#66 Understanding Personal Boundaries in Relationships with Lizandra Leigertwood

Are unclear or weak boundaries creating tension in your relationships? 

In this essential conversation, I’m joined by psychotherapist Lizandra Leigertwood to unpack the role of personal boundaries in relationships and how learning to set them can transform your emotional wellbeing.

We dive into the psychology of boundary-setting, including how childhood trauma, attachment styles, and family dynamics shape your ability to advocate for your needs. Lizandra offers practical tools to help you identify unhealthy boundaries, reconnect with your core values, and begin communicating with more clarity and confidence.

If you've ever felt overwhelmed, resentful, or disconnected in close relationships, this episode will give you insight and actionable strategies to start building healthy, sustainable boundaries - without guilt.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

✅ What healthy boundaries actually look like in relationships
✅ How childhood experiences and trauma impact boundary setting
✅ The connection between attachment styles and emotional boundaries
✅ Signs of weak or overly rigid boundaries
✅ How to set boundaries without feeling selfish
✅ The importance of knowing your personal values and limits
✅ Real-world tools to practice assertiveness and protect your wellbeing

Who this episode is for:

This episode is perfect for anyone who:

• Struggles to say no or express needs in relationships
• Feels emotionally drained or taken for granted
• Wants to improve their communication and self-respect
• Is curious about how therapy approaches boundaries and emotional safety
• Seeks to heal family or partner dynamics with more clarity and compassion

Highlights include:
01:58 Defining healthy boundaries
03:19 Unhealthy boundaries and their impact
05:00 Childhood trauma and boundaries
08:50 Recognising red flags in boundaries
10:52 Family dynamics and enmeshment
15:41 Cutting off toxic relationships
18:37 Practical steps to set boundaries

If you liked this episode you may like:

#35: Healing the Invisible Scars: Understanding and Overcoming Childhood Emotional Neglect

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The Hello Therapy podcast and the information provided by Dr Liz White (DClinPsy, CPsychol, AFBPsS, CSci, HCPC reg.), is solely intended for informational and educational purposes and does not constitute personalised advice. Please reach out to your GP or a mental health professional if you need support. 

Transcript

Defining Healthy Boundaries

Dr Liz White 0:02

If you're looking to improve your mental health and well-being, then keep listening. I'm Dr Liz White, a consultant clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience. Whether you're a frazzled parent, a stressed out professional or finding your way through the challenges of midlife, you're in the right place. Through a mix of solo episodes and insightful conversations with expert psychologists and therapists, I'm bringing you evidence-based tools and strategies to help you navigate life's ups and downs with confidence, clarity and compassion. With confidence, clarity and compassion this is your space to feel seen, supported and empowered. Welcome to Hello Therapy. Have you ever wondered why setting and maintaining boundaries with other people can just feel so tricky? Well, in this episode, I'm sitting down with psychotherapist Lysandra Ledgertwood to explore the fundamentals of healthy boundaries what they look like, why they matter and how past experiences, like childhood trauma, can impact your ability to set and maintain them. We talk about the difference between healthy closeness and enmeshment, red flags that signal healthy boundaries in relationships and practical steps you can take to establish better limits. So, whether you're struggling with people pleasing and want to break patterns of overgiving, or just need a confidence boost to protect your energy, this episode offers much needed guidance and support. And, just to give you a heads up. We do touch on themes around relationship abuse in this episode, so do look after yourselves and come back to the episode if you need to. So let's dive in. Lysandra, thank you so much for joining me on the Hello Therapy podcast today. Thank you for having me. So we are talking about all things boundaries today, which is one of your niches, your specialities. So I'm really excited about our chat. But before we get into that that, do you want to tell our listeners who you are and what you do? Yes, so I'm Lissandra. I'm a psychotherapist. I work a lot with relational trauma, childhood trauma. I work mostly with women, but I also do work with men. Just to you know heal from the past and I work a lot with attachment, and with that comes a lot know heal from the past, and I work a lot with attachment, and with that comes a lot of boundary setting and people pleasing, absolutely, and I said a bit before that I talk so much about boundaries with my clients.

