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. To cause hurt and be hurt is to be crushed with the scariest feeling I’ve ever known.

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.

Boundaries, as you will soon see, should help us avoid extremes and live closer to the kind of love God intended for relationships. 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.

I had given every bit of love and forgiveness I knew to give, and it wasn’t enough. 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. Without trust, love will die. So, I had to say it: “You cannot build trust that keeps getting broken.”

Friend, you may be brokenhearted. You may be sad. You may be afraid and possibly angry. You may be focused on trying to fix what isn’t within your ability to fix. And you may even be fixated on trying to figure everything out.

Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

A hurtful statement can be called a mistake. But a repeated pattern of hurtful statements or uncaring attitudes or even unjust expectations is much more than a mistake.

In a relationship when truth is manipulated, denied, or partially omitted for the sake of covering up behaviors that should be addressed, dysfunctions may not just be difficult, they may become destructive.

He loves us unconditionally and He will not tolerate our sin. Both are true with God and both can be true in our relationships as well. God had grace but His grace was there to lead people to better behavior, not to enable bad behavior. And the same should be true of our grace as well.

I want to speak tenderly to your heart. Just you and me. You’re going to make it. And so am I. But it’s going to get hard. Really hard.

Anxiety has gotten such a bad rap for way too long. We are told not to be anxious (Philippians 4:6). That is biblical and good. But remember, the focus of this verse and the surrounding verses isn’t to shame us for being anxious but rather to remind us that the Lord is near and what to do proactively with our thoughts when anxiety comes.

And there were so many setbacks and tears and reverting to old ways of thinking and reacting. Having your life turned upside down is brutally devastating, but it can help shake loose some emotionally unhealthy issues that need tending.

What I like about Philippians 1:9–10 is that the love here is associated with knowledge and discernment. So, the inverse is also true. A lack of wisdom and discernment is actually unloving. Sometimes we only associate love as a feeling. But we have to remember that biblical love is an intentional action where we want what’s best for us and the other person. Keeping this in mind, when setting boundaries our heart posture should be one of wisdom and discernment for the sake of true and healthy love.

Somewhere in all the looking around at others for validation, we’ve stopped looking up. If we are living honest lives that honor God, we must not forget that people not liking our boundary does not mean we aren’t living right before God.

Here’s who I am. I am a woman who loves God and loves other people. Therefore, because of Christ in me (Galatians 2:20), I am empowered to be the version of me God intended when He created me. I’m kind, creative, caring, generous, fun, and loyal.

Okay, your turn to answer this crucial question: Who am I? Pause here. Think about this. And if you’re having a hard time answering, maybe it’s because you’ve lost her. Sometimes we’ve let other people’s opinions and needs define us for so long that we lose ourselves in the process. Or maybe circumstances have been so confusing, maybe even brutal, that we feel like life has reduced us to someone who others feel badly for. I’ve felt this exact way during the past several years of my life. I wanted to be a victorious woman of God, not a victim of a bunch of circumstances that caught me off guard and ripped the rug out from beneath me.

Think of a memory, a memory from early on in your life, and try to remember who you were before you started looking to others for validation. Before you started becoming so hyperaware of your faults and frailties that you stopped seeing yourself as worthy, valuable, and designed by God on purpose.

Walk confidently in the fact that our all-sufficient God did not make you insufficient or broken.

Sometimes the worst kind of anger and bitterness happens when you feel forced to smile on the outside while you are screaming on the inside. I’ve been that woman. Sometimes losing my temper because I’d let things go so long, I just couldn’t hold back my frustration any longer. Or, sometimes biting my tongue so long that I lost the desire to stay close to that person.

We feel deeply, so we hurt immensely. Our mind and pulse are constantly racing from triggers and fears and worst-case scenarios.

What makes a whole person? I know this is a big question. But it is worth looking at because being whole has a big impact on not only our health but on the quality of the relationships we are drawn to. Whole people tend to gravitate toward whole people. Fractured people tend to attract other fractured people.

I must stay whole by keeping what I know, what I feel, and what I do in alignment with God’s truth about who I am.

Someone else being disappointed doesn’t make us a disappointment.

When we are giving most of our energy and efforts each day trying so hard to stay “good” with another person, we stop paying attention to our own well-being.

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.

Because God has a limitless supply, only He can meet all our needs (Philippians 4:19). Because God created us, only He can truly access the depths and fullness of someone’s heart (Romans 8:26–27). Because nothing is too hard for God, only He can sustain the type of giving a desperate soul longs for (Jeremiah 32:27).

We will always desperately want from other people what we fear we will never get from God.

