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

by Lysa TerKeurst

Again, we don’t want to overexplain or debate our need for this boundary. But we can be gracious in our communication around this boundary.

BOUNDARIES HELP YOU FIGHT FOR THE RELATIONSHIP Boundaries are for your sake and theirs so you don’t have to keep fighting against unhealthy behaviors, attitudes, and patterns.

4. A BOUNDARY WITHOUT A REAL CONSEQUENCE WILL NEVER BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

logic. A boundary presented as a hopeful wish is nothing but a weak suggestion. And a boundary presented as a threat will only do more damage. If we can’t or won’t follow through with a consequence, then that person will eventually stop respecting what we have to say and ignore all future boundary attempts.

It’s often people who need boundaries the most who will respect them the least.

5. PLAY OUT HOW THIS BOUNDARY WILL BENEFIT YOU

We are taking responsibility to keep our own sanity, safety, and serenity in check. We aren’t responsible for the other person’s choices, but we are responsible for our actions and our reactions.

It will be challenging if you have to implement the consequences, but if you’ve already made peace with this whole process, you won’t get nearly as confused and frustrated. Getting to a better place is good even if it doesn’t feel good in the moment.

Passivity wasn’t working. Wishful thinking wasn’t working. By not addressing the situation I wasn’t being self-controlled. I was avoiding. And possibly even enabling behavior that could no longer go unaddressed.

My friend Candace recently said to me, “Your healing will bring out the emotional immaturity of those around you not willing to pursue health for themselves.”

when you decide to establish boundaries and the other person tries to label you as controlling, difficult, or uncooperative, see it as a compliment. Yes, you read that right—see it as a compliment. They are frustrated with you because you are no longer willing to participate in the unhealthy patterns of the past. You have decided to raise your actions and words to higher levels of maturity. And if someone chooses not to join you, there will be great tension.

You cannot force people to do what they are not willing to do. You don’t need to fight it. Agree with it and accept it. Grieve someone’s refusal to keep growing, but don’t beg them to see your boundaries as a good thing. They may never see your boundaries as a good thing.

You will never be able to stay where you are and lift them to a more mature or healthy place. They have to do the work themselves.

The hardship isn’t just the tension between where you are and where they are. The real risk is the longer you stay in this tension, the possibility increases that you’ll get pulled down.

As I’ve said before, health cannot bond with unhealth. A refusal to grow and mature emotionally is a big indication of unhealth. The American Psychological Association defines emotional maturity as “a high and appropriate level of emotional control and expression.”1 Emotional immaturity, on the other hand, is “a tendency to express emotions without restraint or disproportionately to the situation.”2 Pay close attention to the words without restraint.

Mature people can disagree but still respect the sanity of the other person. Mature people are willing to see the impact their actions are having on the other person and make reasonable adjustments. Or, if they are unwilling to adjust, mature people at least communicate their unwillingness and acknowledge that the relationship may need to change significantly. They do all of this without accusing, abusing, or losing it. It’s immaturity that creates the crazy-making effect of causing you to doubt reality, second guess what is true, and get yourself so off-kilter you stop addressing what obviously needs to be talked about.

We don’t want to grow hard, angry, or develop an attitude of superiority when setting boundaries. We must stay humble and surrendered to Jesus in this process. So, let them have their own journey and revelation. Be wise with setting and keeping your boundaries and remember that you don’t have to stay in the same place the other person is in.

having a sober mind can also be an instruction not to let ourselves get out of control with our emotions as well. Let’s look at 1 Peter 5:8 (ESV): “Be sober-minded; be watchful.”

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. Here’s what I don’t see in this passage about dealing with anxiety: passivity.

emotional maturity can also be seen as emotional sobriety in connection with this verse.

Just like when someone drinks too much alcohol, they have to “sober up” to regain control, to be sober-minded means regaining control over our actions and reactions.

