Boundaries in Relationships: Why It Starts With Your Body

If you have experienced childhood abuse, this article may not go deep enough. I invite you to listen to the episode “Boundaries for Adults with Childhood Trauma.“

As you read, I invite you to pause and check in with your body. Notice what resonates — and feel free to set aside what doesn’t. You are the expert on your own experience.

Introduction

As a young adult, I had no idea what boundaries were. Not really. I knew the word, but I didn’t know what they felt like in my body, or what it meant to have them violated. I said yes when I meant no — not because I was afraid to say no, but because I genuinely didn’t know that no was an option.

I didn’t recognize when my ex-partner ignored my limits. I thought that was how relationships are. After I separated from him, a friend mentioned that he’d had a consistently condescending tone with me. I hadn’t noticed. It had felt normal — actually, often better than the relationships in my childhood. That’s how deep the unawareness went — not just that I couldn’t protect myself, but that I couldn’t yet see what I needed protection from.

There are many reasons we disconnect from our boundaries. People pleasing. Finding excuses for behaviours that aren’t okay. Normalizing dynamics that quietly drain us. One thing I learned in my professional training that stayed with me: a consistent lack of appreciation in a relationship is a boundary violation. Not dramatic, not obvious — but a violation nonetheless. Many of us have been there without a word for it.

It took years of healing to understand that what I was feeling was information. That the resentment wasn’t a character flaw. That the exhaustion wasn’t just life. These were signals that something wasn’t okay — and that I had more say in it than I realized.

If any of that resonates, this article is for you. Not as a formula, but as a map — built from lived experience and from working with clients navigating the same territory. Boundaries in relationships are learnable. But first, it helps to understand what they actually are, why they’re hard, and what gets in the way.

What are boundaries in relationships, really?

Boundaries are the invisible lines between two people that allow us to create healthy connections. They show us what’s okay for us and what isn’t — what we value and what we need to keep out. They also help us embrace our differences rather than be threatened by them.

A simple example: I love cats. They were part of my healing, and they will always be in my life. I have friends who hate cats. We can hold that difference without judgment. Or this: I’ve been a vegetarian since I was nineteen. My ex-partner ate meat. My boundary wasn’t about imposing my values onto him — it was about knowing what’s true for me, and not requiring him to be the same.

That’s what boundaries actually are at their most basic level. Not walls. Not ultimatums. Just the clarity of knowing where you end and another person begins — and being able to stay in a relationship with someone who is genuinely different from you.

On a more serious note: healthy boundaries don’t arrive overnight. They need continuous practice. Mine were refined throughout my healing journey from childhood abuse — and they’re still not written in stone. The behaviours I allow in my life today are different from what I would have tolerated in the past. That’s not a failure. That’s growth.

The harder work is knowing your boundaries when they matter most. When someone consistently speaks to you in a way that diminishes you. When a pattern leaves you drained or resentful. When something feels wrong but you can’t name it yet. We may also have developed patterns that talk us out of our boundaries — people pleasing, making excuses for others, and normalizing what shouldn’t be normal. All of it is worth exploring. That’s where most of us have to do the real learning.

Why boundaries in relationships matter more than you think

For a long time, I believed that love meant giving everything. Tolerating what wasn’t okay. Accepting others as they are — even when “as they are” included behaviours that diminished me. Nobody taught me where love ends and self-abandonment begins.

What boundaries gave me, slowly and over time, was a different understanding. Not love or self-respect — but love and self-respect, as inseparable. That balance is something many people who grew up with childhood abuse often didn’t have modelled. Not because they were broken, but because no one showed them what it looked like.

I once read the phrase “loving you and being me” — and at the beginning of my recovery, I found it genuinely confusing. I didn’t know how to be me yet. What I understand now is closer to loving you and respecting myself. That feels more honest. More reachable.

Love can also activate profound inner parts — fear of abandonment, fear of loss, the old terror of not being enough. For many of us healing from relational trauma, the word itself carries weight that can make clear thinking harder, not easier. That’s another reason I find “do I feel respected in this relationship?” a more useful starting point than “do I love myself enough to speak up?”

Respect is concrete. You usually know, somewhere in your body, whether it’s present or not. And that knowing — learning to trust it — is often where boundary work actually begins.