Unhealthy Boundaries and Their Impact

Dr Liz White 2:56

So let's start by thinking about boundaries. What would you say are healthy boundaries? Because I think there's often a bit of confusion, isn't there, about what's healthy, what's not healthy. So can you give us some insights into that. Let's start there. Yeah, so in terms of healthy boundaries, it's really about it's a form of self-protection and it's a form of having healthy and good relationships so that there's equal give and take. You know where you begin and end, you know where the other person begins and ends brilliant. And how do you see that linking up with our emotional, psychological well-being? Would you say that obviously, having healthy boundaries means that our psychological function is functioning, is much sort of better. Would you say, yeah, yeah, so it makes it very hard for you to have like really good mental health if you don't have good boundaries. And having good relationships also ties in with having good mental health. And things around identity, no self-worth all of those things really tie into boundaries, and I think people don't necessarily realize how important boundaries are, especially if they haven't been modeled to them in their earliest relationships and in their childhood. Okay, so let's think about what unhealthy boundaries are.

Childhood Trauma and Boundaries

Dr Liz White 4:18

What kind of things do you see in your work in terms of when someone is displaying examples of unhealthy boundaries with people? What would that look like? That could look like so many different things, not prioritizing what they might need. In more extreme cases, it can be putting yourself in very dangerous situations, not thinking about your physical safety, not thinking about your emotional safety, perhaps not being in safe environments or safe relationships, because they don't really understand or know that it's okay for them to set boundaries and what those healthy boundaries actually look like. Yeah, yeah, so being being a doormat kind of thing. Yeah, sometimes like overgiving, almost overcompensating, doing too much in their relationships, not thinking about what they need to, almost that fear of not being accepted or not feeling loved, and so wanting to overcompensate for that in relationships by giving everything and sometimes giving too much, and putting their own needs and sometimes their own well-being at risk as a result of that. Yeah, what kind of things do you mean there in terms of putting? Putting themselves at risk? So like toxic relationships is a really good example of that. Um, abusive relationships, you know, physical, mental, emotional, all of those things. Even risky behaviors can kind of come into that as well.

Dr Liz White 5:50

Yeah, yeah, okay, and so you you obviously work a lot with trauma and unhealthy boundaries can you say a little bit about what ways would childhood trauma impact a person's ability to set healthy boundaries or maintain healthy boundaries, when you have been in a childhood environment where there haven't been boundaries set or it's been like a very like a volatile environment. For example, nobody has emotional regulation, there's a lot of chaos. You grow up in an environment when you almost get used to that kind of environment and so it normalizes a lot of these behaviors and then it also then, as a result of that, it makes it hard for you to recognize what healthier patterns in your relationships are, and so if you haven't had that model to you in those very early years, we can then model some of those behaviors as an adult and not recognize actually when we're in a toxic environment or in a toxic relationship or situation, because that's just what you know, that's normal for you. Yeah, and, as you say, the link there is.

Dr Liz White 6:58

I talk a lot about attachment and attachment styles and attachment, anxiety etc. And being brought up in in a difficult environment like that, like you described, means that you are going to not have a kind of healthy view of yourself are you? Or of other people. You're going to maybe have a negative view of yourself or a negative view of other people and that therefore means that your expectations of others are going to be, you know, maybe they they won't be there for you or they, they won't support you or they won't be there for you and, as you were saying, linking with that the people-pleasing behavior it's. Then you sometimes you feel you have to really well not have any boundaries in order to make someone love you or make someone be there for you. I think that can definitely be the sense for some people, can't it? Yeah, absolutely.

Dr Liz White 7:50

I see that a lot, especially with anxious attachment, and when people have an anxious attachment, a common pattern that I tend to see is that, instead of raising their boundaries when they need to to have healthy relationships, they actually lower them, and so they lower that, that threshold of boundaries, because they're hoping that they're going to, you know, have the love and validation that they're looking for. Quite often they need to raise those boundaries, but they're literally doing the opposite. They're lowering them, they're lowering their standards, they are, you know, deprioritizing themselves in so many different ways. That then reinforces that feeling of I'm not good enough, people leave me, relationships are hard and all of these other kind of like anxious thought patterns that also come with anxious attachment. Yeah, yeah, and it can be so hard for someone, can't it?

Recognising Red Flags in Boundaries

Dr Liz White 8:42

If you're stuck in those patterns, yeah, yeah, it's a really difficult thing to work through If you haven't had that secure foundation, you haven't had relationships where it felt like it was okay to express what your needs are. So, yeah, so we're talking about a couple of things, aren't we? So yeah, so we're talking about a couple of things, aren't we? We're talking about not just setting boundaries, or setting healthy boundaries, but it's also knowing what you need as well. Like it's difficult to set a boundary if you don't know what you need in a relationship, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I tend to see that a lot you probably do as well your client work that it's difficult for them to even know where to start with boundaries, because, if you can, you kind of ask them what do you need? Right now, it's like, well, I don't know, they can only kind of re-externalize a lot of those feelings. They can externalize and think about what other people need and look at it from that perspective. But doing the internal self-work of what do I actually need? That tends to be really hard.

