Boundaries for Adults with Childhood Trauma: Why the Usual Advice Doesn’t Work

“Just set healthy boundaries.” Sounds easy. But does it?

I grew up without knowing what boundaries were. When I first heard the concept, I had no idea what they were asking me to find. Where are my boundaries? What are my values? What are my needs? These sounded like foreign concepts — not because I was incapable, but because nobody had ever helped me develop them.

My own healing journey taught me that learning to set boundaries after childhood abuse is possible. It’s just not as straightforward as generic content makes it sound. It’s a journey. My boundaries today are different than they were 15 years ago. The progress was incremental — 5% better, then 10% better. What I tolerated then, I wouldn’t tolerate now. I’m genuinely attuned to my boundaries today. I just didn’t get here without intensive healing of different layers.

This article is about those layers — and why boundaries for adults with childhood trauma often require deeper healing.

Aggression, submission — and the alternative nobody taught us

In one of my relationships, I initially felt relieved. We never fought. We could sit in silence together. The partner before had been more aggressive — so the absence of conflict felt like health.

It wasn’t. What I didn’t see was that we never actually worked through anything. We avoided conflict entirely. The gap between us grew. Resentment built quietly underneath the surface. Both of us were using a submissive communication style, and I, prone to a fawn response, had learned long ago that letting go of my boundaries was how I survived.

I found many explanations for why it was healthy to give in. Until I abandoned myself.

Later I learned about assertiveness — and it changed how I understood everything that had come before. Assertiveness isn’t aggression, and it isn’t submission. It’s something different: standing up for yourself, understanding your needs, and being able to request change — not force it, but request it, and be genuinely okay with a no. What attracted me most was one idea: both people’s needs matter. We negotiate toward win-win. Nobody disappears.

That seemed completely out of reach for most of my life. I usually lost — or I made myself lose before anyone else could.

At a later stage in my healing, I recognized something else: assertiveness only works when both people are practicing it. In a relationship where one person is assertive, and the other isn’t or won’t be, the dynamic may not be healthy. It just becomes a different kind of imbalance.

And in toxic dynamics, or if you are targeted by oppression, assertiveness may not always be safe. Naming that matters. The goal isn’t to assert yourself into a situation that puts you at risk. It’s to develop the internal capacity so that when safety exists, you can use it. And when it doesn’t, you can recognize that clearly too. Listen to: Safety after childhood trauma.

How boundaries develop in childhood — and what disrupts that

I first realized my family wasn’t healthy when a colleague mentioned how much she trusted her father. Something stopped me. I realized I didn’t trust mine. I didn’t trust any of them.

Growing up, I had no concept of boundaries. I witnessed physical violence and felt in my body that it wasn’t okay — but nobody acknowledged it. Nobody named it. I left home knowing I wouldn’t tolerate physical or sexual abuse. That much had registered. But emotional abuse was far harder to recognize, and society has a tendency to minimize it, which made it even harder. The manipulation, the guilt-tripping, my mother telling me I had to accept the abusive behaviour of my father and stepfather as just how they were- none of that registered as something that wasn’t supposed to happen. It was just how families were.

That’s what makes boundaries so hard to develop for adults with childhood trauma: you can’t set limits from a self that was never given the conditions to form. You can’t know where your boundary is if you weren’t allowed to have it in the first place, and it may have threatened your survival.

From the womb through early infancy, we’re merged with our caregiver. Our survival depends on them completely, and we don’t have a sense of our own limits. The merged state is supposed to end somewhere in early childhood. With a codependent parent, that separation may never fully happen.

As we grow older, we explore our boundaries and test limits. The child starts to separate themselves, to find out who they are. In a healthy environment, that’s supported. In a toxic one, many children learn that being different is not okay.

I’ve seen this pattern with clients: a boy who didn’t want to play hockey, forced into it because “that’s what boys in our family do.” A queer person whose parents were homophobic. A parent who refuses a child access to mental health support or who dismisses their emotions outright, “too sensitive,” “too much.”

There’s a different, heavier version of this: parentification. In my case, it wasn’t one incident. It was the role. From the time I was three until my mother died when I was nineteen, I was expected to manage the adults around me: her emotions, my stepfather’s expectations, my grandfather’s moods. A child can survive a few boundary violations. What’s harder to survive is being given a role that was never a child’s to carry. I grew up believing that if I didn’t behave correctly, my mother would die. I was, ironically, the most well-adjusted child you can imagine. The belief that forms isn’t “my difference isn’t allowed.” It’s “I am wrong.”

At eleven, not long after my grandmother died, I read a book that brought up death. I was engulfed by fear. My mother asked what was wrong. I told her. She said, “Don’t be stupid,” and walked away. I thought I’d done something horrible, upset my poor mother. I didn’t yet know that what I needed instead was someone to sit with me and say: I’m here. Tell me more. It’s normal to feel this way.

Ironically, I grew up in a family that was quite supportive of gender diversity. I was never forced to have long hair or be a girl. I know that was a privilege.

Boundaries don’t only get disrupted by family. Society plays a role, too. Black clients bullied at school for being Black, with teachers who looked down on them. The queer child ostracized for existing. An Indigenous boy bullied for having long hair. A girl not allowed to cut hers short. The world enforces sameness, not just the people raising you. Any form of racism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, or ableism — any message from the dominant group that you are less than — disrupts your sense of self and your boundaries as a child.

These are just some examples. What matters more is what happened to you and how it shaped you.

If we were lucky enough to have a parent who can role model healthy boundaries, we have a higher chance of developing a healthy sense of self during childhood. Most of us didn’t.

