Confidence 101: Boundaries

I have been asked for tips on building confidence, and the more I delve into my thoughts about where my confidence has come from, the bigger I realise the topic is.  Too big for an Instagram post that’s for sure, but now its blown out in my head to the point where it’s too big for a blog!   So I’m going to give you several, and I’m starting with the topic of boundaries.   A big part of confidence relies on knowing what your boundaries are and being able to comfortably assert them, rather than second-guessing yourself.

What are boundaries?

A personal boundary is a limit or guideline that a person establishes to protect their own emotional, physical, and mental well-being. These boundaries define what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour from others and help maintain a sense of autonomy and safety.

Our boundaries are our own and only we can enforce or violate them. When we violate our own boundaries, we will experience distress and a lack of safety.  It’s important to realise that if you don’t feel comfortable asserting your own boundaries, that is a major issue and you should prioritise healing. This mindset will be impacting every relationship you have, most importantly the relationship you have with yourself.

As a society, we also have a set of clear boundaries dictated by law that apply to everyone, such as the idea that it is unacceptable for others to destroy your property, or engage with you sexually without your consent.  You do not need to verbalise these as the government has done it for you already.

If you set clear boundaries (or the government does it for you) and a person does the thing anyway, this is a consent issue, not a boundaries issue. In these situations, asserting a boundary is not enough, as the other party has disregarded your autonomy and rights. It’s crucial to recognise that the responsibility for this violation lies entirely with the perpetrator, not the victim.  In these situations, you need to act in whatever way you feel will minimise harm to you in the moment, or in a way that has the quickest route back to safety.

Personal boundaries can include:

Physical Boundaries: Relating to personal space, touch, and physical interactions. For example, someone may not be comfortable with hugs or close proximity.

Emotional Boundaries: Involving the protection of one’s emotional health, such as limiting how much emotional energy one invests in others or being clear about what topics are off-limits.

Time Boundaries: Setting limits on how much time one is willing to spend on work, social activities, or personal time, ensuring a balance between obligations and self-care.

Material Boundaries: Defining what one is comfortable sharing or lending, such as money, possessions, or personal information.

Digital Boundaries: Establishing limits regarding privacy on social media, online communication, and digital interactions.

Overall, personal boundaries are essential for maintaining healthy relationships and ensuring that you feel respected and safe.  Communication of boundaries makes it possible for others to meet your needs easier and develop a sense of mutual trust.

Some of your boundaries might be very strict while others will be flexible. Some will apply to some people and not others, or some situations and not others.  With self-awareness, you can find what works best for you.   

The goal of having boundaries is to foster a space of respect, trust and safety. You may need to have much stricter boundaries than someone else does if you have a history of trauma as safety might be a harder feeling to access for you, but you still deserve to access safety, so whatever boundaries you need to get there are valid.

Boundaries Vs Rules Vs Standards

A boundary is notthe same as a standard, or a rule.  You can have a standard that you want a partner that buys you flowers every Monday, or a rule that they must buy you flowers every Monday.  If your partner does not bring you flowers on Monday, they are not violating a boundary, they are just not meeting your standards or not following your rules.  You can enforce your boundary by exiting the relationship, because you have a personal boundary around being in relationships that meet your standards or relationships with people who don’t follow your rules.   

A boundary is about your behaviour, not the other person’s behaviour.

You might enforce a boundary by:

• Telling someone about the boundary and the expectations around it
• Declining activities that do not align with your boundaries
• Saying No without guilt
• Prioritising your needs
• Allowing yourself to rest
• Setting limits with how much others can have access to you
• Disengaging from conversations
• Reducing or stopping communication with people who do not respect your boundaries

You do not have to verbalise all boundaries, but you may find it easier to get what you need by communicating them directly.  Whether you verbalise them or not, it is up to you to assert and enforce them with your actions and behaviour.

That’s a boundary for me

Someone might jokingly says “I don’t eat coriander, that’s a boundary for me” We jest about thing like that, but actually yes!  That is a perfect example of a clear boundary. 

As a form of self-care, you opt out of eating coriander.  Whether you do this because you think it tastes like shit, or because you’re allergic is irrelevant – if you don’t want to eat coriander, you shouldn’t have to, you do not have to explain yourself, you can just say “No coriander”. 