God calls us to obey Him. God does not call us to obey every wish and whim of other people. God calls us to love other people. God does not call us to demand that they love us back and meet every need we have.

Healthy relationships don’t feel threatening. Loving relationships don’t feel cruel. Secure relationships don’t feel as if everything could implode if you dared to draw a boundary.

Grief-filled memories are tucked underneath layers of pain written out on emotional scar tissue. And most of the time, when a goodbye has been spoken, memories become an impossible tangle of both grief and greatness, sorrow and celebration, and sighs in the bread aisle on a Wednesday morning.

I wonder why the term is goodbye? What’s good about a goodbye that takes pieces of your heart you don’t want to see taken? What’s good about a goodbye that makes you wonder if you’ll survive the remembering? What’s good about a goodbye that’s impossibly permanent, that you didn’t want or ever anticipate happening?

It’s interesting that the original phrase in the late 1500s was “God Be with Ye.” The contraction of that phrase was “Godbwye” which eventually became “goodbye.”1 I’ve sat with the thought of goodbyes being more of a sending off with God rather than a slammed door, a contact deleted, and a puddle of angst.

I don’t want to be a pit dweller. I want to walk in the light. I want to delight in the truth. And I want my heart, mind, and words to reflect my devotion to God. I will not bow down to someone’s mistreatment, but I also will not rise up with such angst and anger that I violate God’s truth in the way I exit. I’d like a little more “God be with you” in my goodbyes.

When healing from past emotional devastation, it’s normal for the impact of what happened to present itself in the form of triggers. But what seriously tripped me up was thinking the alarm bells going off in my heart and mind were triggers from the past when in reality they were an indication of fresh trauma happening. New lies. New pain. New trauma. New denials. New confusion. New destruction.

I wasn’t the one breaking away from relational health. I wasn’t the one breaking promises and breaking hearts. I wasn’t the one leaving the place we’d worked so hard to get to. And that’s when I could finally say, “I’m not giving up. I’m not walking away. I’m choosing to finally accept reality.”

I wrongly thought that eventually I could do enough, pray enough, give in enough, rescue enough, or make myself change for him enough, and finally an equilibrium of peace could be reached. But that’s not what this verse means. I guess I missed those first couple of words Paul intentionally used with this verse, “if possible,” which imply sometimes it is not possible.

Processing a possible goodbye isn’t permission to peace out or tap out. It’s a pathway toward grieving and accepting one of the toughest realities we will ever face—an unsustainable relationship.

It’s so hard to recognize what is when you’ve been persistently trying to get someone to step into what could be. You can see it so clearly. It’s 7:30 EST to you. But it’s still just 4:30 PST to them. And unless you can alter the universe and wrangle the sun, you just aren’t going to be able to get your vision and their vision to align. And chances are it will make you cry. Not because they are missing the sunset, but because you’re both going to miss out on what could have been. It will all seem so senseless.

I didn’t have epic expectations. They were normal things that healthy relationships need in order to survive. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to feel heard. I wanted to feel I could believe what the person was saying was actually true. And I wanted to know they had my best interest in mind just like I had their best interest in mind.

As we better grieve the sorrows, we will soon receive our tomorrows with a little more healing and a lot more life.

But though I’d had good intentions with my grace and love, I finally had to let go and work on issues that were mine to own. The most honorable thing to do was to trust God to be the Rescuer, to be brave enough to turn every part of this over to Him and let the next chapters of my story unfold.

The greatest joy in life isn’t when it all works out like we hoped it would. It’s when we experience the God of the universe pausing to reach us and remind us we aren’t alone. What hurts us will not be our full story. And this broken world isn’t our final destination. With God, there’s so much more.

The secret is not to get lost in the heartbreak, stuck in all that seems so unfair, or paralyzed by our own mistakes along the way. I closed my eyes and let a few more tears fall. Again, I whispered, “Good bye, good bye, God be with you, good bye.”

So, you have a sense that it’s just not right to make changes in a relationship if those changes are going to cause the other person any kind of hardship at all. It’s easier to manage the hurt inflicted on us rather than the hurt we could potentially cause someone else if we set a boundary. So, you keep trying. You keep carrying weight you aren’t designed to carry. You keep paying the consequences of someone else’s choices. You keep saying yes. You keep giving in, just praying you don’t give out. Maybe one more time of extra grace from you. Maybe one more time rescuing them. Maybe one more time looking the other way and suddenly they will turn a corner and bring home base back to you.

You hold up statements you believe to be true and preach them to yourself like a rallying cry. And then you drench your pillow once again because you know you can’t keep doing this.