Boundaries with Family and the Complicated Conversation We Need to Have About Going No Contact

There’s a conversation happening right now on podcasts, on TikTok, in therapists’ offices- about family, about going no contact, about cutting off, about healing. And while it’s a conversation that is long overdue, it is also felt deeply incomplete to me and to what I’ve witnesses in my 6 years of private practice supporting women navigating this very issue.

Oprah did an episode about it. Millions of people watched. Millions more had feelings about it – strong ones. And what struck me, listening and watching, was what kept not being said. I’ve never met a single client struggling with boundaries or the relationship to her parents who would talk about them badly on the internet, yet alone in public or even private conversations.

In fact, most women I’ve worked with, start our work together defending and protecting the intent of their parents and the family. The good. The grateful. The trying their best. The compassion around their parents experiences. They don’t lead with a conversation about being a victim, toxic family patterns, or bad boundaries. They had good mothers who loved them. They had parents who were trying or doing their best.

That’s a story they both would tell, and it’s true. And yet, that story isn’t complete or that simple.

This series is about that. My work with boundaries is about that.

Boundaries are a living breathing and changing thing. The relationship and boundaries with your family are a living and breathing thing. It changes with time, capacity, and so many other factors.

A relationship that doesn’t fit in black and white scenarios of bad/good, healthy/unhealthy, no contact or full contact- there is a middle messy maybe. A soft yes or small no.

This is about the not-named conversation around boundaries with family. The one that happens after someone says “just set a boundary.” The one that has to happen before anyone decides whether to stay or go of how it feels to shift this important of a relationship. These are the boundaries that live in the in-between, where most of us actually are.

Why Boundaries With Family Are Different

The dynamics of family have changed massively in the last few generations. For better and worse, family structures, roles, and expectations- no longer have a strong framework or blueprint to look to.

The expectations of what “good” parenting looks like, what a healthy relationship looks like, what we owe each other and what we are allowed to want in relationships – all of it is shifting beneath our feet. For better and for worse.

I’ve seen the health of this, the ways that many people are breaking cycles of toxic relational patterns, power dynamics, and abuse. Many adults in this generation are healing and standing the gap of patterns that ran in our family for multiple generations. I’ve also seen how in some ways the pop psychology of boundaries and family has cut us off from each other. Our culture shifting toward individualism, cancel culture, and yes- even “boundaries culture” where anyone who triggers us, makes us uncomfortable, or believes differently than us can not just become “othered” but feel dangerous to you. Where we lean into an approach where there is always a clear and clean victim or villain. Someone to blame. And it’s usually the other person.

Often the past generations didn’t have the safety, capacity, or language to do or see anything different. They couldn’t break a cycle they were actively surviving.

But this shift of relationships and the structures of family changing has left most young adults feeling feeling unmoored in search for better boundaries with families- both the ones we are making and the ones we were born to.

Our center of gravity, the place where we find safety and belonging- the family, is destabalized.

Destabilization is not always a bad thing, but it is always uncomfortable. It comes with tension and frustration no matter how well it is held. Even when well supported, it’s emotional and creates conflict while we find a new way of relating.

The cultural conversation around boundaries with family has collapsed into a binary: no contact or staying in a relationship that’s sucking you dry. Stay or go. Good parent or bad parent. Victim or villain. Toxic or narcissistic or a good mom.

Sometimes that binary is exactly right. Sometimes no contact is not only appropriate, it’s lifesaving. It’s the right way of doing relationship to let there be space, distance, and even no contact. Sometimes distance is the only sane option. And I will never minimize that reality. I’ve lived it. Love and forgiveness, do not always mean access.

Boundaries with family don’t always create a pretty happily ever after in or out of the relationship. Even healthy and happy people are still hard to live with or be in relationship with. I wonder if we can start naming and owning that. Realizing the both, and. The nuanced messy middles.

