7 Love & Boundary Myths That Ruin Relationships

Welcome to the Overcoming Sexual Abuse podcast where you get the tools and inspiration to help you overcome childhood sexual abuse. I’m your host Christina Enevoldsen, certified coach, author, and incest survivor, and I’m here to help you heal and live your very best life. 

There are common misconceptions about love and boundaries that are meant to protect relationships but actually sabotage them. I’ll clear up the confusion and share the truth so you can care for yourself and others for deeper love and connection. 

I believed a lot of myths about love and boundaries. I never felt permission to have boundaries and I felt like my compassion and my generosity left me really vulnerable. My big heart led to over-giving and people took advantage of that. Even if it wasn’t because of anything they did, I still overextended myself and ended up with a lot of resentment and without my needs being met. And loving other people just really just did not feel very loving toward myself. 

And that’s why I wanted to share this with you because I found out that what I was doing was not only not loving myself, but I wasn’t loving the other person either. And the truth is love and boundaries go together. Boundaries protect love, both loving feelings and loving actions. And boundaries protect you and your relationships. 

So to start with let’s get into the truth about love because if you don’t define love correctly then you won’t be healthy in your boundaries. So the first thing to know is that love doesn’t always feel good. So I define love as seeking a person’s highest good. Their highest good isn’t always about what feels good, but what actually is good for them, what leads to their good. Not just good right now, but good in the long run, good over a period of time. 

And while I was destroying my health with my chocolate addiction, eating chocolate really felt good, but it wasn’t good for me. That wasn’t loving. and sometimes truly good things that serve you don’t particularly feel good, like saving money for the future versus splurging on things in your Amazon cart that you really don’t need. And a good parent doesn’t allow their child to do whatever feels good to the child. They limit what their child can do and those limits that a parent sets, they don’t feel good to either the parent or to the child, but having limits is good for the child and it is loving. So feeling good can be bad for you and be unloving while feeling bad can be good for you or good for the other person and actually be loving. So love doesn’t always feel good. 

The other truth to know about love is that love is about freedom. Being loved doesn’t require anything from you. You get to be loved without having to do anything to have it or to keep it. You also don’t have to do anything as a result of being loved. You can accept the love, return the love, or reject the love. You don’t have to love back or even show appreciation for that love. And you don’t have to accept their input just because they love you. Their love doesn’t give them the right to decide what’s best for you. They don’t have a right to force love or force good on you. Love doesn’t impose its way or what it wants. Real love doesn’t say to you, “I love you, so I won’t let you throw away this opportunity.” Or “I love you, so I won’t let you fail.” Or “I love you, so I won’t let you harm yourself.” 

Love offers support and has honest talks with you and interventions when needed, but Love also accepts and supports free will. love is willing to feel the heartbreak of seeing you suffer or even self-destruct. 

And I’ll say it from another angle. Love doesn’t require anything of the person that you love. The person you love just gets to be loved without having to do anything to have it or to keep it. They also don’t have to do anything as a result of you loving them. They can accept the love, they can return the love, or reject the love. And they don’t have to love you back or appreciate your love. They don’t have to accept your input just because you love them. Love doesn’t give you the right to decide what’s best for them. And love wants the best but doesn’t force itself or force good on the other person. Love doesn’t impose its way or what it wants. Real love doesn’t say “I love you so I won’t let you throw away this opportunity” or “I love you so I won’t let you fail” or “I love you so I won’t let you harm yourself.” Love offers support and has honest talks and interventions when needed, but love also accepts and supports free will. Love is willing to feel the heartbreak of seeing someone you love suffer or even self destruct. 

This is one of the reasons why healing your past and being able to sit with any emotion is so important and needed for loving relationships. Because if you can’t tolerate your own pain of seeing someone you love in pain, then you’ll try to fix their pain as a way of fixing your own pain. You’ll need to control them so you don’t have to feel the pain of seeing them in pain. You’ll need to control their circumstances and their behaviors that lead to their pain. And what real love does is it just means being with them in their pain, not solving it, especially when they need to feel the pain to motivate them to make some changes. 

You’ve probably heard of the Tony Robbins quote, “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” And that’s where sometimes doing good and feeling good are different because pain can be a powerful catalyst for some very necessary changes. And sometimes the other person is feeling the pain of loss and in that case the pain of the grieving process is about their internal changes, the journey of the heart. So when you’re practiced at sitting with your own pain you can be with others in their pain and that’s such a loving thing to do to enter into someone else’s suffering and just be there with them. 

