What to Expect When Setting Boundaries With Your Abuser

Things will get harder before they get easier

Once, my mother apologized to me.

As it was only the one time, I remember it clearly.

I was home from college, and I’d been working a summer job as a waitress. I’d made plans to go out after work with a guy I worked with, Isaías, who I’d been sort of seeing while I was home.

I’d told my parents where I was going and that I’d be home around 10. “Okay, honey,” my mother had said as I walked out the door.

After my shift was over, I went out with Isaías as planned, and while we were out my mother called me on my cell.

“Nikki.” I could hear her clenched teeth, tight lips. “Where the f*** are you.”

I looked at the clock; it was only 9:00. My heart dropped into my stomach as I began wracking my brain to figure out how I had transgressed so I could begin to mitigate the damage before I got home. I came up blank.

“Um, out with Isaías?” I said.

“Oh? You’re not out with Hector?” she demanded. “Because he just called here.”

Her tone was accusatory despite the obvious question of why Hector — a boyfriend from two years prior — would be calling my parents’ house if I was out with him. What’s more, it’s not like I was banned from seeing Hector or something. When we’d broken up my parents had been indifferent.

“No, I’m out with Isaías like I told you I would be.” I was gentle with my words, treading carefully. By the age of 19 I knew I needed to massage our interactions and soothe my mother when she was being irrational, rather than clapping back as I would have done in my younger years.

It didn’t work. I could tell from her tone my mother had told herself a story she now believed, despite reason and evidence to the contrary. I excused myself from my date, knowing I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself with the adrenaline that was now scraping through my veins. There would be a fight waiting for me when I arrived at home, and the longer I waited the more intoxicated she’d become and the worse it would be.

Better to get it over with now.

As I drove the half-hour home, I couldn’t quiet the voice in my head — the one that kept asking what I’d done wrong. Intellectually, I knew there was nothing. I was clean and sober. I’d even stopped smoking cigarettes. I wasn’t causing trouble, just working and hanging out and going about life as a college kid.

But my past conditioning just wouldn’t let me believe I wasn’t to blame for something.

I arrived home and opened the front door, braced as best I could be. I’d been away at college for years now, but the anxiety inspired by the unexpected confrontation transported me back to my preadolescence, when my mother would regularly pick fights with me.

I’d attempted to communicate by using logic on an irrational human being, and I’d lost the battle every single time until eventually I learned fighting was futile.

The living room was empty. The television was off. It seemed my parents were already in bed.

My keys clinked on the counter; the roll of ones I’d made that night lolled back and forth next to the phone. I headed toward the back of the house to get ready for bed, relaxing a bit.

“Nik?” I heard as I replaced my toothbrush in the holder. My mother was in the hallway. I side-stepped out of the bathroom, aware of the time she’d backed me into that room years earlier. My hackles were raised, but she was…

She was contrite.

“I’m sorry, Nik,” she said.

“Oh. It’s okay,” I said, my voice hollow around the lump in my throat. A cautious relief washed over me. The confrontation seemed to be a non-issue but I was reluctant to add any more to the conversation lest it twist in the wrong direction again.

My mother didn’t move. “I was just really upset,” she said. “Suzie died tonight.”

Suzie was my dad’s dog. He’d gotten her as a puppy around the time I left for school. She wasn’t even three years old yet. “Oh,” I said, stunned.

My parents were sad, and I consoled them as best I could. But in the back of my mind was a question.

What did my father’s dead dog have to do with my mother’s calling me in a fit of paranoia, looking for a fight?

Reflecting now, I believe it was a combination of her sadness over the dog and her perpetual generalized anxiety, mixed with an increase in her nightly dose of alcohol, which had fueled her paranoia about my whereabouts.

Reasons without reason.

Reasons she wouldn’t acknowledge if confronted with them.

Reasons, but no excuse.

Unhealthy relationships don’t develop healthy boundaries without conscious effort

By that point in my parents’ relationship, my dad had learned two things: when to speak up, and when to keep quiet.

My parents don’t have boundaries so much as a management strategy.

He preferred to keep the peace. When my mother would get nasty or paranoid, he would simply disengage. Reason didn’t work once she had an idea in her head, so even when he was right he would stuff his own feelings — and all rationality — in the hopes things wouldn’t escalate any further.

It was a hard lesson for me to learn, but eventually I began doing this, too. After years of not getting through to her even when she was spouting nonsense, I finally just started avoiding her when she got like that.

Every once in awhile, though, her constant picking would build up and my father would boil over. “Now, that’s enough,” he might say. The words were few, but his demeanor conveyed their seriousness. It was enough to change the dynamic, for better or worse.