Dr Liz White 9:46

Yeah, so someone listening, if they're sort of thinking, oh, maybe I'm not so great with boundaries, what might be some red flags that you could say to someone in terms of, ok, these are the signs that maybe your boundary setting needs some work. What would you say? Tend to relate it to the feelings that are coming up for them, probably just on a day-to-day, of feeling angry, feeling frustrated and feeling resentful. I think resentment is very much a big one where people can identify that they have these kind of negative feelings in their relationships and they feel as though maybe they are constantly doing things for other people but they don't get that same energy back. Right, yeah, always putting the effort in. Yeah, yeah, always. Maybe like calling that friend, always being the one to you know, arrange times to meet up, or, yeah, always being invested in the relationship almost more than other people.

Family Dynamics and Enmeshment

Dr Liz White 10:49

So a red flag would be, yeah, sort of putting lots and lots of effort in and not getting much back anything, any anything else in terms of someone's behavior or someone's actions within a relationship. I think I would probably relate that to a lack of safety in your relationships, and so you know, very big red flags are, you know, if somebody's like shouting in your face and you kind of think, think that's okay, that's all right, and then you minimize that, maybe even somebody being like physical towards you, or, you know, threatening behavior, coercive behavior, a lot of the time, people don't recognize that these are significant red flags and they are a situation of, actually you'll be putting your safety at risk in a lot of those situations. Yeah, and, and in those situations it's so important, isn't it to to talk to someone about it, even if it's a friend, or to get professional advice or support, um, in those scenarios, um, so we we've talked about, I guess, romantic relationships, we've touched on friendships. I think it'd be helpful to also think about family relationships, and something that does come up a lot is the idea of the sort of enmeshed family. You know, the family that's very, very close but maybe that's not healthy. Can you explain, maybe, the difference between a family that's very, very close but maybe that's not healthy? Can you explain, maybe, the difference between a family that's got close relationships and a family that's enmeshed and it's not not so healthy? What, what would you say there? Yeah, so where should I start with that? With the healthy, quote-unquote family? Okay, so that tends to look like um, everybody has their own sense of self. There's closeness in the relationship where you know, there is that feeling of safety, there is that feeling of being able to just be your authentic self Conflict is dealt with through having, you know, healthy communication.

Dr Liz White 12:42

Things are talked through Around emotions. People openly talk about emotions. They talk about how they feel. They are supportive of one another. They recognize their need for space when other people need their space. They recognize their own identity and that the people in their family also have their own identity at the same time and it just works cohesively, as you know. It's supportive, it feels safe, it feels easy in a lot of ways, okay.

Dr Liz White 13:10

And then the flip side, so a family that feels like close but actually they're enmeshed, so a lot of enmeshment is around like the emotional boundaries and so almost like when, when one person is angry, they're kind of projecting all of that anger onto everybody in the family and it's almost like if, if I'm unhappy, we're all unhappy. Yeah, there tends to be like a lot of white people pleasing just a lot of things where they're just very toxic behaviors in the family. Things are not spoken about openly. Yeah, there's, you know, we don't talk about that or there's a lot of chaos in the family as well. There's all types of like dysfunctional patterns that can come as a result of like not boundary setting and recognizing that. You know, this is me and this is my part in the family dynamic. Yeah, and I was gonna add to that that, over the years, what I've often come across are adult children who feel very, very, very responsible for their parents or parents, and maybe they maybe they still live at home, but not all the time um but feel like they need to look after their parents, which is difficult when, obviously, your parents are getting older and they may need particular aspects of care.

Dr Liz White 14:28

But I think in an enmeshed sort of situation, that weight of responsibility is so, so heavy. Have you come across that? Yeah, I have. I have definitely in families.