And I don’t know very many survivors who haven’t expressed the pain of just wanting somebody to be there with their pain, someone to accept their emotions and to let them express their emotions and to cry with them because that’s so healing. And the people who judge you for your messy emotions, who think you’re too much or maybe maybe they even say overtly that you shouldn’t be feeling certain things, you shouldn’t be feeling things so deeply. But maybe it’s not overt the way that they are just stepping back from you and your pain. Maybe they change the subject or they try to cheer you up or fix the circumstances. But either way, you get the message that you and your pain are too much. You’re not acceptable. You’re not lovable unless you’re happy. 

And the truth is that people who can’t be with you in your pain simply can’t be with their own pain. It’s really not about you. They abandoned you in your pain because they abandoned themselves in their pain because they were abandoned in their pain. And that’s the power of healing and learning to be present in any emotion, to know that it’s survivable to experience pain and to be able to experience your own loving support exactly when you need it the most because then you can be not only with yourself when you’re in pain, but you can also be with the pain of others. You don’t need to control it or fix it. 

And it certainly is not easy to see someone in pain, but the truth is when it comes to healthy boundaries, you just don’t have the right to control how someone else feels. You don’t have a right to take over the responsibility for their emotions. Their emotions are theirs to take care of, and their needs are theirs to take care of. 

So love is about freedom, and love is the opposite of power and control. To dominate means to disregard another person’s right and ability to direct to their own life. 

And there are two primary ways of dominating. In the drama triangle, these are the roles of persecutor and rescuer. In archetype, they are the tyrannical father and the devouring mother. We usually associate power and control with the overt tyrant type. 

When you’ve been violated and powered over by the tyrant type abuser, it’s reasonable to think that love is the opposite of the tyrant. If the tyrant is too hard, then softness is the remedy. And that’s especially true if your needs for comfort and nurturing also weren’t met. Then you might believe that doing the opposite is better, that love is about pouring on the comfort and the nurturing. 

But the other type of abuser is the caretaker. Because remember, to dominate is to disregard another person’s right and ability to direct their own life. It’s just as disempowering to help too much. When you do too much for someone, when they’re capable of doing it themselves, but, “Oh, you can do it better or faster.” 

When you do that, you rob them of their power of that opportunity to learn and to grow and to practice and to get better and feel good about themselves and develop confidence. But when you step in, it communicates that slow is not okay or imperfect is not okay. It’s not okay to be a beginner, that they aren’t capable, that they’re not empowered to impact their own lives. 

A caretaker steals a person’s power just as much as an overt, tyrannical abuser does, because it keeps someone small and feeling small. It might be with the absolute best of intentions, but that doesn’t minimize the harm that it causes. Truly loving someone is about letting them try and fail and loving them when they fail. It’s about letting them have consequences for poor decisions so they can make better decisions. It’s about helping them access their inner wisdom instead of telling them what you think is best. It’s about helping them access their inner strengths so they can persevere through challenges. It’s about letting them feel uncomfortable emotions instead of trying to fix them. It’s about letting them experience that uncomfortable emotions are actually survivable; it won’t kill them. And also that they don’t have to feel those uncomfortable emotions alone. Because love is uncomfortable right alongside of them. 

Another truth about love is that love is about mutuality. Love is win-win. It’s not always about sacrificing yourself. It’s good for both in a loving relationship. People do occasionally sacrifice their own desires and needs for each other but there’s mutuality in the giving and receiving. It’s not always on one person doing the sacrificing. Overall in my marriage, there’s mutual giving and receiving, sometimes on a daily basis, but there have been seasons like early in my healing when Don did most of the giving. He sacrificed himself for my benefit. He offered lots of grace and time and space and emotional support and financial support. I didn’t really have a whole lot to give him during that time. And then while Don was in school, he was in school for over a decade, I was there for him with patience and understanding and encouragement, mostly just giving him a lot of time when he needed to finish his assignments. And when we’re giving to each other, it’s not out of the belief that the one giving is less important or the one receiving is more deserving or worthy. It’s about pulling together and wanting the best for each other. 

So be aware of when something starts to feel like less of a joy to sacrifice and more of a burden. There were times when I started feeling that way with Don. I was honest and told him that I do support him wholeheartedly in earning his degrees. And I still wanted that. But I was also feeling lonely and neglected. Because both can be true. And I suspect that if I hadn’t communicated that, and he hadn’t responded, I would have started to resent his education and resent him. So be alert when anger and resentment starts, when you’re thinking, “What about me?” And that question is for you to answer, not for the other person. That’s your cue to take care of yourself by expressing what you need, by renegotiating, by asking for more, for giving less. 

And about sacrifice, remember love is a win-win. Love doesn’t require you to sacrifice your self-respect. Or your values, your dignity, your health, your individuality, or your identity. 

