The Boundaries Series - Part 2 - Why do Boundaries Feel Impossible Without Guilt?

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

Toronto and Virtual  |  Ontario-Wide

The Guilt Arrives Before You Have Finished the Sentence.

You tried to say no. Maybe you did say it. For a moment, something in you felt clear and right and true. Then the guilt arrived. Not slowly. All at once, and with a force that felt entirely disproportionate to what had just happened. Within seconds you were questioning yourself, replaying the conversation, wondering if you had been too harsh, too selfish, too much.

So you walked it back. Or you said yes after all. Or you said no but spent the next three hours making up for it in a hundred small ways.

This is not weakness. It is one of the most predictable and well-documented patterns in the clinical literature on human relationships, and it has a comprehensible explanation.

Why Guilt and Boundaries Are So Closely Connected

The guilt that arrives when you try to hold a boundary is almost never a proportionate moral signal. It does not arise because you have done something wrong. It arrives because some part of you learned, a very long time ago, that prioritizing your own needs over someone else’s comfort was dangerous. That it would cost you something: approval, love, belonging, safety.

That learning did not happen consciously. It was absorbed from the relational environment of childhood, from the messages, spoken and unspoken, about what made you acceptable and what put connection at risk. By adulthood, the response is automatic. The boundary is attempted, and the guilt fires before the thinking mind has had time to evaluate whether it is warranted.

The Role of People-Pleasing

People-pleasing is not a personality type. It is a survival strategy that developed in environments where attunement to others’ needs was necessary for safety or belonging.

A child who learns that a parent’s mood is unpredictable becomes highly skilled at reading the room and managing others’ emotional states. A child who discovers that their needs are met more reliably when they are compliant and agreeable learns to suppress what they actually want in favour of what keeps the peace. These are intelligent adaptations to specific relational conditions. They are also the foundations of an adult life in which other people’s comfort consistently takes precedence over one’s own needs, and in which any deviation from that pattern produces immediate and intense guilt (Maté, 2022).

Brown’s research adds a critical layer. The people who reported the deepest sense of connection were those who had accepted that they could not be liked by everyone and had stopped organizing their behaviour around that goal. The people who struggled most were those who experienced approval as equivalent to safety, making any risk of disapproval feel genuinely threatening (Brown, 2012). When approval has been experienced as safety, a boundary does not feel like a reasonable limit. It feels like a threat to survival.

Why Maladaptive Guilt and Shame Make Boundaries Feel Impossible

Maladaptive guilt and shame can feel similar from the inside, but they prevent boundaries in different ways, and recognizing which is most active in your own experience matters for the therapeutic process.

Maladaptive guilt is ruminative and disproportionate. It does not arrive because you have genuinely caused harm. It fires automatically the moment a boundary is attempted, rooted in a learned belief that prioritizing your own needs is not permitted. It does not resolve. Instead, it produces obsessive replaying of the conversation, a compulsion to apologize or undo what was said, and a persistent sense of responsibility for the other person’s reaction regardless of whether that reaction is reasonable. Research confirms that this pattern of chronic self-blame is directly associated with depression, anxiety, and the sustained suppression of personal needs (Parvez et al., 2023).

Shame operates at a deeper level still. It does not focus on the boundary attempt. It uses the boundary attempt as evidence of something it already believes about you. The internal experience is not I may have hurt someone. It is I am the kind of person who hurts people. I am selfish. I am too much. Recent research confirms that shame, more than any other self-conscious emotion, produces avoidance and withdrawal as primary responses, making it physiologically as well as psychologically incompatible with the sustained self-awareness that boundaries require (Singh and Bhushan, 2025).

Together they form a cycle. Maladaptive guilt compels repair behaviour that undermines the boundary from the outside. Shame attacks the self that attempted it from within. Understanding which is driving your experience is not a theoretical distinction. It is the beginning of understanding which experience requires therapeutic attention and which approach is most likely to support genuine change.

What Self-Compassion Actually Means Here

Self-compassion is frequently misunderstood as self-indulgence, as letting yourself off the hook, as prioritizing your own comfort at others’ expense. For someone whose guilt is already telling them they are too selfish, the suggestion to practise self-compassion can feel like being handed something they are not permitted to have.

Kristin Neff’s research defines self-compassion precisely as treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would extend to a good friend in the same situation. Not excusing harmful behaviour. Not bypassing accountability. Simply refusing to add cruelty to difficulty (Neff, 2011). In the context of boundaries, self-compassion is the capacity to recognize that you tried to meet your own needs, that this is not a moral failure, and that the guilt you feel is a learned response rather than an accurate signal.

That recognition does not make the guilt disappear. That space, between the feeling and the belief that the feeling is true, is where therapeutic change becomes possible.

How Therapy Supports This

From an Internal Family Systems perspective, the guilt that floods in when a boundary is attempted is a protective part doing its job. It learned that your safety depended on keeping others comfortable, and it is doing everything it can to prevent that threat from materializing. That part is not wrong about the past. It is working from an outdated map.

The therapeutic process does not seek to suppress or override the guilt response. It approaches the response with genuine curiosity: to understand which part is carrying it, what it is protecting, and what it would need in order to trust that the situation has changed. When that protective part begins to experience that a boundary did not result in the loss it feared, it gradually loosens its grip.

Somatic therapy supports this process by attending to the physical experience of the guilt response: the chest tightening, the stomach dropping, the urge to reach out and undo what was said. Working with those sensations directly, rather than through language alone, creates experiences of regulation that the nervous system can begin to learn from.

The series continues with Part 3: Building Boundaries That Actually Hold.

Ready to Move Beyond the Cycle?

If you recognize this pattern and are ready to understand the guilt that has been making boundaries feel impossible, I invite you to book a free 15-minute consultation. I work with adults across Ontario who are ready to move beyond the cycle of attempting and abandoning their own limits.

Book Your Free Consultation: lifeyourlifetherapy.janeapp.com

www.liveyourlifetherapy.com

Virtual sessions available across Ontario  |  No waitlist

References

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly: How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books.

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada.

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.

Parvez, M. S., Islam, M. A., & Hossain, M. (2023). The differential roles of shame and guilt in the relationship between self-discrepancy and psychological maladjustment. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1215177. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1215177

Singh, D., & Bhushan, B. (2025). Understanding shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride: A systematic review of self-conscious emotions. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, Article 1678930. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1678930