Gender norms add another layer to this. Cis women are often conditioned to be nice, accommodating, to put others first — which makes boundary-setting feel like a transgression.

Cis men are frequently given a pass for aggressive behaviour, which distorts what feels normal on both sides of a relationship. As a non-binary person, some of this isn’t my direct lived experience — but I see it in my work constantly. Gender diverse and trans folks face their own distinct pressures and barriers around boundaries, shaped by a world that often doesn’t recognize or respect their identity to begin with.

When someone respects your boundary, something shifts. Not just in the relationship, but in how you relate to yourself. And when you respect theirs? The same. That’s what boundaries make possible — not distance, but the kind of closeness that doesn’t require you to disappear.

Boundaries are somatic, not just rational.

Boundaries aren’t purely a cognitive exercise. You can’t think your way to them. They live in your body first — and learning to listen to what your body is telling you is often the most important part of the work.

I noticed this in my own life in relationships that were ending. Before I could articulate what wasn’t working, before I had words for it, I noticed that I no longer felt comfortable being touched by my partner. My body knew something my mind hadn’t caught up to yet. That discomfort was information — not a problem to override, but a signal worth listening to.

In my practice, I use somatic awareness to help clients discover their boundaries from the inside out. Rather than forcing a decision, this approach invites you to notice what your body is telling you. Over time, I’ve found it shows up in three ways:

A yes boundary feels like ease, openness, or readiness — your body is safe and willing.

A no boundary feels like tension, contraction, or an instinctive pulling away — your body is protecting you from something. A maybe boundary is when your body doesn’t fully know yet. There’s hesitation, uncertainty, a sense that you need more time before you can answer honestly.

This framework removes the pressure to have instant answers. It also honours the pace your nervous system can actually handle — which matters enormously if you’re healing from trauma. Your body becomes a reliable compass. The work is learning to trust it rather than override it.

The characteristics of healthy boundaries in relationships

Healthy boundaries aren’t one-size-fits-all. They’re shaped by your history, your culture or community, your values, your nervous system, and the specific relationship you’re in.

Here’s what I’ve found to be true about them:

They’re personal and unique. What’s okay for you may not be okay for someone else — and that’s not a problem to solve. It’s just the reality of being two different people. I notice this even in professional training: I listen to my body to see what content resonates and what doesn’t. What I want to integrate, and what I set aside. That inner yes-and-no is a boundary, too — quiet but real.

They need to be communicated. People cannot read your mind. If you expect others to respect limits they don’t know exist, you’re setting both of you up for frustration. A simple example from my own life: I strongly dislike yelling. For me, it’s a boundary violation — my body contracts, I shut down. And I also recognize that for other people it’s simply a louder way of expressing emotion, and in some cultures it’s entirely normal. Neither of us is wrong. But if I never communicated that boundary, how would anyone know? This is harder than it sounds — especially if you grew up in an environment where communicating your boundaries wasn’t safe. But it’s a skill that can be learned.

They’re contextual. Your boundaries will naturally look different with a close friend than with a colleague, different in a relationship with a healthy power balance than in one where that balance is uneven. As a non-binary immigrant, I’m aware that how I assert my boundaries shifts depending on the safety of the context I’m in. That’s not inconsistency — that’s discernment.

Closeness itself has its own boundary rhythm. I discovered this through a somatic awareness exercise: I noticed I have two distinct “stop” points when getting to know someone. The first comes when someone moves from stranger to acquaintance — I need to pause there and see whether it feels genuinely okay before going further. The second comes when moving from acquaintance to genuine friendship — another stop, another waiting. If someone moves too fast, rushes toward closeness before trust has been built, something in me shuts down. That’s my boundary. And knowing it means I’m also responsible for communicating it — rather than simply withdrawing without explanation.

Boundaries evolve. As you heal, your standards change. Behaviours you once tolerated become unacceptable. And as trust deepens in healthy relationships, you may find yourself becoming more open, more vulnerable — because the relationship has earned it.

Recognizing when your boundaries have been crossed

Your body and emotions are constantly giving you signals. Learning to listen to them — rather than override them — is often the most important boundary skill there is.

