Good Boundaries and Goodbyes: Loving Others Without Losing the Best of Who You Are

by Lysa TerKeurst

To love and be loved is to be enveloped in the safest feeling I’ve ever known.

We set boundaries so we know what to do when we very much want to love those around us really well without losing ourselves in the process. Good boundaries help us preserve the love within us even when some relationships become unsustainable and we must accept the reality of a goodbye.

But we can’t enable bad behavior in ourselves and others and call it love. We can’t tolerate destructive patterns and call it love. And we can’t pride ourselves on being loyal and longsuffering in our relationships when it’s really perpetuating violations of what God says love is.

Love must be honest. Love must be safe. Love must seek each person’s highest good.

And love must honor God to experience the fullness and the freedom of the sweetest connection between two humans.

Boundaries protect the right kind of love and help prevent dysfunction from destroying that love. Boundaries help us say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, and establish what is and isn’t acceptable. Love should be what draws us together not what tears us apart.

Setting boundaries from a place of anger and bitterness will only lead to control and manipulation. Setting boundaries as a punishment will only serve to imprison us. But setting boundaries from a place of love provides an opportunity for relationships to grow deeply because true connection thrives within the safety of health and honesty.

When we’re hurt, good boundaries and goodbyes help us to not get stuck in a perpetual state of living hurt.

Love given is wildly beautiful. Love received is wildly fulfilling. But for love to thrive as true and lasting, it must be within the safety of trust.

I now believe we must honor what honors God. And in doing so, we must not confuse the good commands to love and forgive with the bad realities of enabling and covering up things that are not honoring to God. When someone’s dishonorable actions beg us not to stay, this should give us serious pause.

expectations are sometimes simmering resentments in disguise.

The real issue was I started to resent the amount of emotional access to my life I had given to her.

We don’t want to get so consumed with the pain and chaos of unhealthy relationship patterns that we become a carrier of human hurt rather than a conduit of God’s love.

it’s not just what someone does or doesn’t do; it’s what her actions represent.

a repeated pattern of hurtful statements or uncaring attitudes or even unjust expectations is much more than a mistake.

Like God, we must require from people the responsibility necessary to grant the amount of access we allow them to have in our lives. Too much access without the correct responsibility is detrimental.

Relationships often die not because of conversations that were had but rather conversations that were needed but never had.

Distortions of reality feed dysfunctions.

I’ve assumed other people had the same definitions about how to care for the relationship, how to care for one another, and how to take care of issues that arise.

I had allowed her to have such a prominent place in my heart and mind that her words and actions carried a lot of weight. So much so, that when she was irresponsible with what she said or did it really affected my well-being.

If I don’t take my need for a boundary seriously, I can’t expect other people to take me seriously enough to respect my boundary.

When other people excuse away or minimize this person’s behavior, keeping the boundary can feel doubly difficult. If others don’t feel personally threatened or triggered by this person’s behavior, then they may accuse me of making more out of this situation than I “should.”

When we allow a boundary to be violated, bad behavior will be validated.

Don’t continue to excuse negative or destructive patterns of behavior or addictions, as if they are just occasional slip-ups and isolated mistakes.

So, if we draw a boundary and someone says we aren’t “acting like Jesus” we can certainly check ourselves—our tone, our words, and our actions. But remember to consider the source of that statement. The problem isn’t the boundary, it’s that the other person won’t respect the boundary.

Remember, boundaries aren’t going to fix the other person. But they are going to help you stay fixed on what is good, what is acceptable, and what you need to stay healthy and safe.

expending too much emotionally can bankrupt a person’s well-being.

The person who continues to break your heart isn’t in a place to properly care for your heart.

If your friends think you are accepting too little and at the same time you’re wondering if you’re expecting too much, pay attention to that.

Then there is the pressure I feel as a Christian woman to turn the other cheek, be gracious at all times, and do everything I can to smooth things over. But if I’m honest, overly passive reactions haven’t been serving me or others very well. While being passive may look good at first, if I’m letting the tension of the situation build and intensify, I run the risk of getting so worn out from the hard dynamics at play that I start slipping back into immature reactions and unhealthy patterns.

Peter reminds us that while it is true that God wants us to give Him our anxiety, we also have a responsibility to stay clear-headed and pay attention to what is affecting and triggering our emotions.

Healthy equilibrium in a relationship is possible only when both people are equally committed to these things: healthy habits, self-awareness, and empathy for the feelings of the other person.

I didn’t understand that the rules were to help us learn how to be responsible humans. Those rules evoked in me a great fear of being judged as a bad person.

felt I must be known as a good person in order for me to accept myself.

saw good kids get on the wrong side of some not-so-good kids. It became their game to make up stuff about the good kids and then convince the teacher to call the targeted student up to the board and flip their card to yellow.

2nd grade: John P. and the dictionary debacle. Thankfully Mrs. W. knew my character and I didn’t get in trouble. But isn’t God like that? Isn’t that part of salvation? God knows our hearts despite our sin and loves us anyway.

This whole thing wasn’t just about following the rules. It was about managing people’s perception of me. And I think most of us, no matter what our natural bent is, don’t want to be misunderstood, misrepresented, or have intentions assigned to us that are not true.

We don’t want wrong narratives assigned to us that misalign with who we really are.

The mindset I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is this: people’s opinions define who we are. If we live with this mindset, we will be desperate to try and control people’s perception of us. We will spend our lives managing opinions to always be favorable toward us so we can feel good about ourselves.

If we are filtering our thoughts of boundaries through wrong perceptions, it’s no wonder many of us find boundaries not just challenging but pretty close to impossible. Here’s why: We aren’t sure who we really are. We aren’t sure what we really need. We aren’t sure that if others walked away from us, we’d be okay.

So, boundaries help me stay true to who I really am. Without boundaries, I can hyperextend myself to the point where I become anxious, bitter, resentful, angry, annoyed, and distant. That’s not who I really am, so it’s my responsibility not to let another person’s actions and expectations wear me down to the worst version of myself. In a biblical sense, it’s me not allowing another person to make me betray who I am in Christ.

Remember, you are closest to who you really are when you are the closest to who He created you to be.

All that a seed goes through to grow into a plant is part of the process of becoming what it was designed to be—not a process of determining its worth or value

When we know who we are, we are whole and available to love, serve, and give to others from that fullness. If we don’t know who we are, then we will love, serve, and give, hoping people will fill our empty places and make us feel whole. And in doing so, we will always be defined by how well or how poorly someone else makes us feel.

If you personalize an incident by attaching it to your identity, you’ll bear the weight of it like an unremovable scarlet letter. If you don’t personalize it, but rather see the situation as a moment to pause and consider, you’ll be better able to humbly determine what to do, and how to process it.

Maybe this is an opportunity to ask yourself, is this something that is supposed to reform me or inform me? If some part of this situation helps develop you in healthy ways, receive it as a growth opportunity.

the goal of someone else being happy shouldn’t be your definition of healthy.

You are whole and healthy when who you are as a child of God is in alignment with what you know (orthodoxy), what you feel (orthopathy), and what you do (orthopraxy).

No trauma is healed in a healthy way by developing unhealthy ways of coping.

I want to be is driven by a desire. I must be is driven by a demand. And when our desires shift into becoming demands, we run the risk of getting caught in the most serious form of people pleasing. I’m not talking about the kind of people pleasing where we just want to keep someone happy so we can be liked by them. I’m talking about fearing that our needs will go unmet if we draw healthy boundaries with someone, so we let the person take complete advantage of us.

People pleasing isn’t just about keeping others happy. It’s about getting from them what we think we must have in order to feel okay in the world.