time, but they just didn’t respect your answer. Confusion, real or performed, is often just a stalling tactic and manipulation. Say what you mean once, and let the silence after it do the rest.
- Don’t mistake apology for change. Some apologies exist to repair harm. Others exist to preserve access. The second kind tends to arrive quickly, arrive often, and change nothing. A genuine apology comes with a visible shift in behaviour, not just softer words, but different actions. Anything less than that isn’t an apology or forgiveness being asked of you. It’s a pattern being protected to keep you chained. Remember, the best apology is changed behaviour.
- Give yourself the gift of the pause. Urgency is one of the most effective tools people use to bypass your judgment. It’s designed to make you decide before you have had time to think or weigh your options and before you know it, you’re trapped, once again. One of the quieter but more powerful boundaries you can hold is simply this: “I’ll get back to you.” Calm, neutral, non-negotiable. It returns the moment to you.
- Stop matching effort with more effort. This is the quiet trap that wears people down over years. Someone pulls back, and we lean in harder, because we care more. Someone gives less, and we compensate by giving more. Withdrawal is often not a sign of overwhelm, but simply a test of how much you will tolerate. The healthier response isn’t to escalate your effort. Learn to match theirs. If they step back, don’t chase. Simply stay where you are. Find more ways to fill your time, space and energy without them around.
- Know that you’re allowed to leave. This is one of the hardest boundaries to actually live, because it asks you to release the belief that staying, no matter the cost, is proof of your loyalty, proof of the fact that you’re no quitter. Your willingness to walk away, not out of anger, but out of self-respect, is what real self-worth looks like in practice. Leaving does not equate to quitting or losing. It means raising your standards and choosing to respect yourself over whatever version of “enough” you’d settled for or the breadcrumbs they gave you.
Setting boundaries or asking for more from your relationships does not make you cold, selfish or lonely. It brings you clarity, which more than anything else is what ends the patterns that used to drain you. It shows you the truth about your relationships. It clears the space in your life for something and someone way better.
So, are you willing to set better boundaries?
Samagra Sikhsha