And tolerating disrespect or abusive behavior is not loving. There is absolutely nothing virtuous about submitting to abuse. The other person doesn’t benefit from mistreating you. They don’t grow, they don’t thrive because you let them mistreat you. Their destructive treatment doesn’t only harm you, it harms them. If they feel better or relief or more important when they mistreat you, that doesn’t mean it’s good for them. And you’re not depriving them of something good if you say no to that. You’re not taking away something they need, because nobody is born with the need to abuse people. So it’s important to know what love actually is, since so much resistance and setting boundaries has to do with misunderstanding love. 

So let’s go on to the boundary myths. And I’ll start with one that’s foundational to the rest of them. So one is that boundaries are limits that you put on someone else. And the truth is that if you believe this, if you misunderstand this about boundaries, then you’ll feel bad using them because you won’t want to control someone else. And that’s good that you don’t want to control people, but the truth is all boundaries are with yourself. A boundary isn’t saying, “I’m not going to let you yell at me anymore.” That’s control because you can’t make someone start or stop yelling. You don’t have the power of over an adult, they can do what they want. You can only choose what you will do in response to their yelling. 

And I don’t mean to punish them for it as though you’re the yelling police or the etiquette police or the relationship police or the communication police or any other kind of police. This isn’t about teaching them a lesson. That’s not your job. Your responsibility is to take care of yourself and you do that by deciding what to do when they yell. You get to decide to be around them or not to be around them when they yell. That’s the power that you have. So you might say, “If you yell at me again, I will take care of myself by leaving the room until you speak more calmly.” That’s what you can control. You control the leaving. 

And related to this, you don’t try to set a boundary. So people say they try to set a boundary, but the person didn’t respect their boundary or honor their boundary. And some people claim that a boundary isn’t working. And the only way a boundary doesn’t work is if you don’t work it, if you don’t do the action that will take care of you. It’s not someone else’s job to respect or honor your boundaries. It’s not the other person’s job not to yell. It’s your job to limit their access to you while they’re yelling. So you respect your boundaries by following through with how you decided to take care of yourself. 

If you communicate your boundary, but don’t follow through, it’s not a boundary, it’s a threat, it’s manipulation. And that’s because you’re not doing anything different; you’re trying to get the other person to do something different, and that’s manipulation. So, your boundaries are yours to set with yourself and yours to honor and respect. 

The next one is actually two. One is that boundaries are unloving and the other corresponding myth is it’s unfair to set boundaries unless someone deserves it. And these myths try to protect love but end up killing it or at least seriously maiming it. And the truth is there’s nothing unloving or unfair about setting a true boundary. A boundary isn’t hostile. It’s not punishment, it’s not weapon, it’s not an attack, it’s not an accusation. 

And when you set a boundary, you’re not saying that the other person is wrong or mean or bad or evil or dangerous. If you’re using boundaries that way, you’re misunderstanding boundaries. If you’ve experienced boundaries used that way, then that wasn’t boundaries, even if that’s what they were called. If you believe that boundaries are against someone, then in the name of being nice or loving, then you’ll pretend to be fine with things that you’re not fine with. You’ll dismiss what you want. You’ll ignore your needs. You’ll overlook and minimize and discount things that really matter to you. 

And things will continue and they’ll build because the other person doesn’t know how they’re impacting you because it’s not their job to monitor that. It’s your responsibility to be aware of how someone is affecting you and to adjust yourself accordingly. 

And I’m going to squeeze a little additional myth into this myth with that if someone loves you, they should know what your boundaries are. And the truth is that boundaries are about distinctions. A boundary clarifies what you’re about and what you want and need and what you’re responsible for and not responsible for. And as I shared, your boundary is for you to take care of. It’s your job to notice when you need a boundary. It’s your job to decide the change that you need to make. It’s your job to communicate that and it’s your job to follow through on that. It’s really unloving to leave someone guessing or to expect them to mind-read what you want if you don’t explicitly tell them. It’s a really loving thing to do to clearly communicate what your boundaries are. 

All right, so getting back to the myth about boundaries being unloving or only using boundaries if the person deserves it, so-called “deserves it” air quotes, okay? So if you try to ignore your needs and stuff down your feelings and try to do the loving thing or be the bigger person, like this is just grin and bear it, hiding how you really feel and going along with that doesn’t feel good or right for you. And that’s dishonest. It’s false. And that’s not loving. Being agreeable and being loving are not synonymous. When you associate saying yes with being loving and saying no with being unloving, then you’re betraying yourself and you’re being false and that’s not what love is. 

When you do that, then maybe you try to avoid the person or brace yourself when you’re around them. And then resentment builds up. Maybe you complain or gossip about them. Maybe you become passive aggressive. And then in some cases, it gets intolerable and it leads to this reaction rather than thoughtful and respectful loving communication. And maybe there’s a blow up. 

