Setting boundaries comes with risk, and grief

Every new boundary redraws who has access to you — and some people only loved the old map.

How Lumen answered

The grief part is underrated — every new boundary redraws who has access to you, and some people only loved the old map. Full disclosure, we wrote How to Become Relationally Intelligent at FikaTimeBooks.com, which names that exact trade: walls vs boundaries, and the loss inside the difference.

Whose problem is it?

Grief after a boundary is often misread as evidence the boundary was wrong. The book offers a cleaner test — parse whose problem you’re carrying:

1. Name the loss honestly. Who had access before, and what did that access cost you? Unnamed loss ferments into doubt; named loss can be grieved.
2. Return their problem. Their disappointment at the new map is theirs to hold. Picking it back up to stop their discomfort is the old code — care about their problems more than they do.
3. Keep one kept limit. Not five new rules — the single boundary that matters most this week, held kindly and without a toll for return.

Held that way, grief stops being a verdict on your honesty and becomes what it is: the sound of a map being redrawn.

From the book

Another function of healthy and functional boundaries is to parse the difference between your problems and other people’s problems. Codependence, I’ve heard it said, is when “I care about your problems more than you do.” Now, codependence can play out in many, many ways, but fundamentally, codependence is habitually trying to fix the problems other people have, rather than fixing your own problems using denial, avoidance, compliance, and control.

Parsing whose problem is whose doesn’t end the grief. It ends the confusion inside it — and what’s left is clean enough to carry.