How to Set Boundaries with an Abuser

Setting a boundary with an abusive person is almost impossible.

Today we are going to go over 3 things:

1. Why it is so hard to set boundaries with an abuser
2. How to regulate yourself so you can get in touch with what you need and how you feel
3. How to actually set a boundary with an abuser

If you need support:

Website: emotionalabusecoach.com
Email: jessica@jessicaknightcoaching
Instagram: @emotionalabusecoach

I created a series of canned responses that can be helpful with diffusing conflict. You can get them here: https://jessicaknightcoaching.activehosted.com/f/3

Transcript

Hello, and welcome back. And thank you for being here with me today. My name is Jessica night and this is the relationship recovery podcast. Last week, two weeks ago, I did a podcast on the cycle of abuse. And in that podcast, I said, you can't change the behavior, but you can change your response to it.

I've been thinking about that a lot, and I wanted to unpack it a little bit more because what I was really talking about was bad. And setting a boundary with an abusive person is almost impossible. Today. We're going to go over three things. Why is it so hard to set boundaries with an abuser, how to regulate yourself so you can get in touch with what you need and how you feel and how to actually set a boundary with an abuser.

When I think about setting boundaries, I typically think that I'm setting a boundary to keep somebody in my life, not to get them out. If I really want to remove someone from my life that I don't really care about or that I'm not, you know, emotionally attached to it is easier. I could just say, I don't want to talk to you anymore.

I could block the call. I could just stop responding. There's ways to remove them. That's not emotional when healthy people set boundaries with each other, they're usually respected. Most recently, I was asked by a friend to not talk about my new relationship. He said everybody in my life is in a new relationship and mine is ending.

And I would really appreciate it if like you didn't vent to me about it or talk to me about it. I, I support you, but I can't hear it right now. I said a hundred percent. Totally fine. Absolutely. I didn't take it as an attack. I didn't take it as him not wanting to know about me. I didn't take it as him being mean to me.

It was Nope. You got it. I'm sorry that you're going through what you're going through.

A few years ago, I had to set a boundary with a good friend of mine because he kept making comments about me being a single mom and not being able to hang out anymore. That's essentially how they sounded. They weren't a grading. It wasn't mean he wasn't trying to be mean. He was trying to joke with me, but the truth was is that I was a single mom and I was struggling and I wasn't hanging out.

And I really couldn't. I was tired. I had a one-year-old. And I had to ask him to stop doing that. And I was afraid to do that because I didn't want to say, Hey, please stop joking with me because I do enjoy that part of our friendship, but I was growing an internal wall against him. And I knew that I was coming up with all this resentment and I didn't want to do that anymore.

I cared about this person. And when I asked him, he said, yes, like, you know, and then we came up with a plan. And that if he did do it, I was able to have a way to respond to him. And that we, you know, we sort of like reset. We got on the right page. That was really important to me because I didn't want this friendship to be coated with this like hateful energy or this resentful energy over something that felt super sensitive to me.

And those are two examples of what it's like to set a boundary with a healthy person. Somebody who cares, somebody who is empathetic. And somebody cares and loves you and respects you. They will listen to your boundaries, even if it feels difficult at the time. But setting a boundary with an abuser is very difficult and there's nothing quite like doing it.

When you set a boundary with an abuser, they typically become more abusive when you call them out on the behavior. When you ask them to stop yelling or to stop being cruel, or when you create distance and detached due to their behavior. Or even when you set boundaries in response to their abuse, they usually will react with more abuse or call you abusive.

They claim that they're being abused by you because of you setting a boundary towards what they, to what they are doing, that you don't like. They may even say that you don't care about how they feel, and you are no longer listening to how they feel over your, over listening to yourself. Which if you're in this position, it's good because you're finally listening to what you need.

They might even claim that they're the victim because you aren't being quote unquote nice anymore. Which also means you're not putting up with their shit. And without any consequence to it, you're not being yelled at and then apologizing that you got them mad, but your response to the abuse is not abuse.

This is you protecting yourself, which is essentially because of users, don't respect boundaries.

There's usually no combination of word and technique that you can use to make an abusive person, respect your boundaries. This is actually part of what being an abuser means. When you do, you're asking how you can change an abusive person into a non abuser, which has been the theme of almost every podcast so far.

The abusive person believes that they're right. They think they are right and you are wrong. They don't see that the way that they think is problematic. They see it as fact and their feelings are facts. They're unable to take accountability because even when they do their accountability is typically book-ended with other abuse in my town.

Something like, I'm sorry for what I said, but I'm sorry. I lashed out. If you didn't say what you said, I would've never gotten angry. You did this. You walking away is giving me the silent treatment. An abusive person is just not going to magically start respecting your feelings without actual work on themselves.

