Boundaries Bring Connection — Not Distance | Therapist in Redlands
I used to tighten up every time someone mentioned boundaries.
There was something about the word that felt cold to me — clinical, rigid, like a wall going up between me and the people I loved. I worried it was code for rejection. For distance. For a kind of emotional selfishness dressed up as self-care. I'd spent most of my life being the person who made things easier for everyone else, who smoothed things over, who stayed. The idea of limits felt like it belonged to someone harder than me.
And honestly? I think I also knew, somewhere underneath all of that, that if I ever really looked at what I needed — if I named it out loud — everything might have to change.
That was before everything shifted.
The Moment Something Cracked Open
A few years ago I was deep in two processes at once. I was getting certified as a Daring Way Facilitator — the curriculum built on Dr. Brené Brown's research on shame, vulnerability, and wholehearted living. And I was beginning training with Julianne Taylor Shore, a therapist and author whose work on the neurobiology of boundaries would eventually become one of the most important clinical influences in my practice. Jules' book, Setting Boundaries That Stick, came out in 2024 — but I first encountered her ideas years earlier, through an early episode of the Therapist Uncensored podcast.
I remember sitting with headphones in, probably folding laundry or driving somewhere unremarkable, and feeling something in me go very still.
Jules was explaining that boundaries are not about controlling what other people do. They are about what we are willing to do — and not do — to stay in alignment with ourselves. That the goal of a boundary is not to change someone else's behavior. It is to protect your own integrity. Your own values. The version of yourself you actually want to be.
I had to pull over.
Not because it was complicated. Because it was so simple, and it had somehow never occurred to me. I had been thinking about boundaries as things you do to people. Something defensive. Something that required justification and armor and a certain willingness to be disliked. And here was this completely different frame: a boundary is something you do for yourself. From the inside out. Grounded in what matters to you, not in what you're afraid of.
Everything I thought I knew about this topic rearranged itself.
Why Boundaries Feel Like a Threat — When They're Actually an Invitation
Here's what I see constantly in my work as a therapist in Redlands and throughout California: most women who struggle with boundaries don't struggle because they don't understand them. They struggle because the predictive part of their brain learned, early, that having limits was dangerous.
When you grew up in an environment where your needs were inconvenient — where love felt conditional on your compliance, where keeping others comfortable was the price of belonging — your brain filed that away. It built a model of the world where your limits were a liability. Where saying no risked abandonment. Where taking up space was a betrayal.
That model doesn't disappear when you become an adult. It runs. Quietly, persistently, shaping every moment you consider asking for what you need or declining what you don't. It's why you rehearse a simple request for twenty minutes before sending it. It's why you feel a rush of shame after saying no, even to something completely reasonable. It's why you can understand, intellectually, that you're allowed to have limits — and still feel like you're doing something wrong when you act on them.
This is not a character flaw. It is implicit memory doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you by predicting what worked before.
And here is the part that took me the longest to really land: that model can be updated. Not by understanding boundaries better. Not by reading more about them or talking yourself into them. By having new experiences. Embodied. Repeated. Over time.
That is what this series is about.
What Gets in the Way — And Why It Makes Sense That It Does
Before we go further, I want to name some of the most common places women get stuck in this work. Not as a checklist of your problems, but as an acknowledgment: if any of this sounds like you, you are in very good company.
You've confused boundaries with cruelty
So many of the women I work with grew up in environments where limits were weaponized — where boundaries were punishments, where love was withheld as control, where "setting a boundary" meant someone was angry and you were about to feel it. Of course that made you allergic to the whole concept. Of course it feels mean to draw a line. You learned that lines hurt people.
A boundary, practiced from integrity, does not hurt people. It might disappoint them. It might ask them to adjust. But it is not cruel — and learning to feel the difference in your body is part of the work.
You think you don't deserve them
This one runs deep and quiet. It's not usually a conscious thought. It shows up as the reflexive over-explanation when you decline something. The apologizing before you've even said the hard thing. The way you word your needs as questions, or preface them with "I know this is a lot to ask" even when it isn't.
Underneath the over-explaining is usually an implicit belief: my needs are too much. My limits are an imposition. Other people's comfort matters more than my truth.
That belief was taught. It is not a fact about you.
You're afraid of what happens to the relationship
This is the most honest fear, and I respect it. Because sometimes, when you set a boundary with someone who has depended on your boundarylessness, the relationship does change. Not always. Not even usually. But sometimes.
What I've seen over and over in my practice is this: the relationships that cannot survive your honesty were not as safe as they felt. And the relationships that can? They get deeper. More real. More worth having.
Boundaries don't end good relationships. They reveal which ones actually were.
You keep waiting to feel ready
Here is something I tell my clients often: you will not feel ready before you set the boundary. You will feel ready after — or, more accurately, after enough repetitions that the brain starts to predict a different outcome.
Readiness, in this work, is built through action. Not the other way around.
The Four Types of Boundaries — A Map for This Series
The framework I work with in my practice — and that will run through all six posts in this series — organizes boundaries into four types. Two external, two internal. Most boundary conversations stop at the first one. This series goes all the way through.
