Setting Boundaries: The biggest scam of our generation?
This is the perspective of an ex-people-pleaser and former "good child" whose worth was tied strictly to performance—someone who didn’t believe she deserved love and happiness unless it was earned through sacrifice and pain. So, please read this with sensitivity if your background is different from mine.
This is a provocative take on the trending practice of “setting boundaries,” a concept marketed to save us from all childhood wounds and toxic relationships. I beg to disagree.
Setting boundaries merely to enforce distance will never lessen the emotional and psychological burden you carry within—no matter how far away you run.
I have been traveling on my own since I was 16, searching for a sense of belonging far away. Yet, I returned home regularly, carrying a heavy sense of responsibility for my family. I wanted to break free from that duty, but I deeply believed my respect for family values was an independent choice, not a result of unconscious conditioning. I couldn't imagine another version of myself—one who could stop sacrificing her own needs or stop saying “yes” when her entire system was screaming “no.”
One could argue this is typical of collectivist cultures (as Edward T. Hall defined them). After all, I am Italian, and community is written into our DNA. That certainly played a role. But the reality was that I was unconsciously struggling, completely unaware that I could be entirely myself while remaining part of my family. I didn't have to choose between my personal happiness and my hometown.
No one ever forced me into a corner; I grew up in a supportive family that genuinely wanted to see me succeed. Yet, I still got entangled in emotional mechanisms that dragged me down to the bottom right alongside the protagonists, even when I wasn't supposed to be part of the story. For decades, I felt responsible for other people’s happiness while simultaneously complaining about their victim mentality. I masked my deep frustration at being misunderstood with anger.
The truth is, even though I lived at an average distance of 600 kilometers from home for the past 20 years, I hadn't actually set a single boundary.
I want the younger generation to understand that casually labeling situations or people as “toxic,” “draining,” or “incapable of understanding me” is often just a mask. It hides our own inability to look at our part in the system. While it may still be necessary to live further away and keep visits or phone calls sporadic, setting true boundaries requires something much deeper: making peace with your past, and making peace with the old version of you who lived there and desperately wanted to belong. As long as you are at war with that past, you aren't rejecting them—you are rejecting yourself.
A healthy boundary is set without anger, resentment, vengeance, or fear. It is a line you draw simply by choosing to stop feeling guilty, worthless, intimidated, or humiliated. When you truly know who you are, you can sit down and have a conversation with anyone. The only thing that changes is your awareness. You finally recognize your old lines in the play—you’ve played that part before, but now, you get to write the script.