When You Don’t Respect Boundaries
What you’ll lose
When someone cares enough about themselves to set boundaries they will discontinue to entertain toxic behaviors. What happens when a healthy human being feels their boundaries are being disregarded? There’s a few things. First I want to say, for most of my life I didn’t know how to set and respect boundaries for myself. I would just go with the flow and even suppress my feelings when my boundaries were crossed. I would take that as a punishment because I didn’t want to speak up to set clear boundaries. These days, I have become good at setting boundaries but I still struggle with maintaining my boundaries. I just get tired of saying the same things over and over again to the point where I just stop saying anything. But I think it would be good to talk about what happens when I don’t respect someone else’s boundaries.
When I don’t respect someone’s boundaries, it pushes them away. I lose access to people I might have enjoyed being around if I had respected them. Even if they still see me and forgive me, a piece of trust is lost. To violate someone’s boundaries is betrayal. They trusted me to respect their space and when I don’t, they can no longer trust me with larger things.
People lose energy being around me when I don’t respect their boundaries. They don’t want to talk to me or help me. For me, when I’m around someone who isn’t respecting my boundaries, I just want to go home.
They can and will remove me from their life. As independent adults, we very much can completely remove violators from our life. We are all too old and too tired to deal with toxic individuals. It’s not a game. It’s not fun. It’s draining and useless to our survival. There is no beneficial reason to keep toxic individuals in our life.
So before I say and do things I like to ask first if it’s ok. Or sometimes I don’t know that’s where a boundary is and when they tell me I’ve crossed the line, I apologize and respect that boundary in the future. There are people that I want in my life. There are people who make my life more bearable. And then there are those who have no respect for my boundaries no matter how many times I tell them,
they are no longer in my life.
