A large part of therapy for many people is learning how to create “healthy boundaries.” Whether adults or children, with friends or family, we often find ourselves having our desires ignored, our time undervalued, and sometimes even our bodies mistreated again and again, despite our attempts to express our preference against such things happening.

People who admit to having poor boundaries often look upon those that do not and wonder what the secret is. How do those people get treated with more respect? Why aren’t they mistreated as often?

There are plenty of potential answers in this space, from demeanor to status to power dynamics, but the most important thing to recognize is that when we talk about social boundaries, they do not exist as barriers that physically stop people from ever violating them.

All “having strong boundaries” means is:

1. You’ve stated a preference for how you’re treated.
2. You’ve made it known what your reaction will be if you’re not treated that way.
3. You follow through on the reaction.

That’s it. Do that enough times, and voilà, you have boundaries.

To make this more concrete, let’s say your mother keeps calling to criticize your life choices or your partner, or a friend keeps invading your personal space, and this makes you feel bad. In fact it may, reasonably, make you not want to talk to your mother or be around your friend anymore.

The first step is to let them know that. Ideally, you’d let them know that you want to maintain a good and positive relationship with them, but that [specific behavior] is keeping that from happening. It’s not a choice on your part, but a consequence of what’s happening, the same way that people do not choose to feel safe or not when someone invades their personal space; they either do or don’t.

Hopefully they will want to maintain a good relationship too. If they protest, try to guilt trip you, etc, just repeat the preference, and explain the consequence; that you’ll hang up/leave the hangout/whatever the next time they do it.

And the next time they do it, do exactly that. And if they protest, remind them that you talked about this, and you’re just following through on what you said.

And keep doing it until either they change their behavior or they decide the relationship isn’t worth them doing that. Which can be sad, but that’s up to you to balance when you set a boundary whether it’s worthwhile or not.

Again, it’s really that simple. Social boundaries are expectations we create from common knowledge, like politeness norms, or our actions. When someone pushes past a line you draw in the sand, or even just stumbles past it accidentally, you have to be willing to push them back, gently or not, or else the “boundary” doesn’t exist.

Ideally, those pushes take the form of calmly stating your desires, and following through on consequences if they’re not respected. Unfortunately, if certain lines are crossed often enough, sometimes enforcing a boundary involves getting really, really mad, shouting and storming out and slamming the door, because anything less than that is just ignored. If the boundary crossed is a physical one, sometimes “pushing back” includes literal pushes.

And part of why some people have a harder time building and maintaining boundaries is that they have been conditioned to not ever do things like that…

…or the people violating their boundaries have power over them. Enforcing your boundaries is always an unpleasant thing to do, and sometimes it can be a dangerous thing to do, especially if your job or physical safety is at stake.

But if you’re never willing to do any of those things, and you feel frustrated that people don’t seem to respect your desires or needs… this may be a large part of why.

Try not to push too hard at first, and don’t push thoughtlessly, but I’m here to tell you it’s okay to push back. The how and when might be complicated, but the will to protect yourself even if it upsets others others is the necessary first step.

Remember that boundaries exist as a way to preserve positive relationships. They should be shared in that spirit, and seen in that light, lest they be misused to pressure people into uneven relationships, or treated as selfishness by others who don’t know how to negotiate preferences properly.

Edit: I’ve found an article by Tasshin Fogleman that goes into more depth about all this, and is worth the read.

First, a quick definition: I think a useful way to view Trauma as basically a “stuck” central nervous system response to a highly dangerous or frightening situation. There are “smaller” forms of trauma, and more prolonged causes rather than singular events (see: Complex PTSD). But by and large, Trauma is when we get into a situation that triggers a Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn response where we feel a lack of control or agency, and whatever way we reacted gets “hard coded” into a reflex that triggers each time we’re in a similar situation.

It’s almost like the body goes “Well, I have no idea what happened there or what to do about it, and we felt pretty powerless. But it was PRETTY FUCKING SCARY and the thing we did last time at least managed to cause us to survive, so let’s just do that again next time anything like it happens.”

There’s a danger mode that society has been engaging in for years (decades/centuries/millenia?) that simply denied trauma. It was ignorant of trauma, or acted as if it didn’t exist, or verbally repudiated it. People were expected to tough out bad things that happened to them. Men especially were not allowed to express it, except (eventually) if it occurred as the result of war.

And maybe this was helped by there just being less trauma all around. Maybe people didn’t get into situations they couldn’t make sense of as often, or had more robust agency over even shitty things in their lives, or there were more narratives in society that helped people get through such situations without getting stuck.

Whatever the case may be, the pendulum has swung somewhat, and I hear rumblings of worry about whether we’re treating trauma too seriously. If we’re over-correcting and making things out to be more traumatic than they “really are,” and to what degree trauma is the result of people being told that something that happens to them is “traumatic” or is made a big deal of.

This second failure mode concerning trauma is something like a worry that someone will fall off their bike, scrape their knee, and be taken to the hospital amidst parental tears and shock, thus cementing a lifelong fear of bikes or intolerance of pain.

And while I think this second failure mode is probably true for things like how offended or outraged people get by things, I don’t think it’s in our sight-lines just yet for “actual trauma.” Overprotective parents are a thing, always have been. If a kid falls off their bike, they are much more likely to cry if their parent freaks out.

And yes, to some degree how society treats a thing will inform how people react to it. There are some people who are sexually molested or emotionally abused and essentially move on from it without ever telling anyone, or seeking professional help. This is particularly something you’ll hear from people who are older, and grew up before modern perspectives on trauma or awareness of abuse or rape was as prevalent as it is. There’s a fairly famous older man who got in some hot water for saying something like “Well, I was raped a number of times at the male boarding school I went to, and it sucked, but that was just a thing that happened. The older boys would do that often to the younger ones. It wasn’t the end of the world.”

People will look at accounts like this and be somewhat reinforced in believing that the response to traumatic events is moderately, or even largely, to blame for how traumatic it is.

But the thing to remember about trauma is that by its nature it is anti-correlated to reports and disclosures. You will hear more from the people who recovered from traumatic events or were not traumatized by bad events more often than you will those who were. This is axiomatic to what it even means to be traumatized by something vs not.

On top of the other points, like how no two situations are alike, and no two people are alike, and so making a general rule out of anecdotes is dangerous, it’s also hard to think of people who are actually traumatized by the response to a thing versus the thing itself. My experience is that Eddie Kaspbraks are really, really rare in real life, even in less stereotypical, absolute incarnations.

What I do run across instead, and quite often, are the “stereotypical” examples of people who have spent years, if not decades, bottling up their trauma and appearing to all observers, even close observers, as if they’re okay, or as if the behaviors that they have that are harmful to themselves or others are just the result of who they are, and not what they’ve gone through, until something comes out and sheds light on dark machinery. Part of that just comes with the territory of my field of work, but even outside of it, that seems to be far more common than the inverse situation.

And when people who go through events others might call traumatizing, but who were not traumatized by it by some combination of factors that are so far unknown, see such people, I worry that their conclusion will be that this is proof that trauma is the result of low willpower or resilience or “grit” or whatever.

The pendulum may well be swinging toward society being too sensitive to traumatic fears and causing more harm than it’s preventing in highlighting bad experiences as “traumatic.” But so far I don’t know that I’ve seen enough evidence to conclude that for sure, and I hope we get better metrics and tools to determine if that’s in fact what’s happening before we start encouraging a narrative that might make those who suffer from trauma feel in some way as if it’s “all in their head,” like society used to.