How to Set Healthy Boundaries Without Pushing Back
How do you set a boundary with someone who is six times bigger than you, significantly stronger than you, and has absolutely no problem pushing back?
That has been one of my greatest lessons with our horse, Ollie.
Since we became his guardians almost two years ago, Ollie has challenged my boundaries in just about every way imaginable. He’ll pull toward where he wants to go on a walk, plant his feet and refuse to move, get all up in my space when food comes out, or lean his considerable weight into me when we’re working with his hooves.
And for a long time, I thought the answer was to be firmer.
When he pushed, I pushed back. I would use all my mindfulness tools to stay calm, but eventually there would often be a big “OLLIE!” followed by frustration and an energy neither of us particularly enjoyed. 😡
I kept thinking I needed to find a better way to make my boundary stronger.
Turns out, I didn’t need to push harder. I needed to stop pushing altogether.
A friend of ours, Madison, recently stayed with us to work with the horses. She’s an incredibly gifted trainer, and one day, MaryBeth pointed out something in the way I was interacting with Ollie that I wasn’t seeing in myself.
That opened the door for Madison to show me a completely different way of holding a boundary.
She described it as becoming a “quiet wall.”
Not an angry wall. Not a forceful wall. Not a wall trying to convince Ollie to stop pushing.
Just a calm, steady wall that he couldn’t penetrate and that had absolutely no feelings about whether he tried.
If he pushed, the wall stayed where it was. If he tried again, the wall was still there. There was no frustration, no escalation, and no emotional charge. Just a clear, consistent boundary.
Watching her made something click.
A boundary does not have to fight back to be strong.
A few days later, I got to test it.
I was working on Norby’s hooves when Ollie wandered over and started inserting himself into what we were doing. Normally, I might have immediately gone into, Ollie, back up. Get out of here.😡
Instead, I became my own version of that quiet wall. 🙂
I calmly asked him to back up and used the smallest amount of pressure I could.
And this massive, incredibly strong horse quietly backed away. Then he stood there and waited.
I remember thinking, Oh. This is what I’ve been missing.
And maybe it is something you have been missing with your boundaries, too.
Because if you’re like a lot of people, you may wait until someone has pushed your limits over and over before you finally say something. By that point, you’re frustrated, resentful, exhausted, or angry.
So the boundary comes out with all of that energy behind it.
You snap at your partner because you have said yes too many times. You blow up at a coworker because you have quietly taken on more and more work. You finally tell a family member exactly how you feel after months of swallowing it.
Then you walk away thinking, Why does setting boundaries have to feel so awful?
Maybe the problem isn’t the boundary. Maybe you simply waited so long to set it that your frustration had to set it for you.
What Ollie is teaching me is that a boundary can be clear without becoming a battle.
You don’t always have to push back when someone pushes you. Sometimes you simply decide where you stand and stay there.
You don’t need them to like the boundary. You don’t need them to agree with it. You don’t even need to have a big emotional reaction when they test it.
You can become the quiet wall.
And calm does not mean passive.
You can be compassionate and still mean no. You can care about someone and still ask them to back up. You can understand why someone is behaving the way they are without making their needs more important than your own. You can allow someone to have feelings about your boundary without making their feelings your responsibility to fix.
That may be one of the hardest and most freeing parts of setting healthy boundaries.
Because the real practice isn’t just saying the words. It’s staying grounded when someone tests them.
That is one of the biggest reasons MaryBeth and I created our How to Set Boundaries Bootcamp.
Learning what a healthy boundary is isn’t usually the hard part. Most of us already know, at least on some level, where something in our life does not feel right.
The harder part is learning how to actually communicate it, hold it when someone pushes back, manage the emotions that come with it, and keep choosing yourself without shutting other people out.
And you don’t learn that from hearing about boundaries once.
You learn it through practice.
That’s why the Bootcamp includes three live coaching sessions where we’ll teach you how to recognize, communicate, and hold healthier boundaries, followed by three months of support and practice inside our Rewilded Alignment Community.
Because we don’t want you to leave knowing more about boundaries.
We want you to actually live them.
If you are tired of waiting until you’re frustrated to speak up, saying yes when your whole body wants to say no, or feeling like you have to become angry, forceful, or hard in order for your boundaries to matter, I would love to have you join us.
Join the How to Set Boundaries Bootcamp
You can be kind and immovable. You can care deeply without changing your boundary.
And sometimes the strongest boundary is simply a quiet wall that stays exactly where you put it.
