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

by Lysa TerKeurst

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

What people don’t work out, they act out. When someone doesn’t work through their issues, they’ll make their issues your issues.

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.

We also determine appropriate consequences for specific boundary violations. We literally make a list that says, “If he does this, you do this.” What is communicated in vagueness, stays in vagueness, so we want to get as specific as possible.