When Boundary Setting Goes Wrong

How Trauma Survivors Can Confuse Boundaries & Coercion/ Domination

I’ve been releasing my unpublished book The Boundaries Handbook, about IFS-informed boundaries, to my paid subscribers here on Substack. We’ve been talking lately about when boundary setting goes well, and both parties are in consent and cooperating to negotiate boundaries in way that shares power, rather than one person using their boundaries to overpower another.

But I wanted to talk briefly about what happens when boundaries become confused. People who are new to setting boundaries often mess it up when they’re first learning- and that’s normal, perfectly understandable, and to be expected. So if you’re new to setting boundaries or trying to respect other people’s boundaries, just know up front that it’s not going to be a cakewalk, and you will make mistakes you’ll have to own up to.

What’s common is for trauma survivors, especially those who have been overpowered or coercively controlled, to confuse a healthy boundary with coercion or domination. To an overpowered trauma survivor, any boundary feels like you’re trying to control them. Even if it’s the smallest request, it can feel like you’re imposing your will on them by even making a small request meant to protect your own needs. When this paranoia related to boundary confusion plays out, it can be a real shit show.

Stealing The Car Keys

For example, Silvie and Mario were in therapy with a Terry Real trained Relational Life Therapy (RLT) couples therapist. RLT specializes in taking sides with someone who is being overpowered in a relationship in order to stand up to someone who is bullying them, stealing their consent, dominating, and expecting compliance. In heterosexual couples, about 2/3 of the time the bully is male, but as women gain power, 1/3 of the time, it’s the female who’s the bully.

Mario was severely traumatized as a child by two overpowering, violent parents, so he did what many trauma survivors do- he became a control freak and feels entitled to control his wife. Silvie was also overpowered in childhood, but because of patriarchy and gender conditioning, her response to the domination was to learn people pleasing and submission with a smile.

Mario was learning to include Silvie when he made choices that impacted her, so he wasn’t acting like a choice thief. Silvie was learning to stand up to Mario, confront his dominating behaviors without collapsing, and exercise her right to good boundaries. Mario was trying to learn to respect Silvie’s boundaries, but every time she set them, he accused her of being controlling, mistaking a healthy boundary for dominating behavior (since he expected submission, and anything but submission to his dominance felt like controlling domination to Mario.)

One day, Mario had been doing some deep, hard vulnerable work in therapy, and he was drained. But he and Silvie had been invited to a music festival with his boss. Mario changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to go, but Silvie was really looking forward to dancing and listening to live music. He could have made a request and asked Silvie for permission to change the plan, vulnerably sharing that he was weary from all the emotional processing and asking her if she’d be willing to stay home and comfort his sad young parts. But that’s not what he did.

Instead, he took her keys to force her not to go. Silvie protested, something she’d been learning to do in therapy, even though it still scared her to confront Mario. She demanded that he give her back her car keys, but any energy of demand coming from Silvie registered in Mario’s system as controlling, even though she had a right to demand that he give her the keys.

Silvie had been learning her rights, so she knew that, because the car was registered in her name, he did not have the right to steal her car keys or coerce her into staying home. But he wouldn’t give her the keys. Things escalated until they were both yelling, but Mario would not relinquish Silvie’s keys. Instead, he said “I’m setting a boundary. I forbid you to go to the festival with my boss without me there.”

This just lit Silvie up even more. She demanded her keys again and asked him to step away from her car. Mario got big and scary looking and started yelling "Coercive control! Coercive control! You’re controlling me when I’m setting a boundary! You’re crossing my boundaries.”

But it was Mario acting in a coercive way, not Silvie. He was projecting- accusing her of the very thing he was doing, which is a common immature defense mechanism in overbearing narcissistic types.

Mario said he’d go if she really wanted, but only for a short time. He wanted to take her car. But by this point, Silvie was feeling scared and didn’t want to get anywhere near Mario inside a car. They’d had problems inside cars in the past, when he was driving and had her trapped, and he sometimes drove like a crazy person when he was mad. She wanted to drive herself and told him he could take his own car if he wanted to go. That way he could come home early if he wanted.

He still wouldn’t budge, and it was starting to get late. Silvie wanted to go and demanded her keys again. She tried to reach into his jeans pocket to get the key she imagined was in there, but he accused her of hitting him, so she took her hands off him, fearing instead that he might get violent with her.

Silvie told him he had no right to forbid her to drive herself to the festival and he again forbid her to go without him. She demanded her keys. When he refused, she threatened to call the police to force him to surrender the keys to the car that did not belong to him.

He said, “You’re pulling a power move. You’re overpowering me. You’re dominating me after I’ve set a boundary with you.”

She felt helpless. One the one hand, she was reluctant to call the police and get her partner in trouble. But she was stuck between submitting to his domination and letting him force her not to go to the music festival or getting him in trouble with the police. She knew that in the state she lived in, if anyone calls the cops over a domestic dispute, one person is going to get hauled off to jail.