If you are at a restaurant where they do not allow changes to menu, that is them setting a boundary, and you need to respect that and order a dish that does not include coriander, or you can leave the restaurant and go somewhere else. 

But what happens if you say “No coriander” and someone says they can do that, but then serves you coriander anyway? You might:

• Reassert the boundary by sending the food back, in either a polite or impolite manner, or leaving the restaurant entirely.
• Make it work, deciding to make your boundaries flexible by picking most of the coriander out, which is not distressing to you because you have made an intentional calculation about the time it would take to get a fresh meal and you have decided your other boundary of eating by 7pm is more important to you.
• Violate your boundaries entirely by eating the coriander, telling yourself its not that big of a deal and you shouldn’t be so bothered.
• Violate your boundaries entirely by eating the coriander, while fuming about it and blaming the restaurant for how much you are not enjoying your food.

If you chose the last one, I gotta tell you, its your fault that you are not enjoying your food. You put it in your mouth. You did not have to eat that. 

Now, I urge you to extrapolate that situation onto a different sort of boundary, perhaps a more emotionally charged situation, and think about how you are enforcing or violating your own boundaries. In what ways are you contributing to your own unhappiness?

A lot of people struggle to set and enforce their boundaries with others. Some will state a boundary, but when a person does not respect it, they will maintain contact with the person.  In this case, you have set a boundary but not enforced it, so you are living outside your values.  Another person can break rules but its up to you to enforce your own boundaries and protect yourself from others.

Reasons why people might not enforce their own boundaries:

• Fear of conflict – either an imagined or real threat of arguments or violence
• Fear of consequences – for example not setting boundaries at work due to fear of losing your job
• Low self-esteem – a feeling that you do not deserve boundaries, or other peoples desires are more important than your own well-being
• Desire for approval – a need for acceptance by others taking priority over your own boundaries
• Lack of awareness – some may not fully recognise their own boundaries, or understand the importance of setting them
• Social, cultural or religious conditioning – its just the way things are, you don’t feel that you’re allowed to set that sort of boundary (common in a workplace setting or family setting)
• Empathy and care – a strong desire to help others and putting others first to the point where your own boundaries are forgotten
• Hope for change – a belief that if given enough time and understanding, the other person will come to respect boundaries

What You Allow Continues

It may be a hard pill to swallow, but as an adult, its up to you to decide who you allow in your life, and the sorts of conditions that you are willing to accept.  You decide what activities you involve yourself in, what conversations you continue, what people you surround yourself with, what messages you respond to, what phone calls you pick up.

If you are in a relationship where setting a boundary might mean the end of the relationship, it is simply not a relationship worth saving, as it will be missing the core components of Safety, Respect and Trust.

By being honest about your needs, you stand a much higher chance of having them met in the first place.  But if someone is unable to meet your needs, then you should set them free from that unachievable obligation.  Then you will both have time and capacity for relationships with more compatible people.

Consistency is Key

Perhaps you’re having a rough week, you’re feeling dysregulated already, and someone disregards a boundary. You automatically fly off the handle. You’re so angry or hurt and perhaps you bite back, or perhaps you hold it in but you’re seething.

Or perhaps, you’ve having a great week, you’re very well regulated and calm, and then someone disregards a boundary.  It doesn’t make you upset, you have a handle on your emotional state and you’re not going to allow this to ruin your day. But you wish they hadn’t done that.

The thing about boundaries is that they exist whether you get angry about them or not. 

If someone disregards a boundary, whether I am enraged, or totally calm and collected, is for me to handle, with the variety of self-care tools that I have at my disposal, mostly things I learned in therapy. My level of upset is not relevant to the severity of the situation.

I bring this up because I’ve known many people that only take a boundary seriously if you yell at them.  This is not acceptable to me.  A boundary I have for myself is that if I come across someone that only starts to respect a boundary if I am visibly upset, then I do not spend time with that person anymore. These types of people do not actually respect your boundaries, they just don’t like getting in trouble and will change their behaviours to avoid conflict, not to give you respect and trust.  This is a very unhealthy dynamic that does not create safe conditions.

