Boundaries: What They Actually Are (and What They Are Not)
- Alyson Turcotte
- Jun 3
- 4 min read
If you've spent any time in therapy, or even just scrolling through wellness content online, you've heard the word boundaries. A lot. And yet, for something that gets talked about so frequently, there's a surprising amount of confusion about what boundaries actually are — and an even greater confusion about why they can feel so impossibly hard to set.
Let's slow down and take a closer look.
What Boundaries Are — and What They Aren't
Here's the most important thing I can tell you about boundaries, and it's something that often surprises people:
A boundary is a decision you make about yourself. It is not a rule you impose on someone else.
When we say things like "I'm setting a boundary that you can't speak to me that way," we're actually describing a consequence or a request — not a boundary. You cannot control another person's behaviour. What you can control is your own response to it.
A true boundary sounds more like: "If you speak to me that way, I'm going to leave the room," or "I'm not available for calls after 8 pm." The boundary is the action you will take, the limit you will honour for yourself, regardless of what the other person chooses to do.
This distinction matters enormously, because when we confuse boundaries with attempts to control others, we end up feeling powerless when those "boundaries" don't work. The other person didn't comply, so we think we failed. But boundaries aren't about their compliance — they're about your clarity.
The Key Types of Boundaries
Boundaries show up in every area of our lives. Here's a brief look at the main categories:
Emotional boundaries involve protecting your emotional wellbeing. This might look like not taking responsibility for other people's feelings, or choosing not to engage in conversations that leave you feeling drained, manipulated, or destabilized. It's the difference between being empathetic and being a sponge for everyone else's emotional experience.
Intellectual boundaries are about your right to your own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. You're allowed to have a perspective that differs from someone else's — even someone you love — without it being a problem that needs to be resolved. Healthy intellectual boundaries mean engaging in genuine dialogue rather than debate, where the goal is domination.
Physical boundaries relate to your body and personal space. This includes who is allowed to touch you, how, and when — and your absolute right to say no to physical contact that doesn't feel right, even in relationships where affection is expected.
Time and energy boundaries are often the ones people struggle with most. They involve being intentional about where you direct your time and attention. Saying no to one thing is always saying yes to something else. When your time and energy are spoken for by everyone else's needs, there is nothing left for your own.
Material and financial boundaries involve how you manage your resources — money, possessions, space. Lending money you can't afford to lose, feeling unable to say no when asked to share your belongings, or allowing others to take up space in your home in ways that don't work for you are all areas where this type of boundary applies.
How Trauma Gets in the Way
If boundaries feel confusing or frightening to you, I want to offer some reassurance: that experience makes complete sense. Trauma — especially the kind that happens in childhood, in relationships, or over a prolonged period of time — has a profound effect on our ability to recognize and maintain healthy limits. It tends to push people in one of two directions.
Some people become what we might call under-boundaried. This means their limits are either absent or very porous. They say yes when they mean no. They take on other people's feelings as their own. They have a hard time identifying what they actually want or need, because so much of their energy has gone toward reading and responding to others. For many trauma survivors, having no boundaries was a survival strategy — being agreeable, staying small, and anticipating others' needs kept them safe. The nervous system learned that compliance meant protection.
Others become over-boundaried. Their walls are high, their trust is low, and closeness feels dangerous. They may keep people at arm's length, struggle to ask for help, or find that relationships stay shallow because genuine vulnerability feels too risky. This, too, is a survival response. If the people who were supposed to be safe were the source of harm, it makes complete sense that the system would learn to protect itself by limiting access.
Neither state is a character flaw. Both are the nervous system doing what it learned to do to keep you alive. And both can shift with the right support.
What Healthy Boundaries Actually Look Like
Healthy boundaries don't look like walls, and they don't look like open doors. They look more like a screen — they let the good stuff in and keep out what doesn't belong.
When you're operating from a healthy boundary system, you have a sense of where you end and another person begins. You can be genuinely close to people without losing yourself in the process. You can say no without it feeling like a catastrophe, and you can tolerate someone else's disappointment without immediately caving to relieve the discomfort.
Healthy boundaries also have flexibility. They shift depending on context and relationship. The limits that make sense with a colleague are different from those with a close friend, which are different again from those with a partner. You get to make those adjustments consciously, based on what feels right for you — not based on what you think you're supposed to do or what will keep everyone else happy.
Perhaps most importantly, healthy boundaries come from a place of self-respect rather than fear. They're not about punishing others or keeping people out. They're about honouring yourself — your time, your energy, your body, your emotional world — as something worth protecting.
If any of this resonates with you, you're not alone. Learning to recognize, set, and maintain healthy boundaries is some of the most meaningful work people do in therapy — and it almost always connects back to patterns that started long before adulthood. When you're ready to explore this further, feel free to reach out to book a no-fee consultation call. It's a chance for us to get to know one another and see if working together might be a good fit.
