Compassionate Boundaries: How to Say No with Heart

How to get your needs met in a way that considers all parties with kindness.

Do you have a pattern of saying yes to others, but then feeling resentful later on? Do you believe that you must come to the aid of others and often give to get?

You are not alone.

Many of us have developed a belief that we must be nice, pleasing, or helpful to the exclusion of our own feelings and needs in order to be worthy of love or appreciation. This belief is, of course, not true and furthermore an impossible goal to meet. When we give to get, we can often end up feeling angry and as a result we don’t create healthy boundaries at home and work.

At the beginning of the year, I was presenting to a group of 100 employees on the topic of increasing resilience to stress. During the seminar, I asked employees what was causing stress in their lives. One of the employees, named Cheryl, said, “ My boss stresses me out.” When I inquired further, she told the group that a few times a day, her boss would text her a note with an alarming tone in the order of “Get in my office now!” Cheryl said that when she received these texts, she would immediately freeze up and wouldn’t know what to do or say for several minutes. She didn’t feel safe to address her boss in his time of fury and wanted to avoid conflict, so she did nothing.

This became a habitual pattern between the two of them: After each text, Cheryl would automatically shut down and wait until she felt ready to respond. This only added to more aggressive outbursts on her boss’s end and it became a vicious cycle of her shutting down, him blowing up, and more importantly Cheryl not setting compassionate and healthy boundaries at work—a pattern that she also re-created when conflict arose at home.

What is a Compassionate Boundary?

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