What’s missing from this conversation isn’t more black and white, right or wrongs. What’s missing is all the nuance. All the human emotion, relational patterns, and dynamics that are at play. What is missing is all that happens in the long, complicated space between people.

There is no magic boundary that changes it all. No perfect conversation structure that let’s you skip the grief or rupture of relationship. We try to think of the perfect boundary or conversation. The right time or words. But sometimes it’s multiple conversations over years. Sometimes it’s moving closer, only to feel how much distance there still is.

It’s creating distance, only to grieve more once there was finally room to breathe.

That space is where this series lives. We aren’t going to sweep the complexity or harm under a rug of grateful. Sometimes going no contact, or ending no contact, or the messy middles somewhere between with boundaries deserves coplexities.

We will give each person in this picture the sovereignty, dignity, and compassion they deserve. Many of the people who will wound us, do so with love in their hearts and good intentions.

Good intentions can still create harmful or hurtful impact. Positive or loving intent, can still harm in it’s impact.

Many people and parents did their best, can we also name that sometimes it wasn’t good enough? Can we hold and change the standards and expectations without shame or blame, but rather the kind of love that demands accountability and changed behavior? Can we hold a dynamic where we can be with the reality of the thing, to name the powers and plays while admitting they no longer work?

The Grief of Being In Between: When Boundaries With Family Aren’t Black and White

There is a particular kind of relational grief that has no clean name. It’s not bereavement when the person is still alive. It’s not estrangement when you haven’t left. It’s not dysfunction, exactly, because there is also love there, history there, good moments threaded in among the hard ones.

This is the grief of a family relationship that is not working, and that you simultaneously want to stay in and want to be free of.

It’s the grief of the mother who shows up in some ways and is completely absent in others. The father who provided but never really saw you. The parent who is loving until they aren’t, warm until the warmth disappears without warning, present in body but gone somewhere you can’t follow. There is the current relationship you have that is being colored by the past.

The dull, aching, open-wound kind of grief. The kind that keeps getting poked. The wound that heals and then the scab picked off.

The kind where death, as painful as it is or would be, sometimes feels like it would be cleaner, because at least then the hoping stops. At least then you know.

We really do hate not knowing don’t we? We hate sitting with questions that don’t have an easy answer.

We want clouds we can silver line. It would be easier to have a clear villain who is all bad than this weird messy middle where there can be so much harm and hurt where there is also longing, loneliness, and desire. It’s a full body push and pull. It’s the mental and emotional chess game constantly tryiong to find how to be in relationship without losing yourself. What are we supposed to do with a relief that comes from an abuser dying? This is what it is to be fully and dynamically alive and to hold the full scope of reality and relationships.

There is a massive population of people quietly and painfully living in this middle space. Not in clean estrangement. Not in happy connection. In the complicated, unnamed in-between, where the family relationship as it is isn’t working, but the path to setting real boundaries with family is anything but clear.

You are not alone. And you are not stuck in either full or no contact. There is a maybe and an in-between.

Boundaries with family do not always look like walls. Sometimes they look like windows, doors, or bridges. I have a whole framework that I work with women helping them feel these different levels and intensities around boundaries. A no can be soft and gentle, or a no can be an aggressive and defensive fist. A maybe can be a consensual conversation or question, a back and forth of navigating how to stay in love or fall out of love without harming them or you. Conflict is hard. Holding the tension of different needs, capacities, and desires is a continual relationship. It’s holy and human.

Your boundaries can change. What works right now may shift when you have kids. Or once the kids get older. When you have more capacity. When they have had time to work through things. People do change. But it’s rarely painless. And it’s usually while in relationships- especially through conflict. Through the pain points where we have to come face to face with the best and worst in us and in others.

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” Prentis Hemphill.

The Micro-Violations You Stopped Noticing (And Why They Make Boundaries With Family So Confusing)

There is another reason setting boundaries with family feels so disorienting, and it almost never gets discussed:

You stop being able to feel the small things.

