Who Deserves Your Love: How to Create Boundaries to Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

by K.C. Davis

In my experience, the biggest problem with relationship advice isn’t bad advice. It’s good advice applied incorrectly.

When you experience a pervasive lack of psychological safety in childhood, you learn to hide, suppress, or despise the most vulnerable pieces of yourself because they will be weaponized against you. You hide them to protect yourself, but, in doing so, you ensure that you never get the opportunity to prove the story wrong.

Everyone deserves love, but no one is entitled to yours.

What I mean by moral neutrality is that in most relationships, there isn’t a good guy and a bad guy, someone who is totally right and someone who is totally wrong. There are just two imperfect people activating each other’s sensitivities and making emotional decisions. Looking at conflict this way shows us that the blame does not go to one person alone, but rather that two people are in a system. They act in relation to each other.

Long story short: your brain thinks your feelings want to kill you.

It’s simply to regain enough behavioral control during heightened emotional states and nervous system arousal that you can make choices that help you, do not harm others, and align with your values and goals.

The process of losing connection with your thinking brain is called emotional dysregulation. When you are emotionally dysregulated, your ability to function can be completely overwhelmed by your survival brain, which is dedicated to keeping you alive and safe from danger.

For me, it’s a panicky feeling, a racing heart, and chest tightening that signal that I am being activated. Just being aware of when this is happening can be the signal I need to realize the survival brain is taking over and I need to pause before reacting.

Stimulate your vagus nerve. This nerve runs from your brain to your abdomen. When activated, the vagus nerve can lower your heart rate and blood pressure, helping your body relax. Apply a cold compress to your breastbone or the back of your neck. The cold activates the vagus nerve. Drink ice-cold water. Many studies show even something

Activate the mammalian dive reflex. Hold your breath and submerge your face, specifically your nostrils, in very cold water. This submersion exercise lowers your heart rate and increases oxygen to your organs, helping you calm the survival brain and return to your window of tolerance.

Just because someone’s behavior feels like an attack doesn’t mean it is. Just because this issue feels urgent doesn’t mean I have to do anything right this moment. Just because I am in emotional pain doesn’t mean it won’t end.

Instead, the goal is to stop making yourself the subject of her story. This helps to prevent your own insecurities from being activated by hers. You are adopting a new story that removes you from the center of the narrative. She is not picking on you because you are a bad parent or because she is out to get you personally, but because she struggles with her own insecurities and sensitivities. Now you can decide how you want to respond rather than simply reacting. You can stop exhausting yourself trying to gain her approval or taking the bait when she lures you into a power struggle.

the takeaway: Just because you understand where someone is coming from, doesn’t mean you approve of where they’re going.

If staying does not violate your values, you must acknowledge that this person may never be willing to address their behavior. If you still want to stay, then you must own your decision. Do not spend your energy trying to make them willing. Your focus shifts to learning how to create boundaries in this relationship to protect your well-being.

Good people with big hearts who want to change sometimes experience morally neutral barriers that make it difficult to regulate their emotions and behavior.

But you must also acknowledge that bad actors—real assholes who do not care how their behavior affects you and have no intention of working on themselves—can also have disabilities, addiction, or trauma.

There is no disability to which the appropriate accommodation is a human punching bag.

The decision of how to proceed in a relationship with someone who hurts you cannot be based solely on how sympathetic you are to their struggles.

you don’t have to be bad to be wrong (for each other).

But before you jump, I’d like to suggest that you ensure that getting in front of that bullet actually stops the bullet. If the bullet goes through you and hits your children anyway, now you have a child with a gunshot wound and a parent who can’t help them.

You may feel that if you face the absolute truth about a situation you will “have to do something,” and if you don’t do that thing you will be judged, even if only by yourself. I’d like to relieve that anxiety. Assessing a relationship is a journey of gentle information seeking.

sometimes the enjoyment in a bid comes from the enjoyment you get witnessing your partner’s enjoyment—not from your interest in the topic. It’s delighting in another person’s delight. You do not need to love everything your partner or friend or child loves. And your partner, friend, or child does not need to enjoy the things you love. But you deserve to have a relationship in which the other person sees you in the things you love.