The more obvious signals are anger, resentment, exhaustion, confusion, and irritation. I used to dismiss all of these. I’d tell myself I was being too sensitive. But when I started to notice my irritation or resentment as boundary signals rather than character flaws, I suddenly had a roadmap. The feeling wasn’t the problem — it was pointing me toward the problem.

Nervous system dysregulation is also a warning sign worth paying attention to. When something in a relationship consistently leaves you anxious, shut down, or unsettled, that’s your system trying to tell you something. It doesn’t always mean the other person has done something wrong — but it’s always worth getting curious about.

A less obvious signal: sometimes we violate our own inner boundaries when activated parts take over. We say yes when we mean no. We stay when we need to leave. We give more than we have. In those moments, the boundary that got crossed was our own — and the violation came from inside, not from the other person. Read more: Parts work to heal childhood trauma as an adult.

Anger deserves its own mention here. I’ve learned to embrace anger — not to act it out, but to hear it as a signal that something matters, that something isn’t okay, that I need to empower myself in some way. Anger as an emotion is healthy. It’s often the clearest signal that a boundary has been crossed.

What many of us need to learn — especially those who grew up in homes where anger meant danger — is how to express it in ways that don’t cause harm. Many of my clients have a complicated relationship with anger, particularly those who experienced childhood abuse where someone else’s anger was violent. When anger was a weapon in your childhood, feeling it yourself can be frightening. But the emotion itself isn’t the problem. Learning to work with it, rather than suppress or act it out, is part of the healing.

And one more thing worth noting: a consistent lack of appreciation in a relationship is a boundary violation. Not dramatic, not obvious — but it erodes something over time. Your body usually registers it before your mind does.

Common boundary violations to look out for

While boundaries are personal, certain behaviours generally cross healthy relationship lines. It helps to understand that violations tend to fall into two categories: intrusions and neglect.

Intrusions are active — someone is doing something that crosses your limit.

Any form of abuse (physical, emotional, sexual, or verbal), manipulative behaviour or emotional blackmail, constant criticism, mockery or contempt, racist or discriminatory behaviour, unsolicited advice, and having your “no” ignored or challenged.

That last one is worth sitting with. I said stop repeatedly to a partner once. He ignored it. When my nervous system responded to being continuously overridden — which is exactly what a nervous system does when it isn’t safe — he called me “crazy.” My reaction became the problem. His behaviour disappeared from the conversation entirely. That’s a violation layered on top of a violation: first ignoring my boundary, then using my trauma response to avoid any accountability for doing so. There was never space to look at what each of us was responsible for or to figure out how to create more safety. My reaction just became the reason nothing was ever his fault. 

This is a pattern worth naming on its own — I’ve written about it here: When you are dismissed and blamed – the drama triangle and how to reclaim your power.

Neglect violations are less obvious but equally real — someone consistently not showing up, making you wait, withholding appreciation, being emotionally unavailable, or using silence as punishment. The silent treatment deserves to be named directly: when silence is used to control, punish, or make someone feel invisible, it’s a boundary violation. These neglect patterns tend to build slowly, which makes them harder to name. You just feel the erosion over time.

The social context matters, too. Racism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and misogyny are boundary violations, whether they happen systemically or individually. While social conditioning plays a role, that doesn’t remove the need for accountability — including challenging that conditioning itself.

Someone’s past trauma doesn’t excuse their harmful present behaviour. Being trauma-informed doesn’t mean tolerating abuse. True compassion includes accountability and respect. Supporting someone’s growth is very different from enabling their harmful patterns.

Debunking common boundary myths

A few myths about boundaries are worth addressing directly — not just to debunk them, but to acknowledge why they’re so persistent.

“Boundaries push people away.” The opposite is closer to the truth. When someone tells me directly where their boundary is, I experience it as a gift. I don’t have to guess. I don’t have to walk on eggshells. Healthy boundaries create the conditions for real closeness — because both people can show up honestly rather than managing each other’s unspoken limits. What boundaries push away, over time, is resentment. And resentment is what actually destroys relationships.

“Love means no boundaries.” This one I believed for a long time. Love felt like it meant giving everything, tolerating everything, accepting everything. What I’ve learned — slowly, through healing — is that love without self-respect isn’t love. It’s self-abandonment dressed up as devotion. Unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional tolerance of harmful behaviour. The most loving relationships I’ve witnessed are also the most boundaried.