If you think about it, people who have used others, don't want to hear that they are at fault. They make you believe that it's your fault, too, that they hurt you or that you're being over-sensitive or too. And either way it falls. They've user wants to treat you exactly how they want to treat you and they don't want to be challenged.

And so when you set a boundary and abusive relationship, you typically say what you need, like, please don't yell at me. Please don't raise your voice, please don't tell me what I think and feel, but you are likely going to be blamed for not allowing them to express them.

And so if you are setting a boundary with somebody, if you're in a romantic relationship and you're saying, I need you not to yell at me, I need you not to tell me what you feel. I'm going to walk away. If you continue to throw something at me and you're met with more anger, more violence, that's an abusive relationship.

The abuser is masterful in creating an environment where it's not possible, or even permissible to protest how you're being treated. You will be blamed for any painful feelings that you may have in response to their abuse. And then systematically you become silenced because when you have been taught to be in a relationship that is abusive and you've been taught that you can't express how you feel.

And if you do that, there's a consequence, maybe not in the moment, but. You have been taught to not feel like it's safe to express yourself. You've been told, you've been taught that there are consequences to having boundaries. So when you start trying to do this, any boundary you claim to have, and if they claim to respect it, it's momentary.

It will not last. And there's a good chance. It's going to be used against you in a future time. When I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, I tried to set a boundary about anger. I was on the phone with my partner at the time, and he was yelling and I was pushing back when he was telling me how I felt about something that I didn't feel that way.

He was very aggressively telling me what I felt and I didn't feel it. I told him if he continued to tell me what I thought, I'd hang up and he continued to yell. You can't tell me that you and I said, I'm hanging up. Please don't finish the sentence. I asked you not to tell me what I think he escalated was yelling more.

And I was struggling to hold my own boundary, knowing that if I hung up, I would feel like shit after I knew that I was going to feel guilt for hanging up because I'm not a crappy person. And I have an, I don't want to hang up on somebody, but I knew it. But part of me knew I needed to.

He continued to yell. And I said, I'm hanging up. I'm not going to be yelled at anymore. And he yelled louder and said, look at what you did. You did this to me and hung up on me. So to be clear, the boundary I tried to set was don't tell me how I feel. And that was crossed. I did not keep my boundary, which is I could have just hung up the phone when he then escalated and.

When I said I was going to keep it. Then when he yelled at me, I once again, stayed on the phone and could have hung up instead, it escalated so badly because he realized I was not going to apologize for him abusing me. And then I got blamed for his outburst. So I didn't, I hold the boundary. Why was that so hard?

Because when you first start setting boundaries, they're going to feel really uncomfortable. I wasn't used to it. I learned to live in an abusive relationship, but I knew at that time I needed to start trying. I kept the, I kept them really simple at the beginning. Don't yell at me, scream at me on the phone.

I'm going to hang up the phone. If you continue to call my phone, I'm going to block you. If you throw something at me, I'm leaving. If you tell me what I feel and what I think I'm no longer engaging in the conversation. I will be getting up and leaving, et cetera. A lot of us don't do the, getting up and leaving part.

We do the I'm going to tell them what I think, but they, but we don't get up and leave. And I'll get that into that a little bit later when we discuss how to set a boundary. But in order to even get to that point, the point of leaving or even setting some boundaries, you will need to be able to regulate yourself and bring yourself back down to.

You will need to be able to take some space when you need it. You'll need to be able to look at this relationship and ask, is this somebody who has the ability to stop being abusive? And there's a few things that you can do to try and get in touch with boundaries. I'm going to go through seven of them.

One, start listening to your feelings, really start practicing, checking in with your body. Are you scared? Angry, disappointed, sad. Where in your body do you feel it? Can you allow it to be a feeling just for a moment? This is something I do with all my coaching clients. What are you feeling right now? Where if you're in an abusive relationship, you probably lost the right to feel at one point.

And so you can give that back to yourself. What do I feel right now without judgment? No I feel, but, or I feel an, I feel, period two. I want you to start to ask yourself if you could make any choice, what would it be if you were free to make any choice in the world right now, what would that be? Would it be to get up and leave?

Would it be to pack up all your stuff and walk out? Would it be to write a letter of all the ways in which your partner is abusive, what would it be? Any choice would you go to China? Would you go to Japan? Would you go work out? What would it be without judgment? Sometimes just knowing what the choice is, can feel empowering.

You could be sitting in a conversation with somebody you don't want to be in. For a moment. Say if I felt more powerful, I would just get up and go. And you can almost imagine yourself in that moment, leaving, maybe knowing that that's, that's what you want to get to. That's what you want to work towards

three. Watch what the abuser does to disempower you the way I want you to think about this as almost like watching a movie, how do they hook you into feeling good? How do they hook you into feeling ashamed? How do they make it look like you're doing something wrong? How do they make it look like you're controlling?