In the Oprah episode around boundaries, many of the guests shared the small violations. The way things built and built. We didn’t get to hear all the ways they held or responded to those ruptures. But I wonder if they felt and responded to them.

Or maybe because for many adult children especially, the boundaries violations and relational ruptures built up without them even noticing.

Not because they stopped happening. But because the accumulation of small violations and boundaries breaches- the dismissive comment, the subtle criticism, the topic that gets changed when you get too real, the way your excitement gets quietly deflated, the way your pain somehow always becomes about them- becomes so normal that your body stops registering each one individually.

Instead, you get a global no.

A sense of dread or resentment that doesn’t attach to any one incident clearly. A vague feeling of being somehow wrong or too much after spending time with your family. An exhaustion that doesn’t match the objective facts of what just happened.

And because you can’t point to a single thing clearly, you start questioning yourself: Am I imagining this? Am I being unfair? It wasn’t that bad. Why do I feel this way?

You can’t feel these small truths and shifts that need to be made in the relationship. And when you can’t feel it. When you can’t name it or point to it, it’s practically impossible to be able to communicate that to the other person.

This is how many women end up staying in painful family dynamics for years- not because they lack courage or insight, but because the violations are calibrated just below the threshold of conscious recognition. Just small enough to dismiss. Just vague enough to gaslight yourself about. They feel normal within the system even if they no longer feel good or okay to you.

Small and unassuming enough to sweep under the rug of good and grateful even when, no, it doesn’t work for you. The small no boundaries are getting missed not only by you but the other person. They are breaking a boundary that neither of you can see. Resentment will build and can even create rage or it can seep out on the wrong people or at the wrong timing. A pressure cooker that just had the steam release opened.

This is also why sometimes some often swing to a “global no” — a total, sudden withdrawal or the desire to withdraw from the family relationship — rather than being able to identify and name what specific boundaries with family actually need to change. The small things were ignored for so long that the only signal left is the overwhelming one. Because sometimes you only need “no contact” for a short time to restore your own contact with what needs to change within the relationship.

The work, then, isn’t just to decide what boundary to set. It’s to rebuild the capacity to feel the small things — to notice the moment something lands wrong before it accumulates into resentment, shutdown, or explosion. It is to start having and feeling the healthy separation and differentiating that needs to happen when there is family enmeshment where there is no healthy distinction or boundaries with family.

This is delicate work. And it doesn’t happen in one conversation. Not one boundary. It’s the living breathing dynamic range of relationship. Relationship first to yourself- what does and doesn’t work for you. Your own sense of values and integrity. And then and only then, your relationship to other. Boundaries with family are not just based on who is wrong, but on finding the appropriate access, distance, and connection that is right relationship to self and to other.

What if you found and built the self trust and permission to allow your relationships and boundaries with family to be a living breathing thing? Something that can shift. Something that, for now, you like your reasons for. Sometimes we need a big no. We need space and no contact to feel ourselves again. But sometimes you can create micro-boundaries with family. You can create enough small no’s, space, and repair- or appropriate rupture that it supports the family staying in relationship even if the dynamics change.

You Are Still Playing a Family Role You Didn’t Choose — And It’s Blocking Every Boundary

Every family is a system. And every system needs people to play certain parts.

Maybe you were the peacekeeper — the one who sensed when someone’s mood was shifting and quietly moved to head off the conflict before it started. Maybe you were the competent one, the one who managed the logistics of the household or the emotions of a parent who could not manage their own. Maybe you were the good kid — the one who didn’t cause problems, didn’t ask for too much, didn’t need anything because your sibling needed everything.

Maybe you were the martyr mother who felt like she gave everything, only feel like your kids don’t see or appreciate the sacrifice you made. Maybe you have all the compassion and intellectually understand why your parents are the way they are, but no longer can stay in relationship and roles in the way they are.

These family roles and the boundaries with family you had as a kid become part of your identity. And they don’t retire when you leave home. In fact they will often show up in your own parenting, your romantic relationships, and even your business.

