2 kinds of boundaries every overthinker needs
- Jan 29, 2025
- 6 min read
Every few weeks, my second husband would say the dreaded words: “We need to talk.” I’d follow him down to his basement office, knowing what was coming—his litany of the ways I had failed to make him happy. If I would just change, he insisted, he’d feel better.
I accepted this because I'd done the same thing in my first marriage - handed my happiness over to my husband for 16 years, believing if he would just change, I'd be happy.
In both marriages, I didn’t understand the crucial distinction between “we” and “me”.
We vs. me
Each partner in a relationship has to find a balance between connected closeness (“we”) and preserving their individual identity, aka autonomy (”me”).
Boundaries are how you establish and maintain the balance between being a partner and being your own person. They address what you need and expect for both closeness and autonomy.
Brené Brown says setting boundaries “makes it clear what’s OK (with you) and what’s not OK and why.” (Dare to Lead). According to Nedra Glover Tawwab (author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace), your boundaries are the “needs and expectations that help you feel safe and comfortable in a relationship.”
There are many types of boundaries: physical, sexual, material/financial, mental/intellectual, emotional, communication, and time/energy. Each type has several dimensions.
People who overthink strugglethe most with mental and emotional boundaries.
They’re more abstract than the other types, making it harder to recognize when you need a boundary and more challenging to set and maintain it.
Mental boundaries
Mental boundaries are how you guard your mental energy, create peace of mind, and preserve your autonomy.
Learning how to stop overthinking...
allows you to set and maintain a boundary about how much repetitive negative thinking you’ll entertain.
You gain autonomy, creating separation between you and your thoughts and becoming free from their often punitive control.
I experienced this as profoundly empowering.
For the first time in my life, I had agency over what went on in my own head. I no longer felt like the helpless victim of my mind.
The experience of feeling empowered was the tiny seed I nurtured into full ownership of my life.
Focusing on what you can control...
is another internal mental boundary that conserves mental energy and preserves your autonomy.
In my two marriages, I knew what my husbands should do, and I wasn’t shy about telling them. They didn’t even have to ask!
I thought of it as giving them advice. But I repeated my “advice” until they acted on it or gave me a good (in my opinion) reason why they shouldn’t.
I spent way too much time thinking about what they should do—and not what I needed to take care of.
Limiting your exposure to negative influences...
conserves your mental energy.
Negative influences, particularly media, fuel self-criticism and catastrophizing.
I spend 90+% of my time on social media posting and responding to comments on my posts. If I scroll, no matter how I felt when I started, I feel drab and a little down when I stop.
I’ve learned this about a hundred times so far, and I’m sure I’ll need to learn it again.
I’m also on another news diet. I’ve been on several over the years—headlines only, from selected sources. More information isn’t worth the catastrophizing that inevitably follows.
Emotional boundaries
Emotional boundaries help you maintain your autonomy by separating your emotions from your partner’s.
Recognizing your emotions...
is the foundation of setting emotional boundaries. This sounds simple, but I often didn’t know how I actually felt beyond being low-level perma-pissed at a husband.
My constant dissatisfaction in my marriages masked my underlying, more painful feelings of loneliness, grief, shame, and regret.
I had to learn to connect my physical sensations to the emotions behind them—one sensation at a time.
Taking responsibility for your emotions...
is the opposite of what I did in my first marriage. My sister once sent me this desk placard:
It didn’t mean I was the center of the universe. It meant that whatever I felt was about me and only me.
This was a hard pill to swallow—how could everything be about me when there are two people in this relationship?
But here's what I did.
Every time I felt a negative emotion—resentment, anger, irritation, impatience—I paused instead of reacting and asked myself what had led up to it.
When was the last time I hadn’t felt that way and what had happened since then?
I quickly learned that I had typically:
not asked for what I wanted
agreed to do something I didn’t want to do
expected someone to behave in a particular way or
not done something I wanted to.
Just yesterday afternoon, I felt irritated by my partner—who was doing the same things he does all the days I don’t feel irritated around him.
It took me about four seconds to realize that I was actually feeling tense because I was 1800 words into the first version of this issue and completely stuck.
I wouldn’t finish by Monday afternoon—my completely arbitrary internal deadline for putting my newsletter into autosend mode.
Rather than snapping at him, I changed my internal deadline.
Not taking responsibility for your partner’s feelings...
is the opposite of what I did in my second marriage.
I accepted the blame for my husband's unhappiness until I realized I was responsible for my own feelings.
If I was responsible for my feelings, he was responsible for his.
From this viewpoint, the dreaded “we have to talk” conversations were demonstrations of how powerless he felt in his life, including in our marriage.
And I knew I couldn't change that for him — just as no one but me could change my own experience of powerlessness in my first marriage.
Instead of feeling responsible for his emotions, I felt empathy because I understood how he felt.
I began responding to his litany of complaints by acknowledging his feelings and telling him I was sorry he felt that way.
Setting boundaries
Start on the inside
Internal boundaries like stopping overthinking, focusing on what you can control, and filtering your mental intake are the best place to start setting boundaries because you don’t need to communicate them to anyone else. Each time you maintain an internal boundary, your confidence grows—which helps you transition to setting boundaries with others.
At first, setting external boundaries is uncomfortable, even anxious-making. I began with my children. I got used to the language and to responding to pushback by calmly and firmly repeating it.
With each healthy boundary I set, I felt more effective as a parent, more autonomous, and more prepared to set boundaries with my partner.
Don’t announce, implement
In my experience, communicating about your boundaries works best when it takes place in the situation where you need them.
This timing makes it very clear what specific behavior you’ll no longer tolerate.
Instead of announcing that you’re no longer going to participate in arguments that involve yelling, wait until your partner raises his voice. Then calmly say,
“I know you’re upset. I want to listen and I need to have a quieter conversation about it.”
Make it about you
Boundaries aren’t ultimatums focused on changing another person’s behavior:
“If you don’t stop yelling, I’m never going to talk to you about this again.”
They aren’t requests that the other person can choose to comply with or not:
“Would you please stop yelling?”
Boundaries are “I” statements of how you’ll change your behavior to protect your mental and emotional health.
“I hear how unhappy you are. I want to support youin finding ways to enjoy life more.”
“I need some time to think about this before I talk about it.”
“I can support you, but I’m not responsible for how you feel.”
Questions for the week:
How are your mental boundaries? Can you increase your mental well-being by adding or adjusting an internal boundary?
How’s your we/me balance in your intimate relationships? Where do you need to set a boundary to reclaim some autonomy?
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