Depending on how escalated my mother was she would either retreat with her tail between her legs or pounce and, once she was finished unloading, give him the silent treatment for a few days.

And that’s the way things continue now, nearly four decades into their relationship. They’re not boundaries so much as a management strategy. My mother doesn’t have to reflect on her behavior at all, until my father decides he’s had enough of her abuse — and even then, it’s not a guarantee.

Unwittingly, I seem to have adopted these same non-boundaries over the years. However, as I navigate my way through adulthood while still being my mother’s child, I am realizing how important boundaries are for my ability to handle our relationship.

They will resist; expect this, and plan for it

Boundaries have been difficult for me to establish with my mother. Though I’m a mother myself and nearly twice the age my mother was when she had me, I still often feel like a child in our conversations.

What aspects of their behavior are troublesome to you? What do you need in order to feel safe in conversations with them?

That dynamic is hard to overcome, though in many respects I consider myself to be more mature than she is. I’ve spent years working through a mess of psychological issues, while she refuses to admit she has any. (She has many.) So I have a level of self- and other-awareness that she just doesn’t have.

Still, though, she’s always held a power over me and anytime she chooses to wield it I’m a crumbling little kid again.

Naturally, then, when I started standing up for myself in a healthy way I encountered some resistance. She wasn’t used to anyone putting their foot down and telling her how she was allowed to behave toward them.

I think that’s because she’d never stopped to consider how her behavior affects other people at all. What’s always been important to her is being able to get her thoughts and feelings out of her mind and into the world, and she’s never been concerned with the way they fell onto others.

As her daughter, I had borne the brunt of these words over time. Unlike my father, I had never been able to use my gravitas to communicate when enough had been enough. I’d attempted to communicate by using logic on an irrational human being, and I’d lost the battle every single time until eventually I learned fighting was futile.

But one day, I decided I was done absorbing the blows.

In setting boundaries, I had to ask myself a few questions. What aspects of my mother’s behavior were troublesome to me? What did I need in order to feel safe in conversations with her? Once I knew these things, I could communicate and be confident in the limits I was setting.

She will rail against the boundaries. She’ll test them in subtle ways, like when she talks about doing things that are out of bounds, or in more overt ways, like calling and unloading on me with a story she’s made up which has no basis in reality. I have to expect this, and I have to know how to respond.

I’ve gone as far as role-playing specific conversations with my therapist or my husband. It feels silly in the moment but practicing in a safe space really goes a long way towards helping practice how to respond under stress.

Boundaries are for you, not them

Relationships can exist without explicit boundaries. Healthy people might not even need to talk about boundaries in order to have a healthy relationship. When a line is crossed, they’ll sense as much and adjust as needed.

But when one or more members of a relationship is unhealthy, firm boundaries will need to be established sooner or later, or the risk of damage runs high.

Unfortunately, though, establishing boundaries in an unhealthy relationship won’t make it instantly healthy.

Even when the power dynamic is unconscious, it will be jarring to the other person when you challenge it. They will ignore your boundaries, test them, forget you ever set them at all. They might gaslight you into wondering why you set them in the first place.

But the beauty of boundaries is that, once you’ve established them — even if it’s only in your own mind — the other person’s unhealthy behaviors can be filed under no longer your problem. If you set limits, and stick with the consequences for not adhering to them, then you both know where you stand.

For example: “Mom, you are raising your voice and I’m feeling uncomfortable. I’m going to hang up now. Call me tomorrow and we can talk then.” The phone goes off, the follow-up calls go unanswered until the next day, and we can try the conversation again until it works for both of us.

In the interim, I’ll probably be thinking (and possibly even seething) about whatever occurred before I hung up. But I won’t be subjecting myself to more abuse and, in the long run, I’ll suffer less.

It will probably take several tries before it gets through. If you’ve never set limits before, the other person might not believe you’ll adhere to them. If they are taken to saying things offhand and not following through, they might assume you’ll do the same.

It might never get through. If they’re not healthy now, and they don’t seek to improve their health, then chances are things won’t get better from their end. But, once you’re confident in standing your ground, their problems no longer need to be yours.

Once you set boundaries, you can close yourself to the unwellness of others and stop taking it on for yourself. And you can begin to become healthy even when the other person is not.

Invisible illnesses are so difficult to manage, in part because it’s hard for others to understand what they can’t see. It can be even more difficult to understand the debilitating effects of trauma on the developing brain, because “trauma” is not a diagnosis. Yet it still manifests itself for a lifetime, a double-invisible influence, informing the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world and guiding our behavior, especially in times of struggle. For, me everything started with childhood trauma.

Join me here every second and fourth Monday, where I explore the invisible influence of past trauma on current beliefs and behavior. Find all my past columns and subscribe for updates here.

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