What are Boundaries?

By Hanada Kardassopoulos, RP, MACP, M.Ed. Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #008493)  |  Founder, Live Your Life Therapy | Toronto and Virtual  |  Ontario-Wide

You Already Know You Should Have Better Boundaries.

You have probably read about them. Thought about them. Told yourself more than once that something needs to change. You understand, at least intellectually, that saying yes when you mean no is costing you something. That overextending yourself is not sustainable. That the resentment building quietly beneath your accommodation is trying to tell you something important.

The difficulty is not understanding what boundaries are. The difficulty is that every time you try to hold one, something inside you collapses. The guilt arrives before you have finished the sentence. The fear of disappointing someone overrides what you actually need. The version of you that knows what is right gets crowded out by the version that cannot bear the discomfort of someone else’s reaction.

That is not a discipline problem. It is not a knowledge problem. It is something that goes much deeper than either.

Boundaries Are Not Rules You Set for Other People

The most common misunderstanding about boundaries is that they are things you impose on others: statements you make, lines you draw, behaviours you refuse to tolerate. That framing places the entire focus on the external, on what you say, how you say it, and how the other person responds.

Boundaries are not primarily external. They are internal. A boundary is your own internal awareness of what is acceptable to you and what is not, rooted in your values, your needs, and your understanding of yourself. The external communication of a boundary, the conversation, the no, the limit, is only the final step in a process that begins entirely within you.

Brené Brown’s research offers one of the clearest definitions available: a boundary is simply what is okay and what is not okay. That simplicity is deliberate. Boundaries are not complicated in their essence. What makes them feel complicated is everything that happens inside a person the moment they try to identify or communicate one (Brown, 2021).

The Spectrum from Porous to Rigid

Boundaries do not exist as a simple presence or absence. They exist on a spectrum, and most people who struggle with them move between two extremes rather than landing in a sustainable middle.

Porous boundaries involve difficulty saying no, chronic overextension, and the tendency to absorb other people’s emotions and needs as though they were your own. People with porous boundaries often describe feeling responsible for how everyone around them feels, exhausted by relationships they cannot seem to leave or limit, and uncertain of where they end and others begin.

Rigid boundaries sit at the opposite end. They function as walls rather than limits, keeping others at a distance and making genuine closeness feel unsafe. Rigid boundaries frequently develop in people who have experienced relational pain and have learned, through experience, that letting others in leads to harm.

Healthy boundaries occupy the space between. They are permeable rather than porous, firm rather than rigid. They allow for genuine connection while maintaining a clear sense of self. Research in attachment confirms that the capacity to inhabit this middle space is directly shaped by early relational experience and the internal working models those experiences produce (Bowlby, 1988). Understanding where you currently sit on that spectrum is often the first genuinely useful step.

Where the Difficulty Actually Comes From

The capacity to identify and hold boundaries is not innate. It develops, or fails to develop, within the relational environment of childhood.

A child who grows up in a secure attachment environment, one in which their needs are consistently met and their emotional experience is validated, develops an internal working model of themselves as worthy and of relationships as safe. That internal model is the foundation on which boundary awareness is built (Bowlby, 1988).

A child whose needs are consistently minimized, whose emotional experience is dismissed or punished, or who learns that love is contingent on performance and accommodation, develops a very different internal model. Research confirms that insecure attachment in childhood is directly associated with lower self-worth and significantly greater difficulty establishing and maintaining boundaries in adult relationships (Kalogeropoulos et al., 2024). The adult who collapses in the face of someone else’s displeasure is not weak. They are operating from a map that was drawn a very long time ago.

What Boundaries Require

Genuine boundaries require three things that cannot be acquired through information or willpower alone.

The first is self-awareness: the capacity to know what you actually feel, need, and value, independent of what others expect from you. For many people, particularly those who learned early to orient entirely toward others, this is not a simple matter. When your nervous system was shaped by an environment in which your needs were secondary, identifying what you need in the first place requires deliberate and supported practice.

The second is a sense of worthiness. Brown’s research is unambiguous on this point: the people who hold the clearest boundaries are those who believe, at a fundamental level, that their needs and limits deserve to be respected. Not because they have earned that respect, but because they are worthy of it. That belief is built through experience, relational and therapeutic, that consistently communicates a different message than the one absorbed in childhood (Brown, 2021).

The third is nervous system regulation. A boundary cannot be held by a nervous system in a state of activation or threat. When the body reads a difficult conversation as danger, the survival response overrides everything else. The part of you that knows what you need goes offline. What remains is the part that has always kept you safe by accommodating, appeasing, or disappearing. Somatic therapy addresses this directly, building the physiological capacity to remain present in the discomfort that boundaries inevitably produce.

What Changes When You Understand This

When you understand that your difficulty with boundaries is not a character flaw but a comprehensible response to what you learned and what was modelled for you, the work changes.

It stops being about learning the right script or finding the courage to use it. It becomes about understanding the parts of you that have been protecting you through compliance, people-pleasing, and self-erasure, and gradually creating the conditions in which those parts no longer need to work quite so hard.

From an Internal Family Systems perspective, the part that collapses when you try to hold a boundary is not your enemy. It is a protector that learned, at some point, that your safety depended on keeping others comfortable. That part deserves curiosity and compassion, not override.

The series continues with Part 2: Why Boundaries Feel Impossible Without Guilt.

Ready to Understand Your Relationship with Boundaries?

If this resonates and you are ready to understand your relationship with boundaries at a deeper level, I invite you to book a free 15-minute consultation. I work with adults across Ontario who are ready to move from knowing what they should do toward understanding why it has been so difficult.

Book Your Free Consultation: lifeyourlifetherapy.janeapp.com

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References

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

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

Kalogeropoulos, C., Lomas, T., & Wamsler, C. (2024). Predicting self-worth from attachment security. Journal of Assessment and Research in Applied Counselling, 6(2).

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