How to Create Inner Peace with Emotional Boundaries

Emotional boundaries are among the most challenging—and most rewarding—skills that a recovering people-pleaser can develop.

You might imagine your emotional boundaries as a protective bubble. This bubble keeps your emotions in and others’ emotions out. 

Emotional boundaries give you the ability to witness others’ emotions without taking their emotions into your bubble as your responsibility to react to, fix, or solve. They enable you to discern where your emotions end and another person’s emotions begin. 

Without emotional boundaries, others’ emotions flood into our bubble like ink into a pool of water. As a result, we become highly reactive to others’ emotions. 

From this place of high reactivity, we often:

• Adopt their emotions as our own

• Do whatever we can to assuage their anger, frustration, anxiety, or guilt—even if the actions we take aren’t aligned with what we want or who we are

• React very strongly and negatively to even the slightest hint of others’ disapproval, disagreement, or frustration

• Have difficulty maintaining our own emotional reality when someone else feels differently

• Become scared, defensive, or angry when others don’t feel the same way we feel

In Bowen Family Therapy, having strong emotional boundaries is called having a high level of differentiation or a high degree of “selfhood.” The Bowen Center writes, 

“The less developed a person’s ‘self,’ the more impact others have on his functioning and the more he tries to control, actively or passively, the functioning of others…

People with a poorly differentiated ‘self’ depend so heavily on the acceptance and approval of others that they either quickly adjust what they think, say, and do to please others or they dogmatically proclaim what others should be like and pressure them to conform.”

Family Therapist Diane Gehart explains, 

“For example, when one’s partner expresses disapproval or disinterest, this does not cause a differentiated person’s world to collapse or inspire hostility…Partners with greater levels of differentiation are able to tolerate differences between themselves and others, allowing for greater freedom and acceptance in all relationships.” 

Being highly reactive to others’ emotions can feel exhausting⁠—like navigating a tiny boat in stormy waters, completely at the whim of the unpredictable sea.

When we strengthen our emotional boundaries, we regain a sense of stability in our lives. Small emotional differences between ourselves and others no longer provoke visceral and destabilizing reactions within us. We begin to experience more spaciousness, and in that spaciousness, we begin to prioritize our own emotions⁠—many of us for the first time ever!

Strengthening your emotional boundaries is a long-term process that takes time and commitment.  One of the most fruitful ways we can practice is by changing our patterns of reactivity in our existing relationships with family members, partners, and friends.

Want to learn how to set emotional boundaries? Join me at my virtual workshop, Emotional Boundaries: The Art of (Loving) Detachment. Tickets and on-demand recording available here.

Step 1: Notice Your Reactivity

The first step in changing any habit is simply to notice when the problem behavior arises. For many recovering people-pleasers, the pattern of being highly reactive to others’ emotions is so deeply ingrained that it takes practice to become aware that it’s happening.

You might make a habit of beginning to notice when you:

• React very strongly to others’ emotions

• Regularly get involved in others’ conflicts or disagreements

• Feel responsible for fixing others’ problems

• Feel especially prone to guilt trips (even if you’ve done nothing wrong)

• Struggle to “agree to disagree”

Practice noticing how you feel in your heart and body when this reactivity arises. Mentally note to yourself:

• “I feel tightness in my chest and discomfort in my heart when my parent complains about their hard workday.”

• “I feel on the verge of tears when my partner expresses a minor disagreement, like preferring to go to dinner at a different restaurant than the one I suggested.”

• “I feel broiling anxiety in your stomach when my adult daughter tells me about the argument she had with her girlfriend.”

Step 2: Remember Your Bubble

With this new awareness, you can begin altering your reactions. When you notice yourself becoming reactive, you might ask yourself: “Is this mine?”

This simple inquiry helps us check in with ourselves and determine whether we’re feeling an emotion grounded in our own experience, or whether someone else’s emotion has infiltrated our bubble.

If your answer is “No—this isn’t mine,” take a moment to visualize your emotional boundaries surrounding you. Some of my clients like to visualize them as a translucent bubble—others as a golden force field—and still others as a moat or a sturdy fence.

Visualize yourself safe and protected in the center of your emotional boundaries, and remember that their emotions are outside of your bubble—and as such, not yours to manage.

Step 3: Act Non-Reactively

Finally, we practice being less outwardly reactive in real time.

