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

by Lysa TerKeurst

I dedicate this message to the courageous woman who will make some hard but very brave decisions to step out of chaos toward health and honesty.

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.

We can’t enable bad behavior and call it love.

Love should be what draws us together not what tears us apart.

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

The problem is that trust is an incredibly fragile thing to rebuild. The setbacks are cruel. Unexpected sprains are debilitating. And if twisted backward to the point of fracture, the splinters of trust broken over and over are daggers to the heart.

Without trust, love will die.

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.

Love breathes the oxygen of trust.

Health cannot bond with unhealth. So, either I had to get unhealthy and enable this cycle to continue, or I had to follow through with the boundaries we had agreed upon.

it can be excruciatingly maddening to watch someone choose things you know are destructive. Though their choices are their own, the consequences have an impact on everyone who loves them,

If you go with what they say, you’ll become more and more convinced you’re the problem. If you oppose what they say, they will make sure you feel you are definitely the problem. Either way, you lose. And I was losing . . . my health, my emotional well-being and, even if I didn’t want to admit it, my marriage.

All relationships can be difficult at times, but they should not be destructive to our well-being.

Where there is an abundance of chaos, there is usually a lack of good boundaries. Chaos shouldn’t be the norm and while we can’t always change the source of the chaos, we must tend to what we can change.

We don’t want the hurt they’ve caused to make us betray who we really are. We aren’t cruel or mean-spirited so we don’t want to bring any of that into our boundary setting. I also want to have compassion because I don’t have life so figured out that I never act and react in unhealthy ways. I have my own issues that I need to work on and work through with counseling. And certainly learning to have compassion appropriately, while still also having boundaries, continues to be one of my biggest lessons.

So, a trigger makes you anxious because it sets off an alarm, making you feel something isn’t right or safe. But the trigger is not the main issue—the main issue is the unhealed trauma still inside you. When you get triggered, it’s pointing either to something from your past not yet healed inside you or a new trauma happening in the present moment.

At first, like I said, I just thought the problem was me. Why was I getting so frustrated? I thought I needed to work on my patience. So, I did. But things didn’t get better. So, I thought I needed to work on my expectations. Maybe they were too high? Then I found out that expectations are sometimes simmering resentments in disguise. Ouch. So, I changed my phraseology from “expectations” to “needs and desires.” That helped, until it didn’t.

I finally had to realize that to continue to try and solve the problem was part of the problem.

The real issue was I started to resent the amount of emotional access to my life I had given to her. If you are a highlighting kind of person, swipe some yellow across that word access. It’s a big one. It’s especially big if we are knee deep in a close relationship and we start feeling unheard, unsafe, uncared for, taken advantage of, or made to pay consequences for choices that we had no control over.

I haven’t been as wise about understanding how to guard my heart. Maybe this has been a problem for many of us. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

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.

When Jesus came to make atonement for our sins, we were forgiven, and we are also required to live lives where forgiveness is given and received in our relationships with others. Ongoing and unrepented sins still have consequences. God offers all people love, but not all people will have access to life in eternity with Him. Why? Because sin separates. So, if we never repent of our sins and accept the new hearts that come through salvation in Christ, the wages of sin are eternal separation from God.

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.

Setting a boundary is being responsible enough to reduce the access we grant to others based on their ability to be responsible with that access. People who are irresponsible with our hearts should not be granted great access to our hearts. And the same is true for all other kinds of access as well—physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial.

Bottom line: God established boundaries to protect intimacy, not decimate it. And we should do the same. How to do this appropriately is what this entire message is about.

People who are irresponsible with our hearts should not be granted great access to our hearts.

Being aware of our dysfunctions doesn’t fix them. If we want healthier relationships we must also be willing to address them.

Because of the Fall (Gen. 2–3), all of us have some level of distortion or dysfunction. We do not perceive, think, feel, or behave in the healthiest way possible at all times. As a result, emotional distortions such as latent anxiety, shame, low self-esteem, pessimism, depression, and perfectionism (among others) dynamically interact and affect marriage and family interactions.