Both words sober and watchful warn of losing control. Peter reminds us how important it is for us to play an active role in our lives as we fight against the enemy and his various tactics to lure us into a loss of self-control.

This whole thing wasn’t just about following the rules. It was about managing people’s perception of me.

We don’t want wrong narratives assigned to us that misalign with who we really are. If we are strong, we don’t want people to get the impression we are weak. If we are compassionate, we don’t want others to say we are selfish. If we are responsible, we don’t want to be portrayed as careless. If we are hardworking, we don’t want to be labeled as lazy. If we are committed to living like Christ, we don’t want others to accuse us of characteristics that make it seem we don’t take our faith seriously.

And while wanting to be good might seem like a wonderful quality for a child to have, being desperate for others to validate me was not healthy. It set me up for a mindset that’s not good at all. 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.

I think this hits at the core fear around setting boundaries: If I set a boundary, someone will no longer see me as I want them to see me. They will no longer know me as I want them to know me. They will no longer believe the best about me, and there’s something inside of me that really wants them to believe the best about me.

Being misunderstood is so brutal because someone else is taking liberties with our identity.

When someone makes hurtful accusations and pushes against our boundaries, it can feel as if whatever this relationship is providing for us will be taken away and some need in us will go unmet.

When someone else makes us question our need for the boundary, we can second-guess reality, our sanity, our rationality, and even the severity of what’s really going on. We can easily start to wonder if the real problem is us rather than considering the source and why we are in this hard dynamic in the first place.

Here’s the first thing we need to notice about the effects of these triggering statements: they are each evidence that we need to establish a boundary with this person.

And here’s the second thing to notice: if we are afraid that this person will think poorly of us, potentially abandon us, or try to make us feel crazy for taking a step toward making the relationship healthy, chances are even higher that, without wise boundaries, they will eventually do all three of these things to us.

the telltale sign of their unhealthiness is their unwillingness to accept no as an answer without trying to make you feel terrible, punished, or unsure about the necessity of the boundary.

If we want to stay healthy, we have to use our limited energy in the right way.

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.

Healthy people are mature people. They seek to understand your concerns, discuss any issues that the need for the boundary reveals, and respect your limits.

sometimes the problem isn’t that we aren’t good at setting healthy boundaries. Maybe we aren’t good at recognizing that we won’t get healthy results from unhealthy relationships.

While checking ourselves is healthy, questioning our identity is not. Checking ourselves means looking at a current attitude or behavior to see if it is in line with God’s instructions and wisdom. Questioning our identity is doubting who we are because we have given too much power to other people by letting their opinions define us.

If our identity, the foundational belief we hold of who we are, is tied to an opinion someone has of us, we need to reassess. We must be honest with how much access to our heart we’ve given to this person.

Posing a boundary as a question opens us up to be questioned, debated, and disrespected. If a boundary is presented with doubt, it won’t be effectively carried out.

In a moment of honest reflection, it felt incredibly freeing to state for myself who I really am rather than when I’m trying to defend myself against the judgments of others.

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.

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

If we don’t know who we are, we will constantly be manipulated into who others want us to be or become enmeshed in the needs of other people. 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.

When God is the source of our identity, we are much less prone to others feeding our insecurity.

If people are constantly annoying us, frustrating us, exhausting us, or running all over us, chances are we either don’t have the right kind of people in our life or we don’t have the right kind of boundaries. Or maybe it’s both.

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.

Regardless, here’s what we shouldn’t do: attach their disappointment to our identity. Someone else being disappointed doesn’t make us a disappointment. We can listen to the statements of others for the purpose of considering if there’s any truth in them and if so, what we may need to receive in humility. But we can’t hold onto someone else’s disappointment as an indictment of who we are.

we must place a boundary around our identity, protecting it and guarding it, using God’s truth to inform and stabilize what we know, what we feel, and what we do.

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.

1. Boundaries remind us of the right definition of healthy.