Boundaries Aren’t Just About What We Say No To

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to people talk about other people.

Sometimes that has been in formal settings, working with leaders, teams or organisations trying to understand why relationships have become difficult. Sometimes it has been through coaching or conversations about conflict, performance and behaviour. And sometimes it has simply been one of those conversations where somebody is trying to make sense of why an interaction with another person is affecting them so much.

One thing I’ve noticed is that people rarely begin those conversations by saying, “I think I have a boundary problem.”

They are much more likely to tell me they are frustrated, exhausted, resentful, disappointed or completely fed up with someone. They might describe a colleague who constantly asks them to pick things up at the last minute, a manager who contacts them at all hours, a family member who expects them to solve every problem or a friend who seems to take far more from the relationship than they give.

Usually, by the time we are talking about it, the pattern has been happening for quite a while.

What I find interesting is what happens when we become curious about the pattern rather than immediately focusing on the other person.

Because quite often there is a boundary in there somewhere. It just hasn’t necessarily been recognised as one yet.

Resentment can tell us something useful

I don’t think resentment is always evidence that somebody else has done something wrong. Sometimes it is, of course. People can behave badly, take advantage of others or repeatedly disregard something they have been clearly asked to respect.

But I have also seen resentment emerge when someone has repeatedly agreed to something they didn’t really want to agree to.

They keep saying yes. They keep stepping in. They keep making themselves available. They keep absorbing the extra work, solving the problem, answering the message or accommodating the request. From the outside, the other person may have very little indication that anything is wrong.

Internally, though, something is building.

Eventually the person reaches a point where they feel completely taken for granted, and sometimes the person they are angry with is genuinely surprised because, from their perspective, this arrangement has apparently been working perfectly well.

That is one of the reasons I think resentment can be useful information. Rather than immediately deciding what it says about somebody else, I’m interested in what it might be telling us about something we have been repeatedly overriding in ourselves.

Perhaps I keep agreeing to something I no longer have capacity for. Perhaps I am giving more than I genuinely want to give. Perhaps I have an expectation that I have never actually expressed. Perhaps I am hoping somebody will notice that I am struggling and stop asking, rather than telling them that I need something to change.

None of that makes the other person automatically blameless. It simply gives us more information about what is happening between us.

We often expect people to recognise boundaries we haven’t expressed

This is something I have observed repeatedly in workplace conflict.

Two people can experience exactly the same interaction completely differently. One person thinks they are being helpful by checking in frequently; the other experiences it as micromanagement. One manager believes they are demonstrating commitment by responding to emails late at night; someone in their team interprets those emails as an expectation that they should be available too. One colleague assumes that because somebody has always been willing to help, asking them again is perfectly reasonable. The person being asked is wondering how anyone could possibly fail to notice how overloaded they are.

Neither person necessarily has access to what is happening inside the other person’s head.

We are often remarkably confident that other people should know what we need, particularly when the need feels obvious to us.

The difficulty is that what feels obvious from inside our own experience may be almost invisible from somewhere else.

That doesn’t mean we need to turn every relationship into a formal negotiation about boundaries. I certainly wouldn’t want to work or live that way. It does mean there are times when we need to give people information they could not reasonably be expected to have.

And then, of course, we get to observe what they do with it.

There is an important difference between someone not knowing and someone not caring

I think this distinction matters enormously.

If I have never told somebody that something is a problem for me, I need to allow for the possibility that they genuinely don’t know. Once I have told them clearly, however, the situation changes.

They may not agree with me. They may see the situation differently. They may need time to adjust a behaviour that has existed between us for years. Human relationships are rarely as simple as making one request and expecting perfect behaviour from that moment onwards.

But there is a difference between somebody learning how to respond to a boundary and somebody repeatedly demonstrating that they have little interest in respecting it.

That is often the point where people become stuck, because we can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to find better words.

We explain again. We provide more context. We try to make the other person understand why something matters to us. We soften the message, strengthen it, choose a better moment or wonder whether perhaps we were unclear the first five times.