I see this a lot in clients: the ones who took on too much responsibility as kids often can’t tell what’s theirs to carry and what isn’t. They overgive in relationships; they are compassionate but can’t see their own boundaries. Others endure hurt by others for long periods of time because they had to endure it in their childhood.

Other patterns I’ve seen are that they wanted to be a police officer, a dancer — and their caregivers said, ‘you can’t do this.’ They wanted to succeed in school, and were told, ‘you’ll never succeed.’ The anxious, overbearing parent who denies the child the chance to take any risk. That’s what stays with them — not the specific rejection, but a feeling: I’m inadequate. I’ll always fail. Even when it feels true in the body, it’s an embodied experience that formed in response to what happened. Not an accurate account of who they are.

Boundaries and the sense of self — a combined journey

I don’t think developing a sense of self and learning to set boundaries happened in sequence. They happened together — each one making the other more possible.

I read something by Brenda Shoshanna that stayed with me: you can’t say yes to a relationship if you can’t say no. Reading her sentence, I realized I never said fully yes to living with my ex-partner.  My ex-partner and I were talking about moving in together. We decided to buy a larger apartment partly because he wanted more space. I asked him to pay rent, a reasonable amount. He refused, loudly. I didn’t ask again.

On one level, his response had a logic to it: why support you if it’s your apartment? But it was a bigger apartment because of him. And I hadn’t said yes to the compromise. I wasn’t okay with it. I just didn’t know how to say no. And I was too scared to lose him.

That’s the fawn response in a specific moment: not dramatic, not a crisis, just a quiet abandonment of what I actually needed because the alternative felt too dangerous. My sense of self wasn’t strong enough yet to hold the boundary. And without the boundary, I couldn’t fully consent to the relationship either.

What I was living out in that relationship had a longer history. In childhood abuse dynamics, the boundary violation came from the outside, and we had no control. We couldn’t say stop. We couldn’t make it not happen. So we adapted: we put more into relationships than we got out of them, we took care of other people’s emotions while neglecting our own, we made ourselves smaller so there’s less to violate. Self-abandonment isn’t weakness. It’s what happens when a child has no other option.

The difficulty is that those same adaptations follow us into adulthood — into relationships where we do have options, where saying stop is possible, where our needs are allowed to exist. The fawn response doesn’t know that yet. It’s still operating on the original terms. Read more: Signs of Childhood Trauma: Why Your Inner World Feels Fragmented.

Why boundary advice doesn’t reach this

Most boundary content treats boundaries as a communication skill. Learn the phrases. Practice saying no. Hold firm when someone pushes back.

That advice assumes you already know what you want to say no to. It assumes you can feel your limits before they’re crossed. It assumes a part of you isn’t convinced that asserting a need will cost you the relationship, the approval, the safety you’ve organized your life around.

For many adults with childhood trauma, none of those assumptions hold.

Boundaries live in the body. If parts of you learned to disconnect from your body — because being present in it was dangerous, because your feelings were consistently dismissed, because you needed to leave yourself to survive — your connection to your own limits may be similarly disconnected. You may not feel where you end and someone else begins. You may override what your body is telling you before you’ve even registered it.

Learning to recognize your limits is not separate from healing. It is part of it. The body awareness, the parts work, the gradual rebuilding of the sense of self are part of the boundary work.

I notice this consistently in my clients. Many people with childhood trauma are highly attuned to other people’s needs and emotions, because they had to be. Reading the room, anticipating reactions, managing others’ states- these were survival skills. The same attunement that made them so good at taking care of others is completely unavailable to themselves. They don’t know what they feel until it’s already too much. They don’t know what they need until they’ve gone without it for so long that it surfaces as resentment or shutdown or a crisis.

Part of the work is shifting focus from the external world to the internal one. For many adults with childhood trauma, that shift is harder than it sounds. Some parts don’t want to go there. Being present inside yourself was dangerous once — and parts that carry trauma don’t automatically trust that it’s safe now. That’s not resistance to overcome. It’s information about where the healing needs to go first. Tuning inward, not all at once. In small increments. 5% more awareness of what’s happening inside you. Noticing what a crossed limit feels like in your body before your mind has named it.

That’s where boundaries actually come from. Not from a script. From reconnecting with yourself. Read more: Healing childhood trauma as an adult.

What this points toward

Boundaries for adults with childhood trauma aren’t a skill you learn. They’re a capacity you build, slowly, in layers, alongside everything else that healing requires.

The more I healed, the more I recognized the importance of my limits. What I tolerated then, I wouldn’t tolerate now. And something unexpected happened along the way: I actually feel relieved when people set boundaries with me now. I don’t have to guess. I don’t have to walk on eggshells. When someone tells me directly where their limit is, that’s a gift. I learned to read people’s unstated boundaries because there was so much manipulation in my childhood. Direct communication is so much easier.

Boundaries are the foundation to build trust in a relationship. Trust that the partner will communicate a boundary instead of becoming passive-aggressive. I am not saying every person does, but it’s a valuable agreement for any relationship.

If you recognize yourself in this — the self-abandonment, the fawn response, the not knowing what you actually feel — the next step isn’t learning to say no. It’s about tuning inwards and exploring what parts get activated when talking about boundaries, to slowly learn how a no, a yes and a maybe may even feel like in your body. A child needs to experiment to explore its boundaries. And an adult needs a similar journey. Without knowing what’s not okay for you, you can’t find out what is.

That’s what the practice section covers: How to Build Healthy Boundaries After Childhood Trauma: A Practical Guide.

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