“Setting boundaries is selfish.” This is easy to dismantle intellectually — of course, taking care of yourself allows you to show up better for others. But truly embodying it, actually putting yourself first, being assertive when every part of you has learned that your needs don’t matter — that requires real growth. For many people with childhood trauma, selflessness wasn’t a virtue. It was a survival strategy.

Unlearning takes time, patience, and often support. Knowing it isn’t selfish and feeling it aren’t the same thing. This is also one of the harder lessons for parents — particularly mothers, who are culturally conditioned to put everyone else first. The expectation of endless selflessness runs deep, and challenging it can feel like failing at something fundamental. It isn’t. It’s one of the more courageous things a parent can do.

There’s one more reframe worth adding: setting healthy boundaries is a way of letting go of control, not gaining it. When I speak up for myself — respectfully, honestly — I release the outcome. Some younger parts of me may not like it because they want security, though our internal relationship needs to be good enough that they trust me to take care of them. The other person can only respond from their own frame of reference, their own history, their own wounds.

Receiving a boundary can be hard, even for people with good intentions. I can’t control how they respond. What I can do is trust myself enough to say what’s true, lean into the discomfort of not knowing how it will land, and trust that honesty — even when it’s hard — is what makes relationships real. That’s not control. That’s courage.

How to communicate your boundaries

Communicating boundaries is its own skill — and it deserves more space than a single section can hold. I’ve written a dedicated article on this if you want to go deeper: Communicating Boundaries: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me.

The short version: you don’t need lengthy explanations or justifications. “No” is a complete sentence. “Stop” is direct and clear. “I see it differently” holds your ground without needing to win. And when a boundary isn’t respected, naming a concrete next step — something within your control — is more useful than an empty threat.

One thing worth saying here: communicating a boundary means releasing the outcome. You can say what’s true for you, clearly and respectfully. What the other person does with it is theirs to own.

And if the conditions don’t feel safe enough to speak directly — because of power dynamics, systemic oppression, or the nature of the relationship — protecting yourself can look different. Silence, distance, giving less. These are valid choices, too. Context always matters.

Healthy versus unhealthy responses to boundaries

How someone responds when you set a boundary tells you a great deal — but the response itself isn’t the final word. Relationships are one of the primary places where we grow as human beings. What matters isn’t just the initial reaction, but whether there’s a willingness to reflect, learn, and adjust.

Healthy responses look like: respecting your limit even if disappointed, asking for clarification, or taking time to reflect before responding. Unhealthy responses look like: arguing, guilt-tripping, manipulating, ignoring the boundary entirely, or escalating.

But it’s worth adding nuance here. Not every poor response comes from bad intentions. Receiving a boundary can activate shame, fear of rejection, or old wounds in the other person. Someone might go quiet, get defensive, or overreact — not because they don’t care, but because something got triggered in them. That’s human. What differentiates a healthy relationship from an unhealthy one isn’t the absence of difficult reactions — it’s the willingness to get curious about them rather than let them take over.

If you notice shame coming up — in yourself or the other person — be curious about it. What is it protecting? What does it fear? Shame has a way of hijacking responses if we’re not paying attention to it. The goal isn’t to eliminate the discomfort, but to not let it make the decisions.

When I started setting boundaries, I was shocked at how differently people responded. Some respected them immediately. Others pushed back hard. That contrast taught me more about the health of my relationships than almost anything else. A small, low-stakes boundary can tell you a lot about whether a relationship has the foundation to go deeper.

I want to be honest about something: healthy relationships are often presented as the norm — as if most people are out there communicating clearly, respecting each other’s limits, and doing their inner work. In my years of practice, witnessing hundreds of people’s stories, I think healthy relationships are far less common than we’re led to believe. That’s not cause for despair — it’s cause for non-judgement. Most of us are doing the best we can with what we were taught. What matters is that we take responsibility and grow.

One of the clearest signs of a healthy relationship is that both people are willing to grow. So if you notice a response to a boundary that isn’t okay — in yourself or the other person — the question worth sitting with isn’t “is this relationship broken?” but “what can we learn from this, and are we both willing to change?” That willingness, more than any particular reaction in a single moment, is what determines whether a relationship can deepen over time.