How are they actually controlling? Try and watch it when it's happening. What's happening right now. How are my words twisted? And just take note of it. Four, ask yourself how you can support yourself in the moment. What do you need right now? Do you need water? Do you need to wash your face a shower?

Sometimes a mantra can help too. It might say, you know, you might want to say to yourself, it's okay to feel hurt. It's okay. To feel angry. I hear you. I love you. Mine used to be, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Jess. I'm so sorry.

Diminish the power of their words when they're being said to you, and this is something that will go on only in your head. So if you're being told how you think about something like you think every girl that texts me just wants to just in your mind go, that's not what I think. Thank you. Shady phone behave.

Or if it's like, you know, you think that, you know, like, just because you have an opinion, that's right. I have a right to my feelings. My feelings are never heard every time they say something, even if you're not saying it to them, say something back to yourself to disempower them. If they're like you, you know, it's, it's your fault.

I have such a crappy relationship with my family. He had a crappy relationship with his family. Before

you just say it back to yourself, it could even be as simple as this is ridiculous. Six practice working out what you think rather than allowing the story to be defined by the other person. This will allow you to have some space for your own opinion, your own perspective. In a past podcast, I talked about how to an Gaslight yourself, like how to literally write it out.

Something that you can do here is literally write out what actually happened, or even talk out what happened when I was healing through this, I used to voice record myself and I would think about what the fuck just happened. Sometimes I would do it leaving their home and I'd be like, what the hell just happened?

And I would talk myself. I showed up. He was asleep. We had plans. I silently waited. He can, he started to get angry. I felt like it was his own shame coming up for falling asleep. When we had plans, time continued, I was tired. He focused on the fact that I was tired and not on the fact that he wasn't getting ready to go do the plans.

We never went to the plan. That was my fault because he didn't pray. He wasn't ready. You know, it's like walk through yourself through. So that way you are getting right with your own reality and your version of what happened. And lastly, find ways to be around people who listen to you and understand you.

When I was going through this, there was only one person I felt that I could really be honest with, truly honest with other than that, it was really my coach at the time. And I'm this person for a lot of people, you may not feel like you can talk to anybody, but you can tell me.

And so it could be immensely important to be able to speak to somebody that validates your personal experience for who you are, not in the dynamic. And you will need someone who understands emotional abuse and understands narcissism because. Like couples therapy. We'll just like rip you apart around, like, how do we come together?

Because that person, most likely like, performs very well in couples therapy, but you need somebody who understands the effects and what's happening to you so that you can start to recover from what's happening to you.

Just be honest with yourself, you know, really be honest with yourself with what what's going on.

And so I mentioned before where, you know, we're going to get to this point of what does this go? What does it look like when you set a boundary and it's respected? Like how do we get to the point where our boundaries are respected? And the truth is, is that we need. Our boundaries first. That's why I just went through all these steps on how to help yourself get to a place of regulation is because you'll never going to get to a place where you can firmly set a boundary.

If you can't even stay on your own to Pete, your boundaries are not going to be respected. So in order to set a boundary, you really need to have a stronger sense of self. Sometimes I recommend to people trying to set boundaries with other people in their life, like look in your life and be like, who can I set assignee boundary with?

Like, okay, maybe I tell my babysitter, like, no, like you come in late almost every day. I need you here at 7:00 AM or I can't have you come to something like, think about your life and think about where you can set some boundaries, not to just do them to do them, but to almost practice. Standing on your own two feet.

There's a coworker that constantly comes over to your desk and interrupts you, you know, and you lose a lot of work time because you're engaging something you can say is I love you. And I love connecting. I would like to find a time where we can connect throughout the week, but having like, kind of these in these interruptions throughout the day that they're throwing me off and is causing me to stay late.

I really prefer if we found a better way, things like that, easy bank. Because to set a boundary with an abuser, you really need to be firm. And the point of setting the boundary will be, you need to be firm and then you need to remove yourself. So first comes the boundary and then comes you removing yourself from the situation to keep yourself safe.

That's the part that we typically sidestep is the part that we need to then be. We're going to set a boundary and then we need to go to a place where we feel safe. Now, what does that actually mean? We need to operate from the perspective of the abusive person is not going to respect my boundary. So what can I do?

That's going to stop the harm. A lot of people get confused about this because therapy therapists set up boundaries. Like you set a boundary, you state what you need and where you will or will not exceed. And then when that boundary is crossed, you have to sort of like enforce that with yourself, right?

It's not just about saying it and like leaving it there. There's an action part of this that has to take place. You need to remove yourself. If you're going to have a boundary, whether that's blocking, hanging up, walking out of the room, leaving the house, you can't stay there because the minute that your boundaries look shaky there, you're just opening the door for them to be walked all over.

