Why an uncompromising boundary can make more sense when you understand what came before it.
People often encounter a boundary at its most visible point: the refusal.
Someone will not answer the phone. They will not reopen a communication channel. They will not attend an event if another person is there. They will not agree to one conversation, even when the conversation appears practical, brief or harmless.
From the outside, the response can look disproportionate. It’s only an email. You don’t even have to speak to them. You could sit at the other end of the room. Surely you can manage twenty minutes.
What is much harder to see is everything that happened before the boundary existed.
There may have been years of explaining, accommodating, hoping, forgiving, making exceptions, reconsidering and questioning whether the hurt was serious enough to justify stepping away. What eventually appears to somebody else as an uncompromising refusal may be the endpoint of a very long process.
People often judge a boundary by the moment they encounter it, rather than by the history that made it necessary.
We usually see the boundary at the end
A firm boundary can create a misleading impression because the behaviour visible at the end may look very different from the behaviour that preceded it.
A person who now refuses contact may once have tolerated far more contact than was comfortable. Someone who no longer wants to discuss a relationship may have spent years trying to talk about it. A person who appears unwilling to compromise may previously have compromised repeatedly because preserving the relationship mattered to them.
Eventually, something changes.
Sometimes there is one unmistakable event. More often, the change comes through accumulation: another disappointment, another conversation that leads nowhere, another exception that produces the same result. Sometimes the person simply realises that continually negotiating the terms of the relationship has itself become exhausting.
By the time the boundary becomes visible to other people, much of the uncertainty that preceded it may already have been resolved.
Everyone else sees the closed door.
They may not have seen how many times it was opened before.
Why 5% can feel like 100%
Once a firm boundary exists, other people often search for what seems like a reasonable compromise.
Just send one email.
Just unblock them temporarily.
You don’t have to talk to them. Just attend the same event.
Just let them know where something can be collected.
To the person making the suggestion, this may represent 5% flexibility. They are not asking for reconciliation or renewed closeness. They are asking for one apparently minor exception.
But boundaries are not always experienced in percentages.
Imagine a locked door. Asking someone to open it two centimetres involves very little physical movement. Yet the important distinction may not be between two centimetres and a metre.
It may be between locked and unlocked.
If the organising principle of a boundary is this person no longer has direct access to me, then sending one email may not be experienced as a small adjustment. The practical behaviour is small, but its relational meaning is much larger.
This is where two people can misunderstand each other despite both accurately describing what they see.
The outsider sees the present behaviour:
Send one email.
The person holding the boundary experiences the relational meaning:
Restore direct access.
The disagreement may therefore have very little to do with how difficult it is to send an email.
The size of an action does not necessarily tell us the size of what it means.
The history travels with the action
Two people can perform exactly the same behaviour while experiencing it very differently.
Sending an ordinary email to someone with whom we have no difficult history may require almost nothing psychologically. Sending exactly the same email to someone from whom we have deliberately severed contact can carry years of history with it.
The words might be mundane. The action is not.
The same can be true of physical proximity. Sitting fifty metres from a stranger in an auditorium is psychologically unremarkable. Sitting fifty metres from someone associated with betrayal, fear, humiliation or prolonged conflict may be experienced very differently, even if no conversation occurs.
An outside observer naturally sees the behaviour being requested. The person holding the boundary also experiences everything the behaviour represents.
This does not mean the person with the boundary is necessarily correct and the outsider is wrong. It means they may be evaluating two different things.
One is evaluating the size of the concession.
The other is evaluating the meaning of crossing the boundary.
“I could do it” does not mean “you should be able to”
People who encourage greater flexibility are not necessarily dismissive or insensitive. Often they can see a legitimate competing need.
A child may benefit from having both parents at an important event. Family members may want conflict reduced. Property may need to be exchanged. Decisions may need to be made. A firm boundary can create inconvenience for people who had no part in creating the original problem.
There is also a natural human preference for reconciliation. We tend to like stories in which people forgive one another, families reconnect and relationships eventually become peaceful again. A permanent boundary can feel uncomfortable because it leaves something unresolved.
People may also use themselves as the reference point.
I could send the email.
I could sit at the other end of the auditorium.
I could be civil for twenty minutes.
Perhaps they could.
But they are imagining themselves performing the behaviour without necessarily carrying the history attached to it.
Outside perspectives can still be valuable. Someone removed from a painful relationship may sometimes recognise avoidance, unnecessary rigidity or escalation more clearly precisely because they are not immersed in it.
