Ep. 349: How to Overcome Guilt and Handle Pushback When Setting Boundaries

This month’s theme has been time and energy boundaries, and This is the final episode on that them, so in I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about the deeper through line underneath all of this.

Because time and energy boundaries aren’t really about managing your life.

They’re about whether you stay with yourself. Or abandon yourself.

That’s what this is really about.

And for most people, the hardest part of boundaries isn’t actually setting them.

It’s everything that comes before and after.

Sometimes it’s the emotional discomfort of even thinking about setting a boundary.

I know for me, when I first would even think about setting boundaries with, I felt like I was going to die.

I’m not exaggerating.

It felt like an internal emergency, like my life was under threat. And in some ways, it was – my old way of being was about to change.

And then there’s what happens after you set a boundary.

When someone gets upset.

When they push back.

When things feel uncomfortable or tense.

So when I talk about internal boundaries, what I mean is this:

Internal boundaries are about how you carry yourself through that entire process.

Before.

During.

And after.

It’s about how you manage your emotions.

How you support yourself.

How you stay grounded in yourself when things feel hard.

And it’s also about what you do when other people have reactions.

Because they will.

And one of the biggest reasons people struggle with this is they don’t actually believe they deserve to have boundaries.

So part of the work is having someone, whether it’s a coach, a therapist, or a group of people, who can reflect back to you:

You do deserve this.

There’s a part of you that already knows that.

Otherwise you wouldn’t even be here, listening to this, thinking about this. And what’s really cool about the boundary building process is that the more you do the work, the better you feel about yourself and the easier and easier it gets to set boundaries.

The reason you start to feel better about yourself is that you’ve started to show up for yourself and have your own back, possibly for the first time in your life. That is, you’re building trust with yourself.

For me, a huge part of building internal safety came through 12-step recovery.

I was in a small group of women doing step work together, and we were all going through the same kinds of changes at the same time.

We supported each other by affirming and praising each other. We also normalized things for each other by saying, me too.

And that helped me stay with myself when everything in me wanted to abandon myself and go back to old patterns.

Now, the two biggest questions I get about boundaries are these:

How do I get past the guilt and shame?

And what do I do when people push back?

And those two things are deeply connected.

So let’s start with guilt.

Guilt does not mean you’ve done something wrong.

It means you’re doing something different.

It means you’re breaking a pattern.

There’s a therapist I heard say once that the level of guilt we feel is proportional to how much we abandon ourselves.

So if you want to feel less guilt, the answer isn’t to stop setting boundaries.

It’s to stop abandoning yourself. We abandon ourselves when we give into our old pattersn of people-pleaseing, peace keeping at our own expense, overgiving and contorting ourselves because of what others may think of us.

And one of the most effective ways I’ve found to help people stop abandoning themselves is to anchor themselves in their values. That’s because you’re values are yours, and they’re yours for a reason. They come from within your very being.

And when you know what actually matters to you, it becomes much easier to stand firm.

Because you’re not just setting a boundary randomly.

You’re protecting something that’s important.

So let’s say family is one of your top values.

If your daughter has a recital, and work is asking you to come in, it’s a lot easier to say:

“I’m not available. That time is already committed.”

Because you know why.

That time matters.

That relationship matters.

That value matters. When you die, you’re not gonna say I wish I went to work more, you’re gonna say I wish I spent more time with my family.

When you’re clear on what matters to you, there’s much less guilt and the discomfort because you’ve stopped abandoning yourself.

And here’s another important piece.

Just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s an instruction.

Feeling guilt doesn’t mean:

Oh, I must have done something wrong, I need to fix this.

No.

It just means you’re having a feeling.

Now let’s talk about pushback.

Because this is where people really start to doubt themselves.

Here’s the truth:

Other people’s reactions are not evidence that you’ve done something wrong. And, there’s awhole host of reasons people push back. It could be bc they’re testing to see if you really mean it, esp if you’ve never set boundaries before. It could be that they forgot because it’s new for them, not just you. It could be that they have shitty boundaries, which means it’s even more important for you to stand firm in your boundaries.

They’re reactions are not evidence,

They’re just reactions.

I used to believe that if someone was upset with me, it meant I was being a bad person.

And that being a good person meant I needed to fix it by making

them feel better, Backtracking to Undo whatever I had done.

But that’s not actually what’s going on.

If you’ve been over-accommodating someone for years, and you stop, of course they’re going to be upset.

You’ve made their life easier for a long time.

And now you’re not.

That’s a change.

They get to have feelings about that.

But their feelings are theirs.

Not yours.

And one thing I see all the time with my clients is this pattern of backtracking.

They feel like they’ve taken something away from someone.

And now they need to give something back to make up for it.

But you haven’t taken something away.

You’ve stopped over-giving.

That’s not the same thing.

And here’s a reframe I love:

Their reaction is not evidence you did something wrong.

It’s evidence they heard you.

And if you’re having feelings about their feelings, you get to look at that.

What does this bring up in me?

What do I need right now?

Because your feelings are yours to manage.

Just like theirs are theirs.

And I’ll add this too.

Resentment is a really useful signal.

It’s a diagnostic tool.

If you’re feeling resentful, there’s a very good chance a boundary is needed.

Or a boundary needs to be strengthened.

Another big shift is this:

You don’t need to control the outcome.

What you need to do is stay with yourself.

Setting a boundary does not guarantee you’re going to get the outcome you want.

You can’t make other people behave differently.

You can’t control whether they agree, or approve, or change.

You can only control what you do.

So for example, if you have someone in your life who struggles with addiction, a boundary is not:

“You can’t drink.”

That’s not a boundary.

That’s you trying to control them.

A boundary is:

“If you drink, I won’t give you money.”

“If you drink, I’m not calling in sick for you.”

“If you drink, I’m not lying for you.”

That’s a boundary.

You’re defining what you will do or not do.

Because when you focus externally, trying to control other people, you create an unmanageable life.

You’re trying to control the uncontrollable.

But when you bring the focus back to yourself, over and over again, something starts to shift.

You bring your attention back inward.

Back to yourself.

Back to yourself.

Back to yourself.

And over time, it’s like your center of gravity moves.

You’re not scattered out there trying to manage everyone and everything.

You’re grounded in yourself.

And eventually, you don’t have to keep reminding yourself to do that.

It just becomes how you live because you have an internal gravitational pull now.

That’s what it means when I say:

I don’t set boundaries.

I have boundaries. I used to set them, but now they’ve become internalized so I don’t need to set them, I just know where I end and others begin, what’s mine and not mine. I almost never have to think about “what’s my boundary here?” because I just know.

And finally, I want to leave you with this:

Boundaries don’t create the problem.

They reveal the problem.

A lot of people will say:

“Everything was fine until you started setting boundaries.”

But that’s not actually true.

Things weren’t fine.

You were just tolerating things that weren’t working for you.

You were saying yes when you really wanted to say no. putting up with things that felt intolerable.

And you were quietly building resentment.

So when you start setting boundaries, what you’re really doing is bringing the problem into the open.

You’re saying:

This isn’t working for me.

And I’m not willing to keep doing it.

That might create visible conflict that wasn’t visible before.

But the conflict was already there.

It was just inside of you.

So if you take anything from this episode, let it be this:

Boundaries are not about controlling other people.

They’re not about getting the perfect outcome.

They’re about staying with yourself.

Even when it’s uncomfortable.

Even when there’s guilt.

Even when other people have reactions.

Because the more you stay with yourself, the less you abandon yourself.

And that’s where real change happens.