You need a new model for boundaries. So if the boundary is typically I express my boundary, it's heard we move forward. It's now I am setting a boundary and then I am going to remove myself from the situation. If the boundary is crossed, the new paradigm that I'm asking you to step into is that a boundary is something that actually stops the harm.

I will walk away and I will leave. If you continue to tell me how I feel,

you can't rely on just statements like you can't treat me this way. I don't allow this in my home. Those are just words. Words are something I've user can take and manipulate. This boundary has to include an action, which includes mental actions too. Like you can look the other way. You can close your eyes.

But you need to stop the contact if they email you block it. And I know I've said block already a few times, and it is actually very problematic and it's hard to block somebody and I, if one day, I'm sure I'll do a whole podcast on just blocking because it is extremely difficult. So I just want to let you know, what I'm talking about right now is not blocking forever.

It's blocking for a period of time, so you can stop the engagement. So for example, if your texts fighting, you're going back and forth and you've asked them to stop and they're not stopping and they keep going. And you say, you can send me an email with your thoughts, but please I need, I need to focus on my work.

I cannot have the texts coming in my phone and they keep going. You say, I'm blocking you for an hour. I will unblock you at 5 36. That's the boundaries I'm talking about here, but in regards to that, I'm not talking about blocking them forever. I never talking to them too again right now.

And so every time, you know, for example, somebody says like, well, I'm going to rephrase that

every time that you're being yelled at or the voice has like their voices raised or they're throwing things. The boundary is I'm leaving. That removes you from the situation that keeps you safe.

This is going to be very difficult. It's going to be very difficult for you to be able to set the boundary. And then the move here is going to feel like you're cutting off your right arm, that you're like cutting off your arm. And now walking out of the room with your arm and your hand after you just saw it off and you're dripping blood.

That's literally what this is going to feel. That's why, what I'm suggesting starts small and to start with what's manageable, the three take care of yourself. After you said it, you might even want to tell a friend or a coach, this is what I'm going to try and do. I said, I helped a client set a boundary yesterday.

I said, if you start getting yelled at, you're going to have to say, I'm not interested in having this conversation right now. We're not speaking rationally. We should talk about this another time. And I said, if it keeps going, I think you'll have to leave. We can't just sit and let people push and push and push and push most likely.

You've already asked for what you need and it hasn't been respected. And so if it's hard for you to set some of these physical boundaries, leaving, blocking, hanging up, walking away, think about what you can do. Can you turn away? Can you leave the room? Can you stop engaging? What is possible,

what is going to keep you safe? Because the goal of this is to bring us back to the second thing we talked about today. How do you regulate, how do we bring you back to a place where you can regulate and look at what's happening? Come back to yourself and then try and reengage a boundary will also to show them that you're serious.

it's bringing to mind a memory of a boundary. I sat with the same guy around yelling. He had, he, not that he did not plan, um, an event with his friends and how he was going to get there, but he needed my help with something. And I gave, and he said, I want this, like, I want a, and I said, I can't do a, but I can do BNC.

And one of them required him doing no work at all. The other one required him doing a little bit of work. And so he told himself that I didn't actually want to do C and was gonna do B, which was like, meet him halfway to pick something up or go to his house, pick something up. I said, I would just go get it.

He wanted me to go sit in his house with it. And I was like, I'm not doing that. And so, uh, well, frankly, because I wanted my own time, my own space and my own. And so I remember he called me to yell at me that he was going to be late to this thing with his friends, because I didn't do what he wanted me to do, even though I said a week before I wasn't going to do it because I didn't, that, wasn't what I was agreeing to.

And when I reflect back on that, I do remember hanging up the phone. And I remember that actually was maybe the first time it felt okay. I hung up. It felt so ridiculous that I was getting yelled at after I just had. It just wasn't exactly what he wanted it to be. And he didn't plan. So he wasn't getting anywhere on time, but this had to be made into my fault.

And I just said, I don't accept the blame today. Good luck. And I hung up. That was maybe one of the only times I ever hung up and felt okay. More came after that, but it did take going through the phases of hanging up and not feeling okay. Hanging up and giving myself space. Hanging up and maybe not picking up for the rest of the day, but choosing to send an email or a text later on in response rather than another phone call got me to the point where I was able to create more and more space and regulate more and more that I was able to set the boundaries that I felt I needed to set

that did help me get to a place where I felt like I was in my own power. And also that I could take care of myself and that I knew what was best for me. And over time, it did remove me enough so that I was able to see the abusive behaviors and choose not to engage.

So I hope this was helpful today, and I know it was a lot and I know it's probably also overwhelming. So if you do have questions I'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me@jessicaatjessicanitcoaching.com. And if you're in an abusive relationship and you're not sure what to do, you can reach out to me using that same email address or head to emotional abuse, coach.com.

I'd love to connect with you and see if I could support you.