Boundaries aren’t walls; they’re the doorway to sustainable love
Dear Michelle,
I’m exhausted of being the strong one in my family. I’ve always been the one my family relies on…the problem-solver, the fixer, the emotionally support, the therapist…. Whenever something goes wrong, I’m the first person they call. When emotions run high, I’m the one calming everyone down, I’m expected to mediate arguments, and offer solutions at all hours of the night. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. I love them, I really do, and I desperately want them to be happy and healthy but I feel like I have no space to fall apart myself. And the weight of it all is beginning to get too much. I think I’m mildly depressed? but I pretend like everything is fine. No one checks in on me the way I check in on them. If I ever express that I’m struggling, it’s either brushed off or they tell me I’m the strong one and that I’ll figure it out.
I’m so tired of holding everyone else up. I want to be able to say no without guilt eating me alive. But every time I try to set boundaries, I feel like I’m abandoning them. If I don’t answer their calls they’ll just spiral or struggle on their own and I’ll feel so guilty and anxious that I cave anyway. So I push through, even when it drains me…even when I’m silently falling apart. How does someone like me break the cycle without feeling like I’m failing them? How do I take care of myself without feeling guilty, anxious and selfish?
Dear Strong One,
I hear you. Deeply. You’ve been the anchor, the safe place, the fixer, the one who holds things together when everything feels like it’s falling apart. You’ve never dropped the ball because it feels more like a bomb to you. And I know how bloody exhausting all of this is.
You’re not wrong to want something different. You’re not selfish for craving a love that flows both ways. But here’s the thing no one tells you: when you spend your life being the strong one, people start to believe you don’t need anything. They believe you were built to bear it all. And maybe, for a while, you believed that too. I wonder who you see yourself as if we strip away the title of ‘The Strong One’. The world praises strength, but what they don’t tell you is that even the strongest people have limits. Because guess what? You’re human. And humans? Humans need rest. Humans need to fall apart sometimes.
It feels to me like somewhere along the way, you learned that love looks like self-sacrifice. That being needed equals being valued. That your worthiness lies in your ability to show up for others, no matter what the cost is to yourself. But what if I told you that your worth has never been dependent on how much you carry or do for others? That even if you set it all down —even if you walked away from it entirely, you would still be more than enough? What would it take for you to believe that?
From early on many of us learn that love is about responsibility. That to be loved is to be needed, to be useful, to make ourselves indispensable. But when care becomes one-sided, when it’s an obligation rather than a choice, it starts to erode our sense of self. Shouldn’t love be something you offer freely, not something you owe?
Here’s the hard and beautiful truth: You are not a bottomless well of giving. You are not a machine built to absorb everyone else’s grief, chaos, and need. You are a human being who also deserves to be held.
I know you’re afraid that if you stop showing up in the way you always have, they’ll fall apart. That the rescuer in you is convinced that if you step away things may get worse for them because you’re the only one who can help them through it all. I know the thought of boundaries feels so heavy. It feels like rejection, like abandonment, like you’re saying, “I don’t care.” But here’s the truth: Boundaries aren’t a wall, they’re a doorway. They don’t push love away; they teach love where to stand so it can remain sustainable. When we continue to play these roles in our relationships at the detriment of ourselves, our health, our integrity, all we’re doing is reinforcing these dynamics. We become crutches to the cyclical behavior that’s keeping everyone unwell and stuck in loops.
I know what this is like because I too was a crutch in one of the most important relationships of my life. And it’s spiritually draining. Putting in the boundaries is terrifying because we’re so preoccupied with how it will impact the other —but what I’m hearing you say is that you cannot continue on this trajectory either. Walking away from that relationship was the hardest, and most heartbreaking thing I’d ever done until then; it was so painful, I was sure one of us wouldn’t survive. But it had to be done and it was the biggest gift I could give myself. And you know what happened? The world did not fall apart. Instead, eventually, they were forced to learn how to hold themselves, how to find strength from within, and how to trust that they too are capable of navigating life without placing the weight of their world on my shoulders.
So darling, what if boundaries are an act of love for both you and your family? Love that says: I trust you to find your own strength. I trust myself enough to take up space, to rest, to receive.
It will be hard at first. It might ache all the way to your bones. But here’s what I promise you: the world will not end because you choose yourself. And the people who truly love you? They will learn. Maybe not immediately, maybe not perfectly, but eventually, they will see that the version of you who is rested, whole, and free is the version of you they’ve been needing all along.
So here is my invitation to you: Give yourself permission to need. To be held. To be seen beyond what you provide. You are allowed to take a step back. You are allowed to say, “I love you, and I can’t be everything for you.” You are allowed to ask yourself, “Who am I when I am not holding everyone else up?”—and take the time to find out.
You don’t have to keep proving your strength by running on empty. True strength is knowing when to rest, when to receive, when to say, “I deserve care, too.” And you do. You always have.
With love and immense belief in you,
Michelle.