Signs you need stronger boundaries in relationships

Boundaries exist on a spectrum. Too loose and you’re drained, overextended, absorbing what isn’t yours. Too rigid and you’re protected, but also isolated — unable to let in what’s good.

I’ve lived both ends of that spectrum. For much of my early life, my boundaries were too loose — I didn’t know how to protect myself, didn’t recognize when something wasn’t okay. Later, after coming out as non-binary and experiencing a level of hatred I wasn’t prepared for, my boundaries became rigid in a different way. I withdrew. I avoided people. It was the most protective thing I could do at the time, and I don’t say that with judgment — sometimes pulling back is the only reasonable response to being repeatedly hurt. But it also meant I was keeping out the connection I needed.

Both ends make sense in context. That’s important to remember. The goal isn’t to pathologize either pattern but to get curious about what’s driving it and whether it’s still serving you.

Some signs that boundaries may need attention: saying yes when you mean no, avoiding conflict by pleasing others, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, struggling to identify your own needs, compromising your values for approval, oversharing before trust is built, tolerating disrespect repeatedly, or conversely — not letting anyone in at all.

These patterns don’t mean you’re broken. They often come from past relational pain or trauma, from environments where they made complete sense. With patience, curiosity, and often support, they can shift.

In trauma-informed practice, boundaries aren’t just a communication skill — they’re a pathway back to self-trust and body safety. When we learn to listen to our body’s signals and honour them, we’re not just improving our relationships. We’re repairing the relationship with ourselves.

The path to healthier boundaries in relationships

Developing healthier boundaries is a practice, not a destination. And in my experience — both personal and professional — the path usually looks like healing the past and all the protective patterns that formed to keep us safe, but now prevent us from respecting ourselves.

That might not be what you were hoping to hear. But it’s the most honest thing I can offer. The patterns that get in the way of boundaries — people-pleasing, tolerating what isn’t okay, not recognizing when something feels wrong — rarely shift with information alone. They shift when we get curious about where they came from, what they were protecting us from, and whether they’re still needed now.

So the invitation is this: hold a compass of what healthy boundaries look like — not as a standard to measure yourself against, but as a direction to move toward. And alongside that, get curious about what prevents you from setting them. Not with judgment, but with genuine interest. What parts of you resist? What do they fear? What would they need to feel safe enough to try?

Pay attention to your nervous system. It will often tell you something is wrong before your mind catches up. Learn to recognize dysregulation as information rather than an inconvenience.

And be patient with the process. Healthy boundaries aren’t built in a weekend. They’re built layer by layer, through healing, through practice, through relationships that give you the chance to try again.

Curious where you stand right now? The Healthy Boundaries Quiz is a good place to start — not as a diagnostic tool, but as an invitation to reflect on where you are and where you want to go.

Moving forward: Your boundary practice

Strengthening your boundaries is a journey, not a one-time fix. Start small — a low-stakes boundary with someone you trust. Notice what your body tells you before you answer. Pause when you need to. Your “maybe” is a valid and honest response.

Boundaries are something I work on with almost every client I see. The reasons vary — childhood abuse, relational trauma, years of people pleasing, not knowing another way was possible. But what I witness again and again is that as the work deepens, something shifts. Many clients describe it simply: My life got so much easier. Not because the world changed, but because they started trusting themselves in it.

One story stays with me. A client who hadn’t been in a relationship for a long time — who had done deep healing work and was finally ready to try again. Each time they had the courage to set a boundary with this new person, he responded with respect. Every time. I watched them discover, slowly and with some disbelief, that it was possible to be seen and respected at the same time. That’s what I wish for every client I work with. And for you, reading this.

Your boundaries aren’t just about what you won’t accept — they’re about creating space for the love, respect, and connection you do want. That’s where real transformation begins.

Where to go from here

If you recognize yourself in these pages — the people-pleasing, the not-quite-naming-it, the exhaustion you assumed was just life — that recognition is the beginning. But recognizing the pattern and knowing what’s actually in the way of changing it are two different things.

That’s what the free guide Not a Bad Habit is for. It’s not a fix, and it’s not another list of things to try harder at. It’s a way to start understanding what’s underneath the resistance — the parts of you that learned to disappear, to please, to override your own signals — so the work ahead makes more sense.

Get the free guide: Not a Bad Habit.

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