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

by Lysa TerKeurst

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.

But when your life is so tightly woven into a collective fabric of a close relationship, 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, much like exploding hand grenades. You don’t have to be the one to pull the pin to be deeply devastated by the resulting shrapnel.

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.

“Adults inform. Children explain.”

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.

“Your healing will bring out the emotional immaturity of those around you not willing to pursue health for themselves.”

“What people don’t work out, they act out.”

Grieve someone’s refusal to keep growing, but don’t beg them to see your boundaries as a good thing.

If a person has unaddressed childhood trauma, when someone draws a boundary with them, the person may revert to an age when they first felt unsafe.

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.

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.

“God’s love isn’t based on me. It’s simply placed on me. And it’s the place from which I should live . . . loved.”

It’s my responsibility not to let another person’s actions and expectations wear me down to the worst version of myself.

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

Trauma isn’t just something that happens to you. It happens in you.

we can be a resource for them when needed, but we should not become the source of what sustains them.