The idea of asserting or reasserting a boundary is to teach someone about you. Boundaries aren’t selfish. They’re self-preservation, so that you can be the best version of yourself.  And the more you honour your limits, the stronger and steadier your mental health becomes. 

Sharing these limits with other people is also a sharing of yourself, it is a gift. By being honest about your needs and limits, other people get to know you. The real you.  This will bring the right people closer, and push the wrong people away.

When when we assert a boundary with someone, we do it so that we can stay. We are saying “I want to make this work, and here are the conditions to make that possible”.

Be honest about your boundaries

My ex almost never did housework. It was a major relationship conflict that ultimately contributed to its demise.

I set a boundary that I was not willing to do 100% of the housework. We were financially 50/50 and working similar hours and yet he would consistently do nothing around the house.

The mode I was in here was a Hope for Change. I believed that out of his love for me that he would change and I accepted his barrage of excuses for longer than I should have. I picked the coriander out of my food.  

Part of the reason I had such hope was that when we discussed it, he would always declare he was going to do better.

A more honest route would have been to say “I’m sorry, this is a boundary for me, I do not do housework”.

Perhaps you think this is a ridiculous boundary. I think it’s an honest assessment of him though and I think its actually quite common.  Some people really struggle with housework due to disabilities, and some struggle with it due to social conditioning.

And were he to put “I’m not willing to do any housework” on his dating profile, 90% of women would probably swipe left.   And that’s a good thing, because they would all have just saved themselves and him a bunch of time.   But what this sort of honesty would open him up to is the 10% of women who would say, “I appreciate your honesty around the topic of housework. If we were to live together I would be happy to do all of the housework, if you were happy to do XYZ”,  or “I hate housework too! Lets agree to hire a cleaner if we ever live together”.

For me, had I known this about him I never would have considered a relationship with him as we are simply not compatible.  My boundaries were not compatible with his boundaries.  I would have loved to save years of my life, as well as the financial loss that occurred as a result of that relationship but that’s a whole other can of worms. 

I completely understand why someone wouldn’t want to express a boundary of “I don’t do housework” clearly.  He had fear of conflict, low self-awareness, a desire for approval and maybe even a hope for change himself.  Instead, he expressed his boundary through his actions, which I ignored.

While I was living incongruently with this incompatible man, wondering why I was so unhappy, I learned a lot about myself.  I learned what my boundaries were, what I was willing to accept, and eventually had enough information about myself that I was able to leave him, feeling very confident in my choice.

This information has served me well very since.  I wish I had known these things about myself prior, but we don’t know what we don’t know and we can only work with the information we have. I’m still learning every day and regularly find myself in new situations, but I’m dedicated to that learning and part of writing this blog was to reinforce these ideals in my own mind. 

Sometimes you can get lost in the sauce a bit and lose your way with boundaries and its good to have resources like these to come back to during that time.

Learning to trust again after repeated boundary violations

Something my therapist helped me with was the path to Trust.  I worried about my ability to trust others again after having this relationship with a man that had lied about who he was in numerous ways. Not just lies about how he will definitely, definitely replace the toilet roll from now on promise, there was a bunch of other stuff he was lying about too. I felt shame about being naïve and worried about picking poorly again.  

Her advice was, trust everyone.  Being distrusting will block all connections, so it’s not a useful space to be in.  Instead, know yourself, be clear on your boundaries, trust others to respect them.  And if they don’t, leave.  Trust their actions and behaviour, take that at face value. Acknowledge that if they are someone who cannot meet your need to have your boundaries respected, then they do not have a place in your life.

Accept other peoples boundaries, when they set them, either via their actions or verbally.  All boundaries are valid, some might just be incompatible with you.  If that’s the case you can either leave the relationship, or come up with a mutually acceptable compromise together.   Coming up with compromises in your head by yourself, instead of talking about it with the other person will not lead to anything good. This is wishful thinking, lacks transparency and usually involves either self-sacrifice, or eventual harm to the other person.

As the saying goes, ‘when people tell you who they are, believe them’.  The writing is actually all over the wall and what stops us seeing it is a lack of clear boundaries for ourselves.   

