Building Interpersonal Boundaries in Adulthood

June 27th, 2025
By: Kayla Hollett, Therapist and PhD Candidate

Learning to honour your emotional, physical, and practical limits later in life can be both scary and liberating. If you often feel overwhelmed by life or anxious when interacting with others, you may benefit from interpersonal boundaries that protect your time and energy resources.

Interpersonal boundaries are the limits we set through our actions and words to protect our time and energy from the demands and expectations of others. Creating boundaries starts with recognizing what works and what doesn’t work for you in relationships, then adjusting your behaviour accordingly. Maintaining healthy boundaries requires clearly communicating your needs, managing uncomfortable emotions (like fear and guilt), and navigating others’ reactions. At their core, your boundaries are based on your values and represent what matters to you.

What Can Interpersonal Boundaries Do For Me?

Interpersonal boundaries protect our emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. They help shape the relationships, circumstances, and environments that allow us to feel respected, supported, and autonomous. They can help you manage resentment and improve your interactions with others. Boundaries can also help you know when and how to remove yourself from situations that negate your needs or assert yourself in demanding or inequitable conditions.

Why Didn’t I Learn About Boundaries in Childhood?

Difficulties maintaining boundaries in adulthood can develop early in life if a person’s physical and emotional needs or limits were inconsistently acknowledged or ignored during childhood. Children are highly attuned to caregivers’ emotional states and will instinctively adapt to behave in ways that appease their caregivers most. If a caregiver’s reactions to a child’s needs or limits are based on their own emotions rather than the child’s, the child may feel confusion about what is acceptable to ask for or refuse. In some cases, a child may be rewarded or punished based on their attempts to meet the emotional needs of the caregiver, thwarting the child’s capacity to identify and express their own emotional needs. Often, these messages are unintentionally passed on to children during early years of development and reinforced throughout adolescent and early adulthood. As an adult, a person may not know exactly how or when they came to struggle with boundaries.

Identifying Your Boundaries

If communicating your needs and limits is new for you, give yourself time to grow comfortable with the process. You may notice fear, guilt, or a sense of shame when thinking about changing your behaviours in ways that will impact others. You may find it helpful to first reflect on what your values are, how you spend your time, and what gets in the way of prioritizing what you value most. Understanding what behaviours you would like to modify is the first step in planning a boundary to experiment with. You might ask yourself:

• What goals do I have for myself? Do my daily activities centre around these goals? If not, what else uses my time and energy?
• Who is important to me? Am I prioritizing these relationships in a way that feels good? What other relationships require my energy?
• What activities make me feel excited, energized, soothed, or empowered? What activities create anxiety or dread?
• What commitments do I feel obligated to perform? What creates this sense of obligation?
• Who am I afraid to disappoint? Frustrate? Let down?
• (If you have a specific behaviour in mind): what emotions might I feel if I stopped doing this behaviour?

Tips for Boundary-Setting in Adulthood

• Start small. Choose an action that feels a little intimidating but still doable. The first time you change a behaviour may feel risky, like a leap of faith. Some examples are:

• Pause for a few seconds before volunteering for an extra task at work, school, or in your community.
• Take five minutes to yourself at the end of a busy day before starting other evening interpersonal obligations.
• Notice when you are rushing through an interaction and slow your body down (e.g., interacting with a cashier or exiting a bus).
• Block an hour of time in your calendar for rest or unstructured time.
• If you are asked to do something, try saying, “let me check my schedule and get back to you” to give yourself time to reflect on your capacity.

• Notice your emotions. You may notice an increase in anxiety, fear, guilt, or shame as you modify your commitments to others. Practice noticing these emotions and sitting with them. Remind yourself that they are to be expected, but do not mean you are wrong for prioritizing your needs.
• Consider communicating. Not all boundaries need to be communicated every time they are enacted, but if you are implementing new boundaries in longstanding relationships, communicating why you are making a change may help someone adapt with you and show their support. This works well with people you trust.
• Prepare to cope with others’ reactions. People may be surprised by your behaviour shifts. In any existing relationships with inconsistent or unclear boundaries, some people may want you to stay as you are. Practising acceptance of others’ reactions to your boundaries can help you manage feelings of responsibility for their emotions. Maintaining consistency in your behaviours over time will show others what they can and cannot expect from you. Remember to give yourself time to adapt and learn. Reaffirming to yourself why a boundary matters to you can help when others push back.
• Practice, practice, practice. Boundaries are meant to be dynamic and unique to your needs in a given moment, so it can help to experiment with different behaviours or ways of communicating across contexts and with different people. For example, you might learn that you prefer to hold more flexible boundaries in some situations, while more rigid boundaries are better suited to other situations. Practising boundaries consistently and over longer periods of time will ultimately make the process feel less daunting.
• Reflect on your efforts. With each experiment you try, ask yourself: How did this experiment go? Was the outcome different from what I expected? Was the process of communicating easier or more difficult than I expected? What helped me cope with my discomfort? What could I try differently next time? The process of reflection after trying a new behaviour will help consolidate your learning.

Creating interpersonal boundaries as an adult takes time, patience, persistence, and trial and error. You may find that there is no clear endpoint to practicing boundaries as you find yourself ever-changing and adapting to new environments and relationships. With experience, setting boundaries can become more subtle and intuitive – so give yourself time to learn to trust yourself. Hopefully, honouring your limits will help you feel more in control of your time and energy and create more balance in your relationships.

citations

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Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. The Guilford Press. https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.1521/978.14625/28806