I have struggled with boundary issues my entire life.

In my 20s and 30s, I found myself in friendships with people who left me drained and with whom I didn’t feel a kindred connection. With them, friendship meant sacrificing my needs to satisfy theirs.

Initially, I felt energized by these friendships. Still, after a while, I realized I was enervated by them and stuck without knowing how to extricate myself from them.

That made me resentful and uncomfortably aware that, without my participation, I would not have been in the situation I so often seemed to find myself in.

There was the friendship with Clara (names changed to protect the BOUNDARIES of those who also suffered from poor boundaries), who, despite having a girlfriend, treated me like I was her girlfriend with the requisite obligations to attend to her every need.

Her expectations included that I miss work and grant deadlines to nurse her back to health when she got sick (conveniently, for her, she got sick all the time).

There was Stella, who consistently interrupted my work day by popping by unannounced or calling midday to “catch up” or ask what I was doing.

When you’re a writer who works from home, many people presume that a non-office job means you have flexible time.

People invite me to hang out midday and even stop by unannounced during the workday. You’d think after two years of a pandemic that found so many of us working from home would have resolved this fantastical idea that writers hang out at all hours of the day, shopping online or cleaning out our closets.

Even after 20-plus years of writing, I’ve been unable to adequately communicate to people that random interruptions disrupt my focus and rhythm and that it's practically impossible to reclaim—this is still a boundary I struggle to set.

The point is, I’ve been there and continue, in some regards, to be there. People in my life still push back when I draw a boundary. Which means they also have boundary issues.

I've known many people (I've been one of them!) who claim they want to get married only to remain in long-term relationships with people who have made it clear, explicitly or otherwise, that they are not marriage-minded.

We can claim to want something and remain connected to someone who does not share that desire. A person who truly wants a commitment would not continue to be with someone who does not. If you wanted to stop working insane hours to slow down and move to the country to tend to a vegetable garden, would you take a job that required you to be on call all the time?

Not if you truly wanted to slow down.

And so, when one person has a continuing boundary issue with a friend, it’s most likely because one person struggles with setting them and the other struggles with accepting them.

Why can’t some people set firm boundaries while others can’t accept them? What ARE boundaries, and why do so many people not have them?

For the answer, we must meet the foremost boundary expert.

My niece, Maisie, recently recommended the book Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by a licensed therapist and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Nedra Tawwab, whose Instagram posts constitute half of my Insta Saves, who also happens to be a former colleague.

Her newsletter is Nedra Nuggets, and it’s a MUST SUBSCRIBE. (You can also buy her book, along with every other book mentioned in this newsletter, in my bookshop!)

While I understand the language of emotions, psychology, and mental health, and can offer a perspective as someone who has been on both sides of extreme and chronic suffering, Dr. Tawwab has a clinical degree, expertise, and a massive following that I do not possess. Lucky for us, she has a newsletter, this book, AND a companion workbook!

In Set Boundaries, Find Peace, Dr. Tawwab defines boundaries, why we need them, why we lack them, how many types there are, how to be clear about our feelings, and (among many other things) how our conditioning can lead to porous boundaries.

For the longest time, I believed that taking time to attend to my own needs was selfish, and this, Dr. Tawwab says, is a consequence of being taught to put the needs of others before our own.

As a child, anything that involved putting myself first was wrong—at least, that’s how I’d understood things growing up. Anytime I stated what I did or didn’t want or need, it was considered “selfish.” Putting other people first took precedence over what I needed.

In my family’s household, we rarely said “no.”

Instead, the mantra was to oblige people—“It’s the right thing to do,” was the motto. For my life, I always wondered for whom it was the right thing because it never felt right for me, which I came to understand was the point. I was expected to go against my principles and intuition to “do the right thing.”

“It's the right thing to do,” suggests a sacrifice, a martyrdom of oneself for another. It’s an astonishing affront to self-care and peddling the idea that placing your needs behind another is heroic, and the gold standard for how to show up in the world is a profoundly troubling ethos.