Knowing ourselves is the quickest path to knowing others.  Trusting ourselves is the quickest path to trusting others.

Once we are in that space, we can cater our boundaries to various people and move through life feeling a whole lot safer, and more confident.

Catering boundaries to individuals is about recognising what you trust them with and what you don’t.   Some people you might trust with your life, but not your car, so you would have a boundary that they are not allowed to drive your car. 

Another example of a bespoke boundary might be that setting a boundary for yourself that you only hang out with a particular person on weekends because although you adore their company, you know that they like to stay up much later than you and they tend to pressure you to stay longer.  You could cut them off for disrespecting your boundary surrounding sleep, or you could choose to set a new, firmer boundary on the days you spend with them so that you can maintain the friendship.

You might allow some people to phone you any time 24/7, whereas other people you would expect a warning and if they were to call you unannounced you would find that unacceptable and not answer the call, or answer the call and let them know you won’t accept calls in the future.

Some people you can just trust to always let you down and hurt you, some have promised the world but continue to show you who they are via their own actions or inactions. The best boundary you can have for those people is to go No-Contact. 

Search your feelings Luke.  Do what works for you. Your boundaries are your own. And if you have none?  You’re probably wildly unhappy.   And possibly also blaming everyone else for problems that you are responsible for.

Examples of some of my work boundaries

Here a few of my easy to understand boundaries, and how I maintain and reassert them.

All of these boundaries are clearly stated on my website.

My boundary is that I do not offer BBBJ.  If you ask me, I will reassert that I do not offer it. If you ask again, I will ask you to leave, or if I’m doing an outcall, that I will gather my things and leave.

If you were to attempt to put your unsheathed member in my mouth, this is a consent issue, and I will act in whichever way reclaims my safety as quickly as possible. Then I would involve the authorities, because that is sexual assault.

My boundary is that I do not respond to booking enquiries after 10pm or before 7am.  When people message me during that time, I do not reply to them until the next day.   If I go to bed late, or get up early and have capacity, then I can choose to be flexible on that boundary. 

My boundary is that booking enquiries must be sent via SMS or WhatsApp and I do not accept enquiries via social media DMs.  If someone sends me a booking enquiry via DMs, I reassert this boundary by telling them to SMS me.  If they continue to message me via DMs, I will ignore those messages, block them and move on with my day.

HOW THOUGH!?

Though I’m not perfect, I have a pretty good handle on my boundary setting skills. I’ve been referred to as a “Boundaries Queen” by my friends on more than one occasion.  Firstly, I’ve always been a very direct, blunt person, which is probably owing to my autism more than anything else.   I have still been in unhealthy relationships though, where I found myself unable to assert my boundaries, and I have done a lot of work to get to where I am today.

Therapy is fantastic.  See a therapist. Regular journalling is also a fabulous tool. Having friends you can vent to can really help, and being honest about the state of your relationship so you can find out if certain things are “normal” or not can be a way for you to find out if there are some red flags that you were not aware of.   This helped me a lot when I was exiting a relationship and had gotten a bit lost in the sauce and didn’t know what was okay and what wasn’t.   Couples counselling can be a great tool if you want to learn and grow with your current partner.

I also have a couple of book recommendations for you which I found super helpful.

The first The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent by Betty Martin.  This book focuses on boundaries regarding touch, with lots of fun practical exercises to help you learn what you like and don’t like and improve your communication skills with your partner.  It’s an incredible resource for so many reasons.  But all of the touch-based lessons can be applied to every area of your life, so I recommend reading even if you are not specifically interested in touch-related boundaries.

The second book I recommend is Say the Thing by Kami Orange. You can find them on Instagram and Tiktok also, their content is fantastic.  Say The Thing is a short and very practical book that gives advice on how to actually talk about your boundaries.  It includes lots of suggested scripts for various situations and is very easy to understand. I think anyone who reads this book would feel more confident to set boundaries for themselves. You can find this book in audio format for free on Spotify.

If you would like to talk more with me on the topic of boundaries, I’d love to catch up with you sometime and discuss at length, it is such an important topic to me, something I am very passionate about.