I listened to an interview with the author of Setting Boundaries That Stick and one point really made me think. Juliane Taylor Shore, LMFT, pointed out that setting a boundary with someone is a valuable learning experience for them. You wouldn’t want to deprive them of that opportunity 😉 ! If someone had an expectation that you would do/agree to/overlook something, and you do not, that is a chance for them to reassess their assumptions and expectations of you. It can feel so uncomfortable and unnatural to enforce a boundary, but what it actually does is teach the other party something new about you, and may even change their behavior in the future.