You carry the role with you into adulthood. You show up to family gatherings still playing the part you were assigned at age eight. You leave and feel that super special kind of exhaustion that only being with your family brings you — not just tired, but depleted in a way that’s hard to explain. The role has been running, humming in the background, organizing your behavior without your permission. You can feel so stable and healthy, only to have one interaction, one call, or holiday feel like it sets you back years. How can you feel so competent and healthy everywhere else but at home or with your parents? You aren’t alone.

Every boundary you try to set is also a refusal to play your assigned role. You openly or directly addressing behaviors, relationship dynamics, racism, or facing conflict or expressing boundaries is often a direct disruption to the entire family system. It’s destabilization and many families aren’t stable enough to have the boat rocked. Or the family has never tried. This kind of direct conflict is foreign even if done well.

When you refuse to play your role, the system goes into crisis. Everyone else is also thrown out of their role. The peacekeeper is no longer keeping the peace. The good one is no longer being good. The family will push back — often hard. And that pushback will feel like confirmation that you were wrong to try. you’ll be the canary in the coal mine. The squeaky wheel.

Boundaries With Family Are Hard — Even for the Healthiest, Most Mature Adults

The best boundary conversations even the healthiest, most defining-the-relationship conversations are uncomfortable. Sometimes painfully so.

That discomfort doesn’t mean something is wrong. It doesn’t mean the other person is toxic, or a narcissist, or someone who benefits from your compliance. It means change in a family system is genuinely disruptive, for everyone in it. The roles were load-bearing. They held the whole structure up. When one person starts to shift, everyone else has to shift too, whether they want to or not. That is hard even between two willing, loving, emotionally healthy adults, yet alone a relationship that’s endured pain, trauma, or ruptures that never had repair.

“The only people who don’t like your boundaries are toxic people, narcissists, or those who benefit from you not having any. “

I see this phrase and advice tossed around a lot in boundaries pop-psychology. While that can be, and certainly is true in certain situations, as a blanket statement it is deeply immature and it does real harm.

It gives you permission to write off everyone who pushes back. It makes any trigger or discomfort put you in the role of powerless victim. It lets you skip the harder, more honest question: what is my role in how this dynamic needs to change? What do I do with it now?

It also skips something important: sometimes a person’s behavior lands as triggering or harmful not because they are harmful, but because of your history, your current capacity, or your unmet needs. The timing can be off. The intensity mismatched. The intent can be genuinely loving while the impact lands wrong. These are not the same thing as abuse. Disfunction patterns or maladaptive responses and roles can happen in the most loving and intentional of relationships. Boundaries in family are needed no matter how good. And flattening that distinction costs everyone.

So if you are an adult — and you are — I want to invite you to consider something:

You are currently co-creating this dynamic.

Not because you caused it. Not because what happened to you as a child was your fault. But you are an adult now, and adult relationships are not done to you — they are built between people. The way you show up, the roles you play, the things you tolerate in silence, the places you over-function and the places you quietly disappear — all of it is part of the pattern. Even in many of the worst case scenarios with boundaries with family, if you can find your own hinge of power and behavior- you can change the cycle. You can break the pattern. Even if you are a victim. Even if you are being treated wrongly or their behavior is harmful. Can you feel where you have choice or agency? How will you engage? React? Respond? Now that you are in relationship to that reality- what is within your capacity to change?

It may not be your fault. But it is now your responsibility. You can keep playing the game or interrupt it. Breaking cycles is hard. It’s heavy. It’s labor intensive, much of it unseen to anyone but you. It sends many people into a dark night of the soul, existential crisis.

And, if you let it, this healing and boundaries work will become an inheritance of health to not only you- but every relationship you are in.

We can change this conversation away from blame and shame and into one around power. We interrupt the triangulation of villain, victim, and rescuer into one where you reclaim your sovereign authority.