Learning to get better at bids can only help you express an affection you already feel. Getting good at turning into bids does not create affection or enjoyment.

While some struggle with needing potential partners to meet an unreasonable checklist of qualities and accomplishments, others may have the opposite problem. They see potential everywhere. How many people have stayed in a relationship for far too long waiting for their partner to change and become the person they want them to be?

I believe potential only matters when you are looking at someone who has had a lack of opportunities, not someone who is demonstrating a lack of effort or integrity. One is about guessing trajectory based on current behavior, the other is about hoping for a sudden change in trajectory despite there being no evidence for it.

The belief that slapping therapeutic labels (such as “boundaries”) on problematic and controlling behavior magically makes it appropriate behavior.

Real boundaries aren’t about what you say or do—they are internal. They provide a sense of where I end and you begin—what’s my responsibility and what’s not.

If we think of a boundary as defining where you and I begin and end, then we can picture a line that separates us from another person. Our side of the line contains the things we have agency over and are responsible for. On their side of the line are the things we do not have agency over and are not our responsibility.

Having boundaries means you can mentally map out what’s your responsibility and what’s not. On your side of the line are your needs, values, decisions, and body. Your responsibility to stand up for yourself is on your side. What your sister thinks or feels about your request or your feelings are not your responsibility or in your control.

The point is that you’re taking action based on the decision to help yourself, not to control her, or change her, or because you are too afraid to be in the presence of her feelings. That’s being boundaried.

Here I want to clarify the idea of consequences. Consequences aren’t a part of boundaries, but you can, and do, make decisions based on behavior.

Part of enacting this kind of a boundary is to refuse to take on the burden of the awkwardness, tension, or embarrassment of her behavior any longer. I call this return to sender. Maybe she now feels awkward or uneasy. Maybe she is angry that you keep bringing it up. This isn’t in your control. But in addressing your feelings, you’ve refused to take on those feelings for the both of you. In this way, you remain engaged in a relationship with her in a boundaried way.

Shirking accountability for hurtful or inconsiderate behavior and telling someone else how they must feel about it is a lack of boundaries. People get to feel however they feel about your behavior—and you don’t get to control that.

One of the greatest challenges with drawing boundaries is becoming comfortable with being misunderstood. When you go round and round with someone, getting sucked into trying to make them understand your motives and agree with your decision, you are crossing that boundary—across the line that separates you from them—by trying to control things you can’t, which, in this case, is another person’s emotions and perspectives. Just allowing that another person can have a different reality than yours is one of the most boundaried things you can do.

I believe we have a responsibility to all people to respect their human dignity. This doesn’t mean being nice or even kind to everyone. It means refraining from acting in a way that maliciously pursues the suffering or degradation of another person.

Most people are shocked to realize that people-pleasing isn’t about other people’s comfort—it’s about your own. It’s about your sense of self being so determined by the opinions and feelings of others that you must manage those things by contorting yourself around the needs of others.

Healing from people-pleasing means that you stop being controlled by other people’s feelings and opinions. But you can’t do that unless you realize that managing the feelings of others has always been a way to manage your own.

If managing people is how you manage your emotions, identity, and well-being, you need to recognize that it’s not your job to rescue others from feelings of distress.

I think it is much more helpful to think about boundary mistakes, such as people-pleasing, as overfunctioning. Someone who overfunctions in relationships is constantly reaching over that boundary line to take responsibility for things that are not their responsibility.

Enabling is a type of overfunctioning where you usurp responsibilities because you are afraid of letting the other person experience the consequences of their destructive behavior.

One of the hardest boundary lessons is that a great many things that are not your fault are now your responsibility. Mental health disorders, addiction, ADHD—none of those things are anyone’s fault—but their impact on your life and your behavior is your responsibility to manage.

You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.