It’s Not You; It’s Your Trauma
EP 0088 – Fear Of Setting Boundaries
It’s Not You – It’s Your Unmet Need for Approval
You’ve spent decades trying to earn love by disappearing yourself, caretaking everyone else, and swallowing every boundary that threatened disapproval. The brutal truth? No amount of people-pleasing will ever heal the abandonment wound. Real freedom only begins when you finally allow yourself to disappoint the very people whose opinion once meant survival.
The Core Truth About Boundaries and Healing
Setting boundaries with the people who raised you isn’t about punishment or revenge. It’s the adult act of reclaiming the body, emotions, and needs that were never allowed to exist. Joe Ryan lays it bare: you learned early that your feelings threatened connection, so you silenced them to keep the peace. Now, as an adult, the only path forward is to tolerate the terror of saying no, of letting someone be unhappy with you, and of surviving the tidal wave of shame and fear that follows. Boundaries force you to stop outsourcing your worth and start feeling what’s been locked inside since childhood.
Why the Thought Alone Feels Like Death
The moment you imagine telling your parent “no” or expressing anger, your nervous system screams. That’s not weakness; it’s conditioning. As a child, disapproval equaled danger—abandonment, rage, or withdrawal of love. Your survival brain wired itself to equate their comfort with your safety. So even now, the body floods with anxiety, guilt, and dread at the idea of disappointing them. You avoid because facing that discomfort feels like betraying the little kid who still believes love must be earned through self-erasure. Avoidance feels safer than risking the old wound reopening.
The Devastating Price of Never Saying No
Every time you swallow a boundary to keep someone else comfortable, you reinforce the belief that your needs don’t matter. The cost compounds quietly: chronic exhaustion, resentment that leaks into passive-aggression, relationships where you over-give and then collapse in depression when they leave. You recreate the abandonment script in every job, friendship, and romance—showing up 1000% until there’s nothing left of you. The people-pleasing addiction keeps you small, disconnected from your own voice, and trapped in a cycle of proving your worth to people who may never see it.
What Opens When You Finally Hold the Line
When you practice tolerating the discomfort of disappointing others, something profound shifts. Space opens inside. Self-hate quiets because you stop betraying yourself daily. You begin to trust your own feelings instead of outsourcing regulation to whoever’s upset. Regulation becomes internal. Choice becomes conscious. Relationships stop feeling like survival missions. You no longer need their approval to feel okay—because you’ve learned to be okay even when they’re not.
How to Begin
Start ridiculously small. Sit alone and visualize saying no to someone who’s used to walking over you. Notice exactly where the fear, shame, or tightness lives in your body. Don’t think your way out—feel it. Breathe into it. When your mind races to escape, gently return to sensation. Build tolerance the way you’d build muscle: short sessions, repeated daily. Write the unsent angry letter. Speak the boundary out loud to an empty room. Expect it to feel awful at first. There are no shortcuts. No one else can feel this for you. But every second you stay with the discomfort instead of caretaking, you’re rewriting the old survival code.
Three Important Takeaways
- Setting boundaries with parents isn’t about changing them—it’s about finally stopping the self-abandonment that keeps the childhood wound bleeding.
- The fear and guilt that flood your body when you imagine disappointing them are old survival signals, not proof you’re wrong to have needs.
- True healing only happens when you stop intellectualizing and start feeling the pain you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding—no external fix will ever substitute for that.
Conclusion
Stop waiting for permission, for the perfect words, or for them to finally get it. The life you want is on the other side of the discomfort you’ve been running from. You already know how to survive pain—you did it as a child. Now use that same courage to feel it, name it, and let it move through you. No one is coming to save the little kid inside. That job belongs to you now. Start today. One breath. One boundary. One honest no. The freedom on the other side is worth every second of the hell it takes to get there.