In the early stages of our practice, we may have to work on acting non-reactively even if our hearts and minds still feel emotionally charged. With practice, though, this becomes habitual⁠—and the potent emotions subside more quickly.

Here are some examples of what this process can look like from start to finish:

You’ve decided to practice stronger emotional boundaries with your partner because you feel like your romantic relationship takes place on his emotional terms.

One night, your partner comes home from a frustrating day at work. He cracks open a beer in the kitchen and starts venting about his boss, replaying their conversations indignantly. This has happened many nights before.

Before when situations like this arose, you would feel your heart rate rise, get furious with your partner’s boss on his behalf, and feel your partner’s anger as if it were your own. You would jump in to offer your partner (unsolicited) solutions to the problem, or encourage him to quit his job. You would get very involved and very reactive. You might spend the rest of the evening mentally dwelling on his predicament, or tip-toeing around the house so as not to disturb him.

This time, though, you notice your heart beat quicken and your anxiety spike. You remember that this conflict not does involve you; it is between your husband and his boss. You gently say to yourself, “This isn’t mine” as you remember your emotional boundary bubble, a golden force field surrounding you.

You are still compassionate toward your partner. You listen to him for a bit and empathize: “Gosh, babe, that does sound really frustrating! So sorry you experienced that today.” But you don’t jump in to offer solutions or advice. When the conversation reaches a natural ending point, you encourage yourself to continue on with your evening, doing whatever activities you had originally planned, and giving yourself permission to talk about your own day and own emotions, too.

Here’s another example:

You are a lawyer and you live in the same neighborhood you grew up in as a child. After months of searching for a new job, you were finally offered a position at a competitive law firm in a neighboring state. You’re leaving town in two weeks for the new position.

Your parents are deeply disappointed that you’ll be leaving town. Whenever you get together, they despair at how lonely they will be when you leave. They ask guilt-inducing questions like “Who will go shopping with your mother when you’re gone?” and “Two hours is far too long to have to drive!” They’ve even asked you if you’re sure you want to take this position and “leave them behind.”

In the past, you’ve been profoundly impacted by their guilt trips. Sometimes, you’ve even changed your decisions to accommodate them. But now, you’re working on your emotional boundaries.

When your parents make a statement intended to provoke guilt, you pause and notice the anxiety in your body: Tightness in my chest. Shortness of breath. Racing heart. You remind yourself that their despair doesn’t belong to you and isn’t yours to manage.

You imagine yourself surrounded by the golden forcefield that is your emotional boundary. You remind yourself that, within the force field, you are excited about this move. You’re proud and hopeful about this transition.

Instead of engaging with your parents in a defense or justification of your move, you then act non-reactively by saying, simply, “I know y’all are disappointed, but I’m excited for this exciting moment in my career.” You give yourself permission not to engage in a discussion intended to guilt you back into staying. If their unhelpful comments continue, you might even exit the phone call or leave the gathering on your own terms.

At first, this process of establishing emotional boundaries can feel uncomfortable because it’s very different from the over-functioning role we’ve played previously. (For more on over-functioning in relationships, I highly recommend the book The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner, PhD!)

You might find yourself feeling guilty when you release yourself form the task of finding solutions for other's’ quandaries⁠—dwelling on others’ problems⁠—or feeling incapable of relaxing when those near you feel uncomfortable. A part of you might struggle to access what you want to do or feel, because you’re so accustomed to living on others’ emotional terms.

This discomfort is a great sign that you’re at your growth edge. No healing process is without its growing pains! Keep going, and remember: The key is practice. You are strengthening your boundary-setting muscle, and every time you choose a new way of reacting, that muscle gets stronger.

Emotional Boundaries Aren’t All Or Nothing

I like to remind my clients that complete emotional detachment is not the goal of emotional boundaries.

We’re not meant to be robots. It’s only natural to feel a little sad when your loved ones feel sad, or to be troubled by a loved one’s struggles or anxieties.

Reactivity becomes problematic when we feel like our reactions to others’ emotions dominating our lives⁠—when our ability to understand want we feel and what we need feels clouded—or when we find ourselves unable to participate in our relationships as independent, differentiated people.

Emotional boundaries are not about going from feeling everything to feeling nothing. They’re about finding a middle ground: ⁠a space where we can feel and respond lovingly to others’ emotions without letting those emotions dictate our own realities. It’s this middle ground that a recovering people-pleaser aspires to.