Setting Boundaries After Trauma: Why It's So Hard and Where to Start

Written by Roland Bal

To open up without being able to set limits is a recipe for getting hurt. As a child, you don't have that choice, though. You are naturally vulnerable and don't yet have the skill sets to defend yourself when that vulnerability isn't acknowledged or honoured. And this is the case with child abuse and neglect, which often leads to complex trauma. When your vulnerability is not acknowledged, and you have been hurt, your perception of it changes. Vulnerability will be perceived as a weakness or as emotionally dangerous, and as a result, if you venture there at all, it will only be extremely cautiously.

And there comes another problem with post-traumatic stress which is that you have not learned nor have been given the opportunity to set healthy boundaries. You have managed so far to survive using either fight, flight, freeze, or the fawn response. So setting healthy boundaries is an alien concept to start with.

Why Boundaries Feel Impossible After Trauma

You will likely fix your boundaries either too rigidly, which is then followed by a collapse when you get triggered by something or someone. Once you are aware of the importance of both boundaries and vulnerability, the need then arises to explore and define them for yourself. And this is a process.

Starting out, you are going to meet your fears and resistances while hesitantly setting your limits — your yes and no responses towards others. Equally so, when you are starting to allow yourself to feel vulnerable and open up again, you will meet the pain of that disrespected vulnerability and the grievous hurt that surrounds it. It's a challenging but very worthwhile growth process.

Being abused and having your sense of belonging compromised will either make you guard your emotional space very tightly through a fight response, or you might channel your actions into a fawn response.

If your default survival response is fight, you might have found that your boundaries are too strict, too rigid. You might be able to make money as a means to fill a void, but you might trade your time and energy disproportionally. If your default is the fawn response, you have the opposite problem — your boundaries are almost non-existent, and you give. Any disproportionate, excessive, or lack of a particular survival response wears down your nervous system, your body, your mind, and most likely strains your social relationships.

The Connection Between Boundaries, Suppressed Anger, and Anxiety

To recover and heal, you need to be committed and dedicated. Once you become less anxious or depressed, you get more access to anger. If your anger keeps overwhelming you, it will either turn inward as self-reproach or self-hatred, or flow outward as self-righteousness, faultfinding, or blame.

Accessing constructive anger in the form of boundaries usually starts with acting on or voicing what you don't want. Removing yourself from an environment that does not respect you is part of setting boundaries. When you start to learn to work with boundaries, that helps you to have more of a sense of self. You can distinguish better between what you want and what are someone else's wishes. In turn, boundaries reduce anxiety, over time.

At first, you will probably struggle with boundaries and it might amp up your anxiety, especially if you tend to people-please to get a sense of validation. If you persist with exploring boundaries, over time you will shift to giving validation to self before others. Boundaries and self-validation increase self-worth and self-esteem, and potentially reduce anxiety. Healthy boundaries, by expressing what you want or don't want, also make you more focused, more purposeful, more embodied, more productive, more organised, and thus more fulfilled.

Balancing Survival Responses

Each survival response needs to be balanced out so it starts to work for you rather than against you. A healthy fight response — the energy of anger — can help you to set boundaries, have a healthier sense of self, and of purpose. A healthy fawn response can become healthy empathy — compassion and consideration for others. A healthy flight response, the energy of anxiety, can be turned into alertness, being observant, present.

Work towards making each survival response and connected emotion work for you rather than against you. This does not happen overnight. It happens through a gradual process of learning to contain what comes up for you, tracking your edges, and slowly expanding what you can hold without being overwhelmed or shutting down.

Vulnerability and Boundaries Work Together

On a deeper level, trauma work involves engaging with boundaries and vulnerability interchangeably. As you work with the suppressed anger, you will gradually be able to address and reestablish healthy boundaries, self-worth, and self-esteem. Through allowing vulnerability, while holding enough containment for yourself, you may touch into the pain of abandonment and lack of love, which will allow you to hold more of your profound internal pain and start to integrate, release, or transform that part of you.

This is the paradox of the work. You need boundaries to feel safe enough to be vulnerable, and you need vulnerability to feel what has been driving the rigidity or collapse of your boundaries. Neither one works without the other. Containment makes both possible — enough capacity to stay with what you are feeling without being swept away by it or shutting it down entirely.

To contain emotion is to have enough energy and resilience to stay with your internal suffering without reacting to it any further — neither getting too focused on what you feel, nor getting pushed out of staying with the emotion, causing you to dissociate. This is a hard one. But it is the ground on which genuine boundaries are built — not from a place of reactivity, but from a place of presence.