From People Pleasing to Rigid Boundaries: What Happens as We Change
We tend to imagine change as linear. I was a people pleaser. I learned boundaries. Now I’m healthier.
But adopting the opposite behavior is not the same thing as becoming healthier. Often, when we are learning something new, we first become extreme about it.
I see this often with boundaries. Someone who has spent years accommodating other people begins to recognize how much she has ignored her own limits. She starts saying no. She becomes less willing to explain herself or take responsibility for someone else’s disappointment. For a while, she may become quite rigid about it. Everything starts to look like a boundary violation. A family member trying to connect by talking about her own experience feels like she is hijacking the conversation. A request feels intrusive.
This can look like another problem, and sometimes it becomes one. But I think there is an important developmental stage here. If saying no has felt dangerous for most of your life, you may need to say no quite a lot before it begins to feel safe. The rigidity can be protective, part of the process of trying on a new behavior. You do not yet trust yourself not to fall back into the old position, so you guard the new one carefully.
At some point, though, the question changes. Am I responding to what is happening now, or am I still reacting to who I used to be?
A friend of mine recently ended a relationship and wanted to tell the man what she thought he was not seeing about himself. Afterward, she said she might have been a little harsh, but she was tired of softening things for men.
She had been much more than a little harsh. She had been so harsh that he could barely hear what she was trying to tell him.
Maybe refusing to soften was something she needed to learn. Perhaps she had spent years worrying too much about how men would receive what she said or taking care of their feelings at the expense of her own voice. But now the old pattern was still determining her response, just from the other direction. Instead of asking how she wanted to speak to this particular man in this particular situation, she was reacting to all the times she had softened before.
The opposite of the pattern can still be organized by the old pattern.
This is where I think the next part of change begins. First, we develop the capacity that was missing. We need to know that a response that once felt unavailable to us is genuinely available before we can really choose whether to use it.
Then we have to learn that we do not always need to use it.
Terry Real’s relational model is useful here because it looks at health through continuums. Boundaries can be too porous or too rigid. Self esteem can collapse into shame or inflate into grandiosity. Health is not about finding some permanent position in the moderate middle. A situation may call for a very firm boundary or for accommodating someone else. What matters is having access to the continuum and being able to choose based on what is actually happening.
That kind of flexibility requires trust in ourselves. If I trust that I can say no, I can actually consider saying yes. I don’t need the rigidity to protect me from becoming who I used to be.
Therapy is not supposed to liberate us from considering other people. We are still living in relationship. The work is to make room for our own needs and limits without losing the ability to be affected by someone else. We want to be able to consider someone else without disappearing ourselves.
As that new capacity becomes more secure, we can stop organizing ourselves around what we are afraid of becoming again. First we develop the missing capacity. Then we develop freedom in how we use it.
Freedom is having a choice.