Yet, this concept was so deeply ingrained in me that I modeled my friendships and romantic partnerships upon this principle—whatever anyone else needed took precedence over what I needed. Without realizing it, by consistently placing my needs second to everyone else, I told them to follow suit, and when they did, it felt bad, and I felt resentful. But I would never speak up. I didn’t even have access to the words I might have used.

It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve realized that my needs also matter in friendships.

After an arduous day, when I’ve been counting down the seconds to my one free night alone that week, where I plan to hang out with my dog, watch a movie, and eat popcorn, I’m conflicted if a friend calls me needing to talk.

My instinct is to sacrifice one free night to accommodate my friend’s call. But to set firm boundaries with others, we must first learn to set firm boundaries with ourselves. Prioritizing your needs over others is “the right thing to do.”

When you have lax boundaries, inevitably, you’ll find yourself with a festering wound of resentment.

That’s what happened to me.

The time came when I could no longer ignore the terrible dread I’d experience when Clara would call or how drained I was after seeing Stella. Or the terrible sense of obligation I felt having to force myself to make plans with someone I’d successfully avoided for months.

When we don’t set boundaries, we are unfaithful to our needs, allowing someone else’s expectations of friendship to take precedence and set the pace. If you’ve ever daydreamed about disappearing without a trace and living under an assumed name on a remote island, you are also probably dealing with boundary issues.

There is a relationship dynamic called enmeshment, whereby we lose our sense of individuality because we have misled ourselves into believing we are responsible for how others feel. Because we believe we’re responsible, we are careful to protect them from the things that might hurt them.

This, in the parlance of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon, is known as enabling. We do it out of fear when we are enmeshed and neglect ourselves instead of tending to others.

We fear hurting people’s feelings, being rude, the anxiety we’ll feel if we speak up, and being mean, but mainly, we fear the discomfort of feeling any of these things.

As Dr. Tawwab describes in her book, there are six main types of boundaries: physical, material, emotional, intellectual, sexual, and the one that most people (myself included) have the most trouble with—time.

And there are so many areas in which our boundaries flounder: friendships, romantic relationships, family, workplace, and social dynamics.

Why do we have bad boundaries?

Children first learn whether it’s okay to say no to their parents. Then the learning about what is acceptable behavior gets reinforced by teachers, friends, media, and the other adults around us. Those who raise us don’t always know that their behavior may not be acceptable. When we have trouble setting boundaries, we can often minimize our own experiences, move on too soon, or just ignore our emotions.

People with codependency issues tend to struggle with setting, maintaining, and respecting boundaries—their own and others.

Of this issue, Dr. Tawwab writes in her book, “In a codependent relationship, we believe that we must help people avoid consequences, saving them from unpleasant experiences. We think it’s our role to protect them. But rather than protect, we enable the other person to continue their unhealthy behavior. We see the person we’re enabling as helpless and unable to take care of themselves without us….”

It’s tough for a person with codependent tendencies to understand the difference between their needs and the needs of another. They have a misguided sense of responsibility for someone else’s well-being, not to mention a touch of a “Savior Complex.”

After all, who but a savior or a martyr would believe that someone they love will not survive their issue/crisis/ordeal without them?

Codependents are very easy to take advantage of because their boundaries are so unhealthy, and they thrive on pleasing people. Sometimes, the more preposterous the ask, the more intent the codependent person is on proving how necessary they are to you.

Sometimes we confuse trying to protect and save people from pain for love, but that’s not love, that’s codependency. Love is letting someone learn the lessons they are meant to learn to grow, change, and blossom.

When we prevent our friends and family members from learning their lessons, we deprive them of growth. That is not love; that is fear. When we are enmeshed or overly entangled in other people’s problems, some of us believe we are showing love, but we reveal a lack of boundaries.

It’s not our job to protect people from their problems. If a friend or family member is in danger, that is something else entirely.

But when a friend has to do something hard, the consequence of that hardship is growth; interfering, removing the hard thing, or doing it for them, it is a way to feel indispensable.