External Boundaries
These are what most people mean when they say the word. The limits you communicate to others about what is and isn't okay. The no you say out loud. The request you make. The consequence you follow through on.
External boundaries are not about changing what someone else does. They are about defining what you will do — what you'll accept, what you'll walk away from, what you'll name. They live entirely in your lane.
The woman who says: "I'm not available for calls after 9pm, and if you call then I won't pick up" — that's an external boundary. Clear. Owned. Defined by her behavior, not his.
Psychological Boundaries
These are internal, invisible, and for many women the most life-changing work in the whole framework.
Psychological boundaries are the capacity to distinguish what is yours emotionally from what belongs to someone else. To feel someone's pain without fusing with it. To hear criticism without it dissolving your sense of self. To be in the room with someone's anger and stay curious rather than immediately responsible.
The woman who can sit across from her furious mother and think: this is about her, not me — that is a psychological boundary doing its work. Not coldness. Not indifference. Discernment.
For women who grew up learning to be emotionally responsible for everyone around them, this is often the most profound and the most difficult shift. We'll go deep into it in Post 3.
Containing Boundaries
These are the limits you set on yourself — specifically, on how you act out your emotional state when you're flooded, triggered, or afraid.
Containing boundaries are about the space between feeling and action. Between the surge of anger and the email you send. Between the hurt and the thing you say to wound. They are the practice of staying aligned with the version of yourself you want to be, even when the version of yourself that wants to burn it all down is very loud.
This is not suppression. The feeling is allowed to be fully felt. The question is only: how and when and where do I express it?
Physical Boundaries
Your body. Your space. Your yes and no around touch, proximity, and physical comfort.
For many women these feel obvious — until they realize how long they've been overriding them. The automatic hug when you didn't want one. The way you make yourself smaller in a room. The medical appointment where you went along with something that didn't feel right because questioning the doctor felt too hard.
Physical boundaries are not about rigidity. They are about attunement — an ongoing conversation between you and your body about what feels safe, wanted, and right. Post 5 will take this slow and gentle, because for some women this is the most tender territory of all.
Why This Is Brain Work, Not Willpower Work
One more thing before we go further, because I think it matters clinically and personally.
Everything I just described — the fear, the over-explaining, the bracing, the automatic yes — these are not personality traits. They are patterns stored in implicit memory. The brain learned them in a relational context, usually early, usually in the service of staying safe or staying loved. And the brain, being a very efficient prediction machine, has been running them ever since.
You cannot think your way out of implicit memory. You cannot understand your way out of it. What updates it is new experience — specifically, the repeated experience of doing the thing that feels threatening and discovering that the predicted catastrophe doesn't come. That you set the limit and the relationship survived. That you said no and the person was disappointed but stayed. That you honored your body and nothing terrible happened.
Each one of those moments is data. New data. The kind that slowly, experientially, updates the brain's model of what is possible.
That's what the practices in this series are designed to create — not insight, but experience. Not understanding, but felt change. The gap between those two things is where so much of the work lives.
A Practice to Start
The Three-Question Check-In
Think of a relationship or situation right now where something feels off — where you're giving more than you have, or saying yes to something that costs you.
Sit with it for a moment. Then ask yourself:
What is actually okay for me here?
What is not okay — even if I've been tolerating it?
What does my body tell me when I imagine the honest answer?
Don't rush to fix anything. Just notice. The noticing is the first movement toward something new.
And if what comes up feels big — if there's grief in it, or fear, or something that's been waiting a long time to be named — let it. This work has room for all of that.
What's Coming in This Series
Over the next five posts, we'll work through each type of boundary in depth — with real practices, honest clinical reflection, and the kind of slow, somatic attention this work actually requires.
Post 2 will walk through a full process for setting external boundaries — including what to do before the conversation, during the pushback, and after, when the predictive brain is still running its alarm.
Post 3 goes into psychological boundaries — the attachment history underneath them, the difference between empathy and merger, and a practice drawn from the body that I've seen shift something real in the women I work with.
Post 4 is about containing boundaries — the version of you that exists when you're flooded, and how to stay aligned with the person you actually want to be.
Post 5 is about your body. Your physical yes and no. And what it means to finally take up space as if you're allowed to be here.
Post 6 brings it all together — not with a tidy resolution, but with honesty about what this work actually looks like over time. The non-linearity of it. The repair. The slow return.
I'm glad you're here. Let's begin.
About the Author
Kathy Jaffe, LCSW is a therapist in Redlands, CA specializing in work with women navigating anxiety, trauma, relationships, and midlife transitions. She sees clients in person at her Redlands office and via telehealth throughout California. Her approach draws on interpersonal neurobiology, somatic therapy, and mindfulness-based models including ACT and DBT-informed skills — and a deep belief that your system already knows how to heal.
Ready to Go Deeper?
If something in this post landed — if you felt it somewhere before you understood it — that's worth paying attention to. Schedule a free consultation → kathyjaffetherapy.com/contact
