“I can’t say no when someone asks me for something.” “If I think the other person might get angry, I swallow my own feelings.” “I don’t understand how to maintain distance with people.”
——Even now, as an adult, you feel like you can’t hold your own space in relationships.
If that sounds familiar, please keep reading.
It’s not that you’re weak-willed. It’s not that you’re too kind. You simply never received something you needed as a child.
That something is boundaries — the third and final gift a child needs from their parent.
A child who has gained emotional safety and developed a sense of self eventually reaches adolescence. The time comes to receive the last gift from their parent: the sense that even between parent and child, there are lines that must not be crossed — the feeling of “You are you, and I am me.”
“Boundaries” is not a skill that can simply be learned. In the parent-child relationship, boundaries begin as something experienced before they are ever understood — and children raised without them are missing the experience, not just the knowledge.
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