Are You Creating A Boundary or a Barrier?

My thinking about this starts with a short and powerful reflection by Sonya Renee Taylor on the difference between boundaries and barriers. I hope everyone reading this will listen to it, but here are the pieces that rose for me as I was listening to her:

“Boundaries are designed to keep me safe. Barriers are designed to keep you out.”

“Boundaries are responsive. Barriers are reactionary.”

“Barriers are often about ‘here is what I’ve learned to do to “protect myself” from harm;’ and the reality is that we are not protecting ourselves from harm, what we are doing is starving ourselves…of the nurturing and nourishment of connection.” 

“We fear that the historical outcome will be the present outcome if we engage in something that feels like vulnerability”... (But) “harm is inevitable”... “The only way to never risk abandonment (rejection, etc.)... is to live in isolation/eschew human connection." (My combining of several sentences.)

“What you think is a boundary is often a barrier, built by the fear that some historical outline you experienced, rooted often in our youth (and) in our trauma, is going to occur again if we allow people to get close to us, or if we allow ourselves to behave (differently).”

“Can you look at where you are a no and really think about ‘am I a no because no is my safest space, but (that) it also means keeping out all sorts of opportunity, keeping out resource, joy, fun, desire, play – keep(ing) out all of these other really nourishing and essential aspects of our full humanity for the purpose of keeping yourself safe?”

“Boundaries are an opportunity to explore how I allow all these gifts of the universe (list above) in AND mitigate subjecting myself to unnecessary, electactable, harm.”... “Electable harm is harm that comes when I engage in patterns that I know get me the kind of results that don’t feel good.”

“(notice that) all of this is not about the other person. It’s about you.”

“(If I am engaging boundaries to avoid rejection) what I’m really doing is practicing ‘how do I not reject myself.’”

“How do I set up a world where I don’t abandon myself?” “How do I stay in relationships that don’t ask me or pull my energy to abandon myself?”

“Boundaries are keeping you in relationship with yourself first.”

In a discussion of this framing in my coaching cohort, more reflections emerged, including:

• Boundaries are permeable, focused on self-love.

  
  

• Trauma and fear transform boundaries into barriers.

  
  

• Barriers are externally focused, they are about keeping people/experiences away from us.

  
  

• Barriers cannot, and do not, discern what is good for us, and what is toxic. They are not nuanced, not flexible, not permeable. They are instead rigid, keeping out far more than needs to be kept out.

  
  

• Boundaries are permeable and discerning, like the membrane of a cell.

  
  

• The membrane of a cell requires a LOT of energy/resources to stay healthy. It needs to be rebuilt regularly to be able to do the discernment work that is its job – keep out the bad stuff, let in the good stuff. So when we are under-resourced and over-stretched (exhausted, traumatized, sad, afraid), we don’t have the energy to discern, to hold healthy boundaries; we instead either collapse/stop discerning/let lots of stuff in that could be harmful, or we set rigid barriers instead, to try to protect ourselves.

  
  

• Boundaries are part of how we construct and manage our identities. They help us stay in alignment with our core values, say yes to who we most want to be, and create the necessary, healthy, space between us and other people. To quote Prentice Hemphill “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and love me at the same time.”

  
  

• We’ve all had plenty of experiences of other people not respecting our boundaries. And sometimes we choose not to respect our own boundaries. In those moments, there is a lot of learning available; we need to notice, discern why, and then decide transparently and intentionally what we want to do.

Moving from Thinking to Experiencing and Deep Reflecting

I had been pondering all of this, mostly in my head, and then I got a sharp, body-level lesson on the difference between boundaries and barriers and the cost of defaulting to setting a barrier. Here is that story.

It happened when our eldest cat left this world and us. She was a tiny, seven-pound female bengal who came to us about a decade ago, after four years spent living in a cage in a cattery, throwing off a new litter of kittens as often as they could make that happen. She was the most determinedly autonomous creature I have ever known. 

She had been sick for a couple of years, and indeed we thought we were losing her a year ago, when she stopped eating for days. I even dug a grave in the woods for her, since she had loved her years as an indoor-outdoor cat. (We had shifted to keeping all the cats indoors, and she still escaped outside as often as she could manage to dodge around one of us.) She rallied, and the day after she started eating again, she spent 40 minutes yowling at the top of her huge bengal-cat voice at the front door, and staring pointedly from me to the door and back every time I came to talk with her about it. I finally decided she knew what she wanted, and that I could live with my fears for her safety out of respect for her autonomy, and opened the door. She spent the last year as an indoor-outdoor cat again. We compromised, usually, by her agreeing to stay inside at night, when our local coyote pack was most active.

