The Boundaries Series - Part 3 - Building Boundaries That Actually Hold

By Hanada Kardassopoulos, RP, MACP, M.Ed. Registered Psychotherapist |  Founder, Live Your Life Therapy

Toronto and Virtual  |  Ontario-Wide

Understanding Is the Beginning. It Is Not the Destination.

If you have read through this series, you now understand more about boundaries than most people ever will. You understand that boundaries are an internal process, not a set of rules imposed on others. You understand that the guilt and shame that collapse a boundary attempt are learned responses rather than accurate moral signals. You understand where those responses came from and why they have been so difficult to override.

Yet understanding alone has not made them easier to hold. You may have noticed that already. The insight is real. The pattern is still there.

This is not a failure of awareness. It is a neurological reality. The nervous system does not change through understanding. It changes through repeated experience.

Why the Nervous System Has to Learn, Not Just the Mind

Insight belongs to the thinking mind. Boundaries, and the capacity to hold them, belong to the nervous system. These are not the same system, and they do not change at the same pace or through the same mechanisms.

The nervous system learns through experience accumulated over time. Each time a boundary is attempted and the dreaded outcome does not follow, the nervous system takes note. The relationship did not end. The person did not leave. The conflict did not spiral beyond repair. One experience is rarely sufficient to shift a deeply embedded pattern. Repeated experiences of holding a limit and surviving it, without the withdrawal of love, the eruption of conflict, or the collapse of the relationship that was feared, gradually update the nervous system’s assessment of what a boundary actually costs (Webler et al., 2024).

This process is not fast and it is not linear. There will be attempts that hold and attempts that do not. The measure of progress is not whether the discomfort disappears. What shifts, gradually, is the ability to pause in the moment a boundary is tested. To notice the guilt without immediately acting on it. To stay with the discomfort long enough to make a choice, rather than having the response made automatically.

Working with the Parts That Collapse

From an Internal Family Systems perspective, a boundary does not collapse because you lack willpower or commitment. It collapses because a protective part, one that learned a very long time ago that your safety depended on keeping others comfortable, intervenes before the boundary can hold.

That part is not the enemy. It has been doing essential work for years. The therapeutic process in IFS does not seek to override or silence it. The therapeutic process invites genuine curiosity about that part: What is it protecting? What does it fear? What would it need in order to feel safe enough to step back? Over time, as boundary attempts are made and the anticipated losses do not materialize, that part begins to receive new information. Slowly, it loosens its hold (Schwartz and Sweezy, 2020).

This is not a quick process. It is a relational one. The part that has been protecting you through compliance and self-erasure did not develop in isolation. It developed within relationships. It tends to shift most reliably within a therapeutic relationship characterized by consistency, safety, and genuine attunement.

The Body’s Role in Holding a Boundary

A boundary is held not only in language but in the body. The steady voice, the unhurried breath, the capacity to remain physically regulated in the presence of someone else’s discomfort: these are not performances. They are the physiological expressions of a nervous system that has learned, through accumulated experience, that it is safe enough to remain present.

Somatic therapy builds this capacity directly. Working with breath, posture, sensation, and the physiological experience of the boundary moment itself, somatic approaches create the conditions for nervous system regulation that cognitive work alone cannot produce. Research on body-oriented therapy confirms significant improvements in physiological regulation and the capacity to tolerate relational discomfort through this form of work (Kuhfuss et al., 2021). The body has to learn alongside the mind.

Reauthoring the Story of Who You Are

Somewhere beneath the pattern of collapsing boundaries is a story. It says that your needs are too much. That asserting yourself makes you selfish. That the people who love you will leave if you stop accommodating them. That you do not quite deserve to take up this much space.

Narrative Therapy attends to that story with precision. It externalizes the narrative, separating the person from the problem-saturated account that has been shaping their behaviour, and supports the deliberate construction of an alternative. Not a false one.

An equally true one, built from evidence that has always been present but consistently overlooked: the moments when your needs were reasonable, when a limit you set was respected, when the relationship survived your honesty (White and Epston, 1990).

Brown’s research on worthiness is instructive here. The capacity to hold a boundary is, at its foundation, an expression of the belief that your needs and limits deserve respect, not because you have earned that respect but because you are worthy of it. That belief is not installed through a single realization. It is built, slowly and cumulatively, through experiences that confirm it (Brown, 2021).

What This Work Actually Looks Like Over Time

Boundaries do not suddenly become effortless. The discomfort does not disappear.

What changes, gradually and with sustained therapeutic support, is your relationship to the discomfort. It becomes more familiar and less catastrophic. The guilt that once flooded in and overwhelmed everything begins to arrive more quietly. The voice that says you have done something wrong becomes easier to question.

Over time, a different experience becomes possible: holding a limit and remaining present with whatever arises on the other side of it, not because the fear is gone, but because your system has accumulated sufficient evidence that you can survive it.

That is not the end of this work. It is the point at which the work becomes genuinely yours. Articles can lay the foundation. Insight can open the door. What walks through it, and what becomes possible on the other side, unfolds in the sustained and supported space of the therapeutic relationship, at the pace real and lasting change requires.

Ready to Move from Understanding to Genuine Change?

If you have moved through this series and recognize yourself in these patterns, and you are ready to move from understanding to genuine change, I invite you to book a free 15-minute consultation. I work with adults across Ontario using approaches that address the emotional, somatic, and relational dimensions of this work at the level where it actually shifts.

Book Your Free Consultation: lifeyourlifetherapy.janeapp.com

www.liveyourlifetherapy.com

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References

Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.

Kuhfuss, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic experiencing: Effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), Article 1929023. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1929023

Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal family systems therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Webler, R. D., Berg, H., Klein, S., & Kushner, M. G. (2024). Extinction and beyond: An expanded framework for exposure and response prevention. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1331155. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1331155

White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W. W. Norton.