Braced for Impact

One of the frustrating things about being a psychologist is that I can often recognize patterns in other people’s lives long before I recognize them in my own.

A patient can sit across from me describing a relationship that leaves them exhausted, resentful, and perpetually on guard, and together we can usually untangle what belongs to them and what belongs to someone else. We can often see why they keep ending up in the same painful place and what responding differently might look like. Then I leave my office, walk back into my own life, and discover that all of that clarity becomes much harder to access when the story belongs to me.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about the grief that can accompany healthy boundaries (When Boundaries Feel Like Heartbreak). A few weeks later, I wrote another about the reality that holding a boundary once doesn’t necessarily mean the requests stop coming (Here We Go Again). Both essays grew out of the same relationship.

Before publishing the second essay, I read it aloud to my therapist. These days, many of our sessions begin this way. Over the past couple of years, writing has become one of the ways I process my emotions. It helps me understand what I’m feeling before I ever walk into her office.

When I finished reading, I told her something I hadn’t written in the essay itself: while I’d become much better at holding healthy boundaries, I wasn’t sure I was holding them with much grace.

Whenever I interact with this person, I can feel my body preparing itself before the conversation has even begun. My shoulders tighten, my thinking narrows, and some protective part of me moves into position. Before anything has even happened, I’m already anticipating a request that hasn’t been made or an expectation that may never arrive. By the time we’ve exchanged our first few words, I’m already guarded.

In some ways, my bracing makes perfect sense. Over the years, there have been requests that felt overwhelming, expectations I couldn’t and shouldn’t meet, and situations that left me feeling responsible for emotions that were never mine to carry.

As I talked it through with my therapist, though, I began to realize that I wasn’t only bracing for this other person’s behavior; I was bracing for my own.

Years ago, if a difficult request came, I always responded the same way: I’d rearrange my schedule, ignore my own needs, take on this person’s distress, and convince myself that this was what loving people did. I had spent so much of my life confusing care with responsibility that I couldn’t witness this person’s pain without trying to relieve it. Eventually, I could recognize the dynamic, but I hadn’t figured out how to change my response.

That’s no longer true. If an unreasonable request comes now, I can recognize it, and I can say no. I can tolerate this person’s disappointment without rushing in to make it disappear. Boundaries that once felt almost impossible to set have become much easier to maintain.

What I hadn't realized was that although my behavior had changed, my body hadn't caught up. I was still walking into these conversations expecting to become the version of myself I'd worked so hard to leave behind.

The reason this matters so much to me is that this is someone I love, and I want to stay in relationship with them. Walking away would, in many ways, be simpler. What I want is something harder. I want to build a healthier version of the relationship. To get there, I need to find a way to stop walking into every interaction braced for impact, because guardedness has a way of changing a relationship, even on the days when nothing difficult happens.

When I walk into a conversation already protecting myself, I don’t meet the other person where they are today. Instead, I meet years of accumulated history, and I listen through the filter of what has happened before instead of what’s happening now. Sometimes I spend an entire interaction preparing to hold a boundary that never actually needs to be held.

The more I sit with this, the more I realize that what I’m wrestling with now is different from what I struggled with before. Back then, I was trying to learn how to say no when saying no was the healthy response. Today, I’m wondering whether there’s another stage to the work.

I don’t want to go back to the version of myself who believed love required self-sacrifice or find myself carrying emotional burdens that don’t belong to me. Those lessons were hard won, and I’m deeply grateful for them. At the same time, I don’t want guardedness to become my permanent way of moving through this relationship.

The person I’m protecting myself from is no longer entirely the person sitting across from me. I’m mostly protecting myself from slipping back into the role I used to play.

I suspect the requests will continue to come, and maybe they always will, but I’m beginning to think the next stage of this work isn’t simply trusting myself to say no. It’s trusting myself enough to walk into each interaction without assuming I’ll need to, and trusting that if a boundary is needed, I’ll recognize it and hold it. That leaves room to meet the person who’s actually in front of me instead of the history between us, to stay open to whatever the conversation actually becomes, and to engage without bracing for impact.