When her illness flared up again, I thought about hauling her to the vet for steroid shots to try to buy her a little more time, but she had rejected medicines all her life – successfully spraying liquids all over whomever was trying to put them in her mouth, and spitting pills out again and again with firm determination. I didn’t think she’d appreciate being forced to accept a thing she didn’t want. So I just kept letting her make her choices – eating less and less of what we gave her, but still eating the voles she caught outside, and then not eating those either; coming in and out 20 or more times a day, often being inside for only a few minutes at a time; and staying out later, coming back at midnight or 1:00.

The night before she died, I was exhausted and overwhelmed after several nights of poor sleep. She asked to go back out at 10:00 and I said no, not wanting to be woken up by her wanting in at 2:30, and then back out 10 minutes later, and then back in at 4:00… She spent much of the night circling inside the house, yowling, calling, and, by close to dawn, pleading with me to let her out. To use Sonya Renee Taylor’s language, I was a no. I hunkered down in my bed, telling my partner that I did not want to give her the signal that she could just ask to go out anytime; that my sleep was important too. I got almost no sleep. 

The next day, I found her curled up in one of her sleeping spots, looking older and stiffer and very detached. I tried scratching her chin and head and she tolerated it, but would not look at me. I apologized and told her I would let her out if she wanted to go. She turned her back on me. I got up, feeling sad, and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she came into the room and then walked purposefully to the door. I let her out. We never saw her again.

I knew that when she was ready to die she would go outside and die in the woods. I knew that was what she wanted. 

And in the hour before dawn when her insistence turned to pleading that broke my heart, I was still too caught in my no – in my story that I needed to say no in order to keep myself safe, to protect my need for sleep – to let myself respond from my respect for and connection to her.

I set a barrier, not a boundary. Sometimes life brings us the lessons – or framing – we need, a little too late.

And so I have regrets. I am sorry, little cat, for that rigid boundary that prevented me from being my best self that night, my open, curious, respectful, loving self who would have opened the door and let you go off into the night. I am sorry for your fear and grief, for another night of pain, for trapping you once more in a cage when I could have given you the gift you were asking for.

And, I am grateful, for the sharp lesson of that night, and for the insights and questions that continue to fall out from it. Thank you for these insights and questions.

A Note on the Somatics of All This

I am feeling my way into a deeper knowledge of the difference between a boundary and a barrier in my body. I know that the easiest way for me to tell which is which is to tune in to what my body knows, rather than listening to the chatter/rationalizations my mind is creating. 

If I look back at the story I shared, my body was depleted, overwhelmed, afraid, brittle, fragile, rigid – all indicators that I was likely trying to hold a barrier, not a boundary. Maybe if I had been able to pause, attend to what my body knew, and what it needed, I could have found my way back into alignment, back into responding from my whole self, not just my immediate fragility, and my fears.

When I am setting a boundary, I am centered, clear about my intent if not about the situation or the likely outcomes, and operating from strength, not fragility. I know what that feels like in my body.

My job now – a job I will invite you to take on for yourself if that feels useful – is to learn how to notice the difference, and make choices from that knowledge.

What I Am Wondering

What happens if we learn the somatics of this deeply enough that we can quickly and easily discern whether we are setting a boundary or a barrier, and make informed choices from that deep knowledge?

What changes in our approach to challenging relationships and situations if we ask ourselves whether we need to set a boundary or a barrier? If we examine our default response and ask “Am I focused on keeping them out, or keeping me in alignment?” 

And, moving into the realm of the larger world and our work in it…

How could we approach the dismantling of dominance culture as a process of nurturing joy, fun, desire, play, and connection? 

How do we apply this framing to our political world, where so much feels so overwhelming and exhausting and where our default appears to be to create barriers, not boundaries? Do the approaches of folks like Mónica Gúzman give us a path to trying for boundaries instead? (She is the author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.)

What emerges if we view racism, sexism, transphobia, classism, ableism, ageism, and all of the other systemic and somatic biases we carry as barriers designed to keep us “safe” – barriers that are, as Sonya Renee Taylor says, “(keeping) out all of these other really nourishing and essential aspects of our full humanity,” “starving (us) of the nurturing and nourishment of connection”?

What allows us to move from this kind of barrier to more permeable boundaries – boundaries that allow joy, fun, desire, play, nurturing and nourishment in? How could we approach the dismantling of dominance culture as a process of nurturing joy, fun, desire, play, and connection? 

Since boundaries are part of how we construct and manage our identities, and since there are parts of our identities that are toxic creations of cultural stories (racism, etc.), how do we do our own discernment about what parts of our identities we want to keep inside our boundaries and nurture, and what we want to release or transform? How can that move us deeper into the work of collective liberation? And what supports do we need in place to make that work possible?

© Tasha Harmon, August, 2025 - You are welcome to use this article for your own development, and share it with friends and colleagues. If you wish to use the contents of this article professionally (for work you are getting paid for), or to publish it, please email me for permission.