But there is an important difference between:
I think I could do that.
and:
Therefore, you should be able to do that.
Understanding another person’s boundary does not require believing that we would make exactly the same decision.
A firm boundary can still be examined
Calling something a boundary does not automatically make it healthy.
A boundary can emerge from fear, anger, avoidance or misunderstanding. It can become unnecessarily rigid. Someone can also describe an attempt to control another person as a “boundary” when it is actually a demand about how the other person must behave.
Healthy boundaries therefore remain open to reflection.
What is this boundary protecting?
Does it still serve that purpose?
Am I determining my own participation, or trying to control somebody else’s?
If circumstances changed, would the boundary still make sense?
What are the consequences of maintaining it, including for people I care about?
These are important questions. A boundary can have been entirely understandable when it was established and still deserve reconsideration later.
But examination does not require perpetual negotiation.
A person can genuinely revisit a boundary, consider its costs and continue reaching the same conclusion. Psychological reflection does not require every conclusion to eventually soften.
Sometimes examining a boundary confirms why it remains there.
Firm boundary, flexible solution
This is where psychological flexibility can easily be misunderstood.
We sometimes assume that a flexible person should be willing to move the boundary itself. If a practical problem arises, the obvious compromise seems to be relaxing the boundary enough to solve it.
But those are not the only options.
A boundary can be categorical while the person holding it remains flexible.
Suppose someone does not want direct communication with a family member, but belongings need to be returned. They might be willing to use a third person, arrange collection indirectly, leave the belongings somewhere appropriate or consider several other practical solutions.
They may be highly cooperative about solving the problem.
What they are unwilling to negotiate is one particular route to solving it.
That distinction matters.
Firmness about the boundary and flexibility about the solution can coexist.
The same principle can apply in families, workplaces and separated parenting arrangements. There may be legitimate needs on several sides of a situation. Rather than immediately asking Which person needs to abandon their boundary?, another question becomes possible:
Can we meet the legitimate need in another way?
This is flexibility around the boundary rather than through it.
It does not guarantee that every problem can be solved. Sometimes maintaining a boundary genuinely carries costs, and mature reflection requires acknowledging them.
But the existence of a cost does not automatically tell us which value should give way.
Sometimes flexibility means becoming creative about the route while remaining clear about where the road cannot go.
Compassion does not require continued access
Firm boundaries can be especially difficult for people who are accustomed to being caring, accommodating or highly attentive to other people’s needs.
They may understand why somebody behaved as they did. They recognise that people are imperfect. They worry about causing hurt and may give another opportunity long after someone else would have stepped away.
When such a person eventually establishes a hard boundary, the contrast can confuse people around them. Someone previously known for empathy can suddenly appear uncompromising.
But empathy and access are different things.
It is possible to understand why someone behaved in a particular way without deciding that the relationship should continue. It is possible to care about someone’s wellbeing without participating in their life. It is possible to recognise another person’s humanity while deciding that contact with them is no longer something we are willing to offer.
Compassion can influence how we hold a boundary.
It does not necessarily require us to remove it.
Sometimes “not under these conditions” becomes “not anymore”
Some boundaries begin conditionally.
I cannot continue this conversation while you are shouting.
I will reconsider contact if something changes.
I need acknowledgment before I can think about rebuilding this relationship.
But time matters.
If repair does not occur, further injuries accumulate or the person holding the boundary gradually builds a life outside the relationship, something that once meant not under these conditions can eventually become not anymore.
At that point, the boundary may no longer be an attempt to communicate what the other person needs to do differently. It may no longer contain an invitation to repair.
It can simply describe the relationship that now exists.
Not every closed door is waiting for the correct knock.
The boundary you see is not the boundary they built
When we encounter another person’s firm boundary, we usually see its most visible part: the refusal.
What we do not see as easily are the conversations, compromises, exceptions, second chances and internal negotiations that came before it.
Judging a boundary solely by how uncompromising it looks at the end can therefore miss the process that produced it.
To someone outside the situation, another exception may seem like 5% flexibility.
To the person holding the boundary, it may mean reopening something they spent years trying to close.
That does not make every boundary healthy, necessary or permanent. Boundaries still deserve reflection, particularly when they affect people we care about.
But before assuming that greater psychological flexibility requires the boundary itself to move, there may be another question worth asking:
Can the problem be solved without requiring the boundary to be crossed?
Because flexibility does not always mean moving the boundary.
Sometimes the healthier flexibility is finding a way around it.