You have to find the hinge that moves. You have to find a new way to relate to the reality of them. To recognize that you no longer are required to play the game by old rules. You don’t even need to play the game at all any more. We have to bring you into a high level of agency and radical responsibility which includes no longer playing god with the people you love. It means the grief that will come with being in relationship to the reality of a person and not their failed expectations.

You have far more agency than you’ve ever been told or have ever felt. In boundaries with family and these family dynamics- it’s important to start feeling and naming the power balances.

This is why when I work with women on boundaries with family, we don’t start with the other person. We start inside herself. Feeling where she ends and others begin. Finding her own edge of choice and consent. Coming into the full reality of her own power — not as a concept, but as something she can actually feel and move from.

When you can feel your own power, it frees you from power struggles with others. You stop feeling like you need to shrink or puff up. You stop getting pulled into triangulation, into proving yourself, into the exhausting loop of defending your right to exist as you are. You get to stand with a strong spine — without armoring up. Without pushing everyone out.

That is what real boundaries with family feel like from the inside. Not a wall. Not a war. A self. A living breathing relationship.

Setting boundaries with family means untangling yourself from those roles slowly, imperfectly, and with enormous internal resource. It takes stability. It takes support. It takes the willingness to stay in the discomfort long enough to let something genuinely new emerge — rather than collapsing back into the old pattern or blowing the whole thing up.

That is not a small ask. And it is also the only path to something real — especially in families, where the ties are the oldest and the tender places run the deepest.

Boundaries Blog Series

This is the first post in an ongoing series about boundaries with family — the real, lived, complicated kind. Not the kind that comes with a tidy framework and a single defining conversation. The kind that evolves with you. The kind that requires you to keep showing up to yourself.

We’ll go deeper into:

• The Somatic Approach to Boundaries as a Living Adaptive Relationship
• Boundaries with parents — the push and pull, the grief of what wasn’t given, and how to navigate the family relationship you actually have rather than the one you’ve been hoping for
• Boundaries with partners — how the patterns you learned in your family of origin show up in your closest adult relationship
• Boundaries with yourself — the hardest ones, the ones that require honesty about your own role in the family dynamics you keep recreating
• Boundaries with your kids – finding how to be both loving and firm, building a new concept of family that is an inheritance of health and specifically how being a cycle breaker can both help and hurt in this role and season

What is missing from almost every public conversation about boundaries with family right now is the nuance. It’s also the reality that for many, the bad and the good of their parents doesn’t fit in a “happy mother’s day post”. Or a Christmas card. It’s lonely. It’s filled with shame and grief that often has never been named. I hope this blog and my work with this can give you that- a little more language, tools, and feeling seen in this messy middle.

The conversation keeps acting like the choice is between staying exactly as you are or burning the whole thing down. And don’t get me wrong. There are sometimes bridges that need burned.

But that is not our only option.

I want to help you learn and witness your boundaries with family in a new way. Not by forcing yourself to go no contact if that’s not what you need. Not by staying and continuing to abandon yourself inside the family relationship. But by learning to be in relationships differently. With more clarity. Less over-adapting. More connection to yourself.

The goal is not to decide what to do about them.

The goal is to stop losing yourself in the process of figuring it out. To find a new and dynamic aliveness in yourself that you trust to hold a new posture to conflict.

Before You Go: Questions to Sit With About Your Boundaries With Family

• What is this family relationship actually capable of — and what have I been hoping it will become?
• What does my body tell me before, during, and after time with this person?
• What role was I assigned in this family — and am I still playing it?
• What is it costing me to keep showing up this way?
• Is there something I haven’t let myself grieve yet about this relationship?

I would absolutely love for this to be a living conversation. Share your thoughts and questions here or engage on social media. I love hearing from you.

If this resonates and you are ready to get relief in your own boundaries and relationships, this is the work I do. I’d love to support you. [Work with me]

In case Noah Kahan’s new album needs a play break (never), check out my Boundaries Integration Playlist

More soon.