Mario said he’d give her the keys back, but only if she promised not to go to the festival. Silvie resisted, because he was demanding submission to his “boundary.” But Mario would not back down, and Silvie was afraid he was going to hit her. Finally, to deescalate things, but not with a willing heart, she agreed not to go to the festival. Mario gave her the keys. She ran to the spare room, locked herself in the bedroom, and wrote a letter to their therapist. Mario locked himself in a separate room and they spend the night apart. The next day, he refused to talk to her because he was mad she had threatened to call the police. She went to her sister’s house the next morning and refused to see him again until their next therapy session, which only made Mario’s sad young inner children feel more abandoned and lonely. Neither of them got what they needed.

What Went Wrong Here?

Well, many things. Mario was clearly confused when he said he was setting a boundary by forbidding Silvie to go to the music festival with his boss. Unless they’re in jail or in a locked ward in a psych hospital, no adult has the right to forbid another adult from making a free will choice. Mario doesn’t own Silvie. She is not his possession, just because she’s his girlfriend. He does not have the right to forbid her to go to an event she was invited to join, even though it was his boss who did the inviting. Since Silvie was also friends with his boss and his wife, she had her own autonomous relationship with them and would have been welcome with or without Mario.

He also did not have the right to hijack the keys of a car that was registered only to Silvie. They were not married and not in a common law marriage state, so the car was hers alone. Had she called the police and showed the police her car registration, the police would have forced Mario to surrender her keys. They also might have taken him to spend a “cool off” night at the local jail.

He was wrong to falsely accuse her of dominating him with her threat to call the police. Protecting yourself when you’re being dominated, exercising your rights to call law enforcement or calling in the help of other people with more power than you have is an ethical form of self defense. We all have the right to protect ourselves if someone else is using coercive strategies or trapping us in the house when we feel unsafe or stealing our property. Silvie had every right to get the help of law enforcement when her request for her keys was denied and she was afraid she was going to get hit. She was exercising her power to enlist the help of law enforcement.

Mario was confused about this because he had been raised to believe that you protect the people in your family no matter how illegal their behaviors. It never would have occurred to him to call the police in order to protect himself from someone who was crossing his boundaries in illegal ways. He thought family loyalty was more important than self protection, so he felt betrayed when Silvie threatened to call the police. He didn’t know how to protect himself and didn’t realize he could call the police on Silvie if she was the one doing something coercive while stealing his property.

In spite of how it felt to Mario’s unhealed inner children, self defense when you’re getting bullied is not coercive control or domination. Demanding what is rightfully yours, demanding that your boundaries be respected, is not controlling. It’s protective. Mario was confused about that and pulling a classic narcissistic defense strategy of DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender.) He was the one coercing Silvie, not the other way around.

Mario’s boundary was not a boundary. It was an edict. He could have made a vulnerable request- “Please stay home with me. I’m sad and lonely and too tired to go to the festival, and I don’t want to be home alone.” That’s fine. Then Silvie could have made a free will choice to either honor his request or go to the festival without him. But stealing her choice in the name of “I’m setting a boundary” is not ethical. It’s coercive.

As it turns out, one reason Mario didn’t want Silvie to go to the festival with his boss is because he was afraid she might say something that might paint him in a negative light around his boss, and this could threaten his job security. If she was going to go, he wanted to be there to monitor what went down. It would have been ethical for Mario to set a boundary around communication with his boss. “I’m worried that when you’ve been drinking, you get loose lipped, and since you’re mad at me right now, I’m afraid you might smack talk me to my boss. My request is that you not speak about me or reveal anything vulnerable about me to my boss.”

That would have been totally fair. But it wasn’t okay to force Silvie to stay home just so he could protect his reputation with his boss, prevent Silvie from being around his boss so he could control the situation, or get comfort for his sad inner children by forcing her to stay home.

Heal Your Wounded Boundaries

I’ll be sharing more examples from The Boundaries Handbook soon, so please consider a paid subscription if you don’t already have one. I’ve also taught an entire class about IFS-informed boundaries- Heal Your Wounded Boundaries, which you can learn about here.

If you want to learn more about how not to put too much pressure on your partner to care for your sad inner children, how to take that responsibility back and care for your inner children yourself using Internal Family Systems, please subscribe to my main newsletter here. I just published the first of a multi-part series about Internal Family Systems called “You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For.” At the end of the month, I’ll also be teaching IFS For Self Healing, a six week basics course for those who want to learn more about IFS but do not need a full certification program. If Mario had known how to comfort his sad, vulnerable inner children, he might not have needed to coerce Silvie into staying home with him.

We’re also teaching all about such things in my ongoing IFS community of practice LOVE SCHOOL, where we teach relational skill building and relational repair work to people who never had that modeled when they were growing up. Our next gathering is June 9, where we’ll be unpacking, from an IFS-informed lens, the common behaviors people with severe trauma histories tend to act out in intimate relationships, along with why they do it and how to handle it with good boundaries.

When we take responsibility for our own trauma and trauma recovery, we’re less likely to try to control others, and we’re more able to both set the right kind of healthy boundaries but also respect the boundaries of others in non-controlling ways.

Remember, when you’re doing relational recovery work, it’s going to get messy. You’re going to get confused. You’re going to mess up. The key is to keep unpacking it, keep being humble and willing to say “Oops” if you cross someone else’s boundary and “Ouch” if someone else crosses yours.