The Boundaries Debate Is Missing Something

Last night I was at a concert, and the artist mentioned offhand that the fashionable thing to do these days is cut all toxic relationships out of your life. He said he tried that and ended up with no one left. Then he made a dismissive comment suggesting that most people who cut someone off are doing it for trivial reasons, not legitimate ones. I sat there thinking, I think it's a wee bit more complex than that, my dude.

There are two loud voices in the culture right now about family and boundaries. One says cut off anyone who hurts you, toxic is toxic, protect your peace, good vibes only. The other says walking away from family is a mistake, that estrangement is a modern epidemic and people just need to try harder. Neither one holds the nuance of real relational health. The first ignores that some ruptures carry real weight and need real repair, not just distance. The second ignores that repair takes something from both people, not just effort from whoever's still trying. I tried writing about this in an earlier post but didn't get my thinking clear enough, so I want to try again to say what I actually think.

Community is hard, and that's not a flaw, it’s a feature. Being around people who disagree with you, who challenge you, who aren't easy, isn't a version of toxic. It's a version of real life, and it's where growth happens. Feeling humbled, confronted, or pushed past your comfort isn't immediately evidence someone is bad for you. Often it's the opposite: it's what respect between two honest people feels like, and it's an opportunity to get less prejudiced, more humble, and wiser. Community also gives people practice at healthy conflict that doesn't turn violent, at having a voice, including a voice of dissent, and staying in the room while it's used. That's a skill, and you don't build it by leaving every time it's called for. Discomfort and harm get flattened into the same word constantly. They aren't the same thing. That said, distance is sometimes the right call, and here's the framework I use to tell when.

We need to start with the goal. Connection is a survival need, not a preference. The healthiest life isn't the most protected one, it's the one with the deepest sense of community available. Boundaries don't build that. They don't create closeness or repair a relationship. What they do is protect the nervous system when connection isn't safe yet, or isn't safe at all, and they're about the needs of the person setting them. Having no boundaries is its own problem, a way of abandoning your own need for safety to keep a relationship intact. But a boundary doesn't create a healed relationship or better feelings on its own. Connection is what heals a rupture, but only if and when that becomes possible.

The emphasis belongs on that "if," and this is where power and attachment come in. Ruptures don't always look serious from the outside, it's easy to judge a moment without knowing what it meant to the person who lived it. A comment, a slight, a silence, a moment a child needed a parent to show up and didn't, a child's own feelings pushed aside in the name of religious teaching, these can create attachment injuries that never get named as such, especially once they become a pattern. Parents, elders, and leaders hold more power in a relationship, which means they also hold more responsibility for what happens in it.

I regularly see parents and grandparents in my office grieving a child who's gone no contact. Almost always, that grief sits alongside real trouble grasping the pain their own behavior caused, so the cutoff feels extreme and confusing to them. That pattern usually traces back further: people who hurt their kids' attachment were often hurt the same way themselves and never processed it. They're trying to hold onto the only way of relating they know, and a child's request for something different can land as an accusation instead of an invitation. Without realizing it, they're protecting themselves from feeling their own attachment pain by staying unaware of how they impacted their kids.

To be fair, the adult child's request often comes out harsh, because it's coming from a hurt place too. That makes it harder for the parent to stay regulated, curious, and motivated to look at themselves. But a harsh delivery doesn't erase the power dynamic underneath it.

So what does repair actually need? It usually starts with being able to say what happened and what it meant, and having that experience validated instead of minimized or argued with. It means being able to talk about not just the event but how it happened, whether this was one rupture or a lifetime pattern of them, and getting curious together about what kept it going. And often it means wanting the other person to do their own work: to show a deeper understanding of their own story and how it shaped the way they showed up in the relationship, not just offer an apology for a single incident.

None of that happens on a schedule. Even when both people are capable of repair and willing to do it, time and space are sometimes needed before repair is a good idea, to calm the nervous system down enough that the conversation can actually go somewhere instead of reopening the wound. A boundary held for that reason isn't a wall going up for good. It's someone buying the room they need to come back to the table able to listen.

Where does abuse fit in? Abuse is a pattern of behavior used to gain or maintain power and control over another person, causing harm through physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, verbal, or financial means. When abuse has happened, that same list of repair needs still applies, but the bar for proof gets higher: sustained change over time, real ownership, an actual apology, a demonstrated understanding of their own history and how it played out in yours, and a different way of relating going forward. That kind of change is possible, but rare. So when someone cuts off an abusive parent, the boundary is usually the right call, not a failure of nerve.

And when someone keeps showing they can't or won't do that work, no matter how many chances they get, it gets hard to know when to stop trying or checking in. Jesus told Peter to forgive seventy times seven, which is really a way of saying forgiveness shouldn't run out. But forgiveness and reconciliation aren't the same thing. With someone who stays unable or unwilling to change, forgiveness probably looks like letting go of the anger and resentment you're carrying, while still keeping the boundary up. You can release the weight of what happened without reopening the door.

None of this fits neatly into either camp. Cutting people off isn't automatically strength, and staying in contact isn't automatically love. The work is figuring out, case by case, whether connection is possible yet, what you need to recover, and how power dynamics and responsibility play into it too.