And you also might be the kind of person who doesn’t exactly explode, at least externally. But everyone has their limits and when you don’t respect yours, you just get to the point where you can’t be around that person anymore. Maybe you don’t tell them why. Maybe you just ghost them. Maybe you just slowly back out of the relationship and let the relationship disintegrate. And it’s not for any other reason than you thought that you were being loving, but you just couldn’t be honest. 

And when you only focus on what things look like on the outside, appearing loving, that leads to very unloving thoughts and feelings inside. So boundaries actually protect you and the relationship. 

All right, the next myth is you’re selfish if you don’t take the other person’s abilities and resources into consideration. And I hear this a lot because I work with a lot of compassionate people. They say things like they don’t have anyone else, so I have to do this. And it feels like since the other person has no other options than you don’t either, you have to be there for them. The truth is that when you are not their source, that’s not the same as depriving them. You’re their only option or if they had a thousand options. It’s not your job, it’s not your responsibility to figure it out for them or to even find other options for them. 

And the other thing is that it might not be loving to help them. Are they doing everything that they’re capable of? Are they doing anything to become less dependent? Are they learning and growing as much as they’re able? Because it’s really not loving to take more responsibility for someone else’s life than they’re taking responsibility for themselves. That’s not helping. That’s crossing their boundaries. That’s caretaking. 

All right. The next myth is if someone is upset by your boundaries, you’re wrong for setting boundaries. Now, if someone is upset by a true boundary, not a punishment, not control, not an accusation, but you expressing that you need to take care of yourself, then what does that mean? They’re upset by you needing to take care of yourself. Does that mean you’ve done something wrong? 

I have learned so much from my relationship with Don. He is very easygoing, very laid back, and it takes a lot to upset him. And he’s truly not just sucking it up or shoving it down. He just has a lot of patience and he doesn’t take a whole lot of things personally. And in the course of our marriage, I have said some mean things to him. And you know what? For the most part, he did not get upset. Does that mean that I did nothing wrong? Nope. I did something wrong. And so his lack of reaction, him not getting upset doesn’t mean that I was in the right. 

There have also been times when I’ve reacted to Don, when I was upset by something he did or didn’t do, and he’d done nothing wrong. So someone getting upset is not a good litmus test for knowing if you’ve done something wrong or not. And I’ll just throw in a bonus truth, the truth about emotions. Emotions are not facts, and they can’t harm you. Emotions are just simply sensations in the body that come from your perceptions of things. And so if you’re feeling guilty for someone being upset by a boundary that you set or for disappointing someone, your guilt is just an emotion and it’s not harmful for you to feel that guilt. Your guilt doesn’t mean that you’ve done anything wrong and the emotion of guilt doesn’t make it a fact. So I talk about this in episode six, guilt oversetting boundaries. 

It could be that feeling guilty is a signal that you’re actually on the right track, that you’re growing, that you’re going against the rules of the abusive system, that you’re asserting yourself. And it doesn’t feel wrong because it actually is wrong but because it’s new and unfamiliar. 

It’s also not harmful for the other person to feel upset or disappointed. It feels comfortable, and that is all. It’s not your responsibility to save them from their disappointment. And the same is true of other feelings, like loneliness. If you feel lonely, that’s for you to respond to. If someone else feels lonely, that’s theirs to respond to. And just acknowledge how hard it is to know that someone feels lonely or disappointed or set, but also acknowledge that their emotions are theirs to take care of. 

The only person who needs to feel really good about your boundary is you. You don’t need permission and you don’t need somebody else’s approval to set a boundary. Nobody else has a right to decree if your reason is good enough. They don’t have to agree or be happy about your boundary. 

And you might feel pressure to give some sort of excuse and pay attention if the pressure is coming from the other person or from inside you because remember love is about freedom. Are they the ones demanding a good enough reason or do you just feel like it’s something you need to give? Either way, it’s a really good opportunity to exercise your freedom by simply saying no without saying why. 

So it’s not your responsibility to fix other people’s emotions, to take care of their emotions or their wants or their needs. However, if you choose to respond out of the understanding that it’s not your job, but you do want to respond, then that changes the whole dynamic. Then it can be out of love and compassion, and that’s such a more powerful way to show up in your relationships. 

All right, the last myth is that boundaries create distance and push people away. When you advocate for your needs in a relationship and the other person resists or leaves, boundaries did not cause a disconnect. They revealed the existence of a disconnect. They aren’t loving you, they’re using you. Dr. Henry Cloud says boundaries are a litmus test for the quality of our relationships. If they leave, it means they weren’t in a relationship with you, they were in a relationship with who they wanted you to be and what they wanted from you. There’s a saying, “Good fences make good neighbors”. That’s because boundaries protect you, the other person, they protect love and the relationship. 

Thanks for joining me today. I have some great topics coming up. I’m bringing you lots more on healing and boundaries, self-care, family dysfunction, and so much more. So be sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss any of it.