Distortions of reality feed dysfunctions.

People who are genuine and honest don’t go on and on trying to convince you what a good person they are. Proverbs 31:30 reminds us that “charm is deceptive.” I know all this. And still, sometimes I can so desperately want things to be better that I try to reframe reality and convince myself that the person has changed when they haven’t. My confusion or exhaustion, or my compassion, can make me want to give in. Even when the reality of life screams no. Even when I know I’m rescuing, and I shouldn’t be. Even when it hurts me. Even when it’s unhealthy for me. Even when, based on past experiences, I know saying yes in the short term will cause extremely hard dynamics in the long term. Still, I find myself giving in. And when I do give in, the boundary I’d worked so hard to establish becomes nothing more than a passive suggestion or a threat I never intended to keep. Ugh. Then I’m not just frustrated by that person’s lack of respect—I’m doubly frustrated by my own inability to respect myself. When we allow a boundary to be violated, bad behavior will be validated.

We are to guard and protect our hearts and our minds to make sure we keep good in and evil out. We are to guard and protect our testimony and make sure our lives produce the fruit of God’s Spirit in us. And we are to guard and protect our calling to love God and love people. (Note to self: that doesn’t say love God and enable people.)

Healthy changes in someone can’t be measured just by the words they speak. There must be evidence of changed thoughts, changed habits, changed behaviors, changed reactions, and changed patterns demonstrated consistently over a long period of time. How long? As long as it takes.

Don’t continue to excuse negative or destructive patterns of behavior or addictions, as if they are just occasional slip-ups and isolated mistakes. There is something deeper going on in the foundational thinking and processing of someone who has been hurting you with their poor choices over and over. “Things are better” is not the same as “things are healed.”

Sometimes it takes me a long time to acknowledge reality. And that’s certainly been true for me in relationships. Being loyal and hoping things will get better is not a bad trait until hope deferred starts to make my heart sick (Proverbs 13:12).

It’s not that we don’t want to be prayerful and hopeful and eager for positive changes in the other person’s life. But we don’t want to become so eager and overcommitted to their health that we stay undercommitted to our own.

I am not honoring Jesus when I give permission for the other person to act in ways that Jesus never would.

“Adults inform. Children explain.”—Jim Cress

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.

Just like spending that gets out of control can bankrupt a person’s finances, expending too much emotionally can bankrupt a person’s well-being. We think we can just keep taking it. Overlooking it. Navigating around it. Making excuses for it. Reframing it. Numbing out so we don’t have to deal with it. Praying about it. Fussing about it. Crying about it. Ignoring it. Blaming it. Shaming it. And dropping a million hints about it. When people aren’t respectful of our limits, we can set boundaries, or we can pay consequences. Whatever the “it” is and whoever it involves, please know there is an enormous cost that you and I are probably not factoring in—the trauma1 it’s doing to us.

When you are suffering because of choices that affect you but you have no control over, it’s time to start naming what’s really going on. It’s either a situation of misuse of someone’s access to you or a situation of abuse of their influence over you. And often it’s both at the same time.

Are you in love with their potential instead of who they are right now?

“If someone is getting in the way of you becoming the person God created you to be or frustrating the work God has called you to do, for you that person is toxic.”3

There’s a difference between difficult relationships that have issues that need to be worked through and destructive relationships that are causing harm to the individuals and others around them.

It’s understandable that you and I feel anxious when someone is misusing or abusing the access we give them. But we need to let that anxiety be an alarm and not a constant state of being.

there’s been an issue in your marriage, and you want to have an open, healthy conversation with your spouse.

“Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t say it mean.”

Proverbs 15:1 says, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” And Colossians 4:6 says, “Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” This doesn’t mean we don’t say the hard things or set boundaries. It means we recognize we want conflict resolution instead of conflict escalation.

We can set a boundary, or we will set the stage for simmering resentments. Simmering in the frustrations of knowing things need to change, or trying to get the other person to change, is way more damaging than a boundaries conversation.

Stand firm and state the consequences with dignity and respect.