Sometimes another conversation genuinely is needed.

Sometimes we already have our answer.

A boundary cannot make another person behave differently

This is probably the observation that has most changed the way I think about boundaries.

We often talk about setting a boundary as though the act of setting it should change the other person’s behaviour. Sometimes it does, particularly in relationships where there is mutual respect and both people care about the impact they have on each other.

But a boundary cannot actually control what somebody else does.

I can tell a colleague that I’m not available after a particular time, but I cannot prevent them from sending me an email. I can tell someone that I won’t continue a conversation when I’m being spoken to aggressively, but I cannot force them to speak differently. I can explain what I need from a relationship, but I cannot make another person decide that they are willing or able to provide it.

At some point, the question becomes what I will do.

That is where I think boundaries become much more behavioural than verbal.

If I say I am unavailable but continue responding, the pattern probably won’t change. If I say I will leave a conversation when it becomes aggressive but remain in it every time, I am relying on the other person to maintain a boundary that ultimately belongs to me.

That isn’t a criticism of people who find this difficult. There can be very real reasons why holding a boundary is hard, and in some relationships there can be genuine consequences for doing so. Power matters. Dependency matters. Safety matters. The freedom somebody has to act on a boundary can be very different depending on whether we are talking about a colleague, a manager, a partner, a parent or somebody on whom they depend financially or emotionally.

But where we do have room to act, I think it is useful to recognise that the boundary ultimately lives in our behaviour.

Sometimes changing our behaviour changes the whole relationship

I have seen this happen in organisations in surprisingly small ways.

Someone who has become the unofficial fixer for their team stops immediately solving every problem that lands on their desk and starts asking, “What do you think we should do?” A leader who has inadvertently trained everyone to escalate decisions to them begins returning those decisions to the people who actually own them. Someone who has always accepted unrealistic deadlines starts having the uncomfortable conversation about what can genuinely be delivered.

Initially, things can become more uncomfortable rather than less.

People are used to the existing arrangement. It may have worked very well for them. Even when nobody has deliberately taken advantage of anyone, relationships develop patterns, and when one person changes their part of the pattern, everybody else has to adjust.

That is why I think boundaries can feel so much harder in practice than they sound in theory. Saying no is sometimes the smallest part of it. We also have to tolerate somebody being disappointed. We may have to allow a problem to remain unsolved rather than immediately rescuing it. We may need to sit with the discomfort of being perceived differently when we stop behaving in the way people have come to expect.

And occasionally we discover something important about a relationship when we do.

Some relationships adapt. Others don’t.

I’ve become more interested in the pattern than the individual interaction

When somebody tells me about a difficult interaction now, I’m often less interested in analysing that single moment than I am in understanding what keeps happening around it.

Is this a one-off, or is it a pattern? What usually happens immediately before it? How does each person respond? What happens next? What is being reinforced every time the interaction repeats?

Those questions can take us somewhere much more useful than deciding which person is right.

They can show us that a manager keeps taking work back because it feels faster than allowing somebody else to struggle with it, and then becomes frustrated that the team never takes enough ownership. They can show us that someone keeps agreeing to unreasonable requests because saying yes relieves the immediate discomfort of saying no, even though resentment follows later. They can show us two people waiting for each other to behave differently while each continues doing exactly what helps maintain the existing pattern.

Once we can see the pattern, we have something we can actually work with.

And perhaps that is what I have come to understand differently about boundaries.

They matter because they help us understand where another person ends and we begin, but they also ask something of us. They ask us to notice our own behaviour, our own patterns and the things we keep participating in even when we desperately want the outcome to change.

So when I hear someone say, “They keep crossing my boundaries,” I’m interested in what that means, but I’m also interested in what happens next.

Have they been able to communicate the boundary? Does the other person understand it? Is there enough safety and agency to act on it? What happens when it is crossed? What pattern has developed between them, and what would have to change for that pattern to become different?

Those questions are harder than simply telling someone to set better boundaries.

But after years of working with people, I think they are much closer to where the useful work begins.