Dr Liz White 14:39

Another thing that I tend to see as well is, um, adults almost living their lives through what they feel their families want or their parents want, based off of, you know, whether it's like cultural or, you know, all of these kind of expectations they might put on themselves, they might go into a certain career path even, and just general life choices, because they are worried about the opinions of their parents. So to me, that also shows that there's a lot of enmeshment there, because you haven't been able to have your own identity, you haven't been able to make your own choices and your own decisions just based off of what your own values are, and sometimes people tend to. I see that a lot of the time they almost base their value system on their family's values rather than thinking about well, what are my values? What feels right to me? Do I agree with this? Does this feel good for me?

Cutting Off Toxic Relationships

Dr Liz White 15:33

Yeah, and a more healthy dynamic is one where you, you know you can have your family values alongside your own individual values and that that that is accepted by parents or by the family as a whole. You know, rather than there being a sense of you can't do it your own way, you have to do it in a particular, you have to live your life in a particular way that is aligned to our values. And yeah, that can be really really tough, especially if you are, as an adult child, getting older and older, and the further you get into a career that you don't really want to do, it becomes much harder, doesn't it, to start again or to to live a life that that you actually want. So it can cause lots of problems from a mental health point of view. Yeah, I see a lot of that, you know, once it gets to I don't know, maybe 30s, 40s, and they're kind of realizing well, actually, I've spent a lot of my life meeting the expectations of everybody else and I haven't even thought about what do I want for my life? For me, yeah, and the other thing that tends to come up on social media or even just you know, you just google toxic relationships. What comes up is the experience of cutting family members off or cutting friends off. Yeah, if they are deemed to be toxic and I use that term to describe where there's a very difficult relationship or perhaps the person is displaying narcissistic tendencies. That's quite common, isn't it?

Dr Liz White 17:06

So what's your take on this idea of cutting people out or cutting people off? Do you think that's always the right move or do you think there are alternatives? I'm all for healthy relationships, so my first port of call is to look at well, how do you manage the relationship? Is it possible to manage the relationship? So my first thing is never to go immediately to cut them off. I understand where that might be appropriate when there is, you know, severe abuse involved, yeah, and it's a case of, you know, safety and harm, but I think it's it's a very can be a very westernized approach to just automatically go to. Let's just, you know individualism. We don't need anyone cut them off, we don't need to resolve conflicts and actually a really healthy part of relationships is to is to know how to manage healthy conflict. Yeah, I think it's a contentious issue, isn't it? Because it's very individual and certainly when I've had these kind of conversations in therapy with clients, or when clients have sort of brought up this idea of cutting someone off, there is you.

Practical Steps to Set Boundaries

Dr Liz White 18:19

Well, I'd say, 100% of the time, there is a long, long history of that relationship in terms of how that's been experienced and the difficulties that that person has experienced with that person in that relationship. And it's not a decision that people take lightly and often people have spent years and years and years trying to have a good or healthy relationship with that person and unfortunately, because you can't control what other people do or say, it's very difficult and there's a lot of pain or there can be a lot of pain, a lot of hurt and even I think, even if you have cut someone off, there's still pain and hurt isn't there? Because it's not just that you cut someone off and then it's done, especially if they're your, if it's a family member. It's so complex it is. It really is, because sometimes you're not just cutting off that one relationship. You could be cutting yourself off from an entire community, yeah, and so, even though it might feel like it's the right thing for you to do that, there is so much grief that can come out of going through that process and it's it's. It's not an easy thing to go through at all.

Dr Liz White 19:32

No, no, so someone that's listening is who is wondering how do I have better boundaries in my relationships with people? So where would be a good starting point for someone if they're thinking that I like to start with people getting to understand what their own values are, yeah, and understanding about what they think or what feels important to them. That can come through, like their belief systems, or it could even be even just as simple as the kind of traits that they want from their relationship. So, you know, do they value like trust, for example, in their relationships? Do they value honesty? Do they value integrity, do whatever? That is because it's different for everybody and I don't think there is a blanket for everyone, which I think is why boundaries feel like such a big subject and it's so tricky, because it's so nuanced, and what is one boundary for one person isn't necessarily a boundary for another person. So I think, if you connect with what your own personal values are, that's a really good place to start from. And then, if you have identified a handful of values or a couple of values, what? What can a person do next like? How does that translate into setting healthier boundaries? What might, what might, what advice might you give to someone there? I think it's a case of thinking about what they want from their relationships and considering what their needs are in relationships and what it takes for them to feel like they can be in connection in their relationships as well.

Dr Liz White 21:49

It can be difficult, can't it, if one of your values is connection with others, but you're? You find that people just walk all over you or you engage in the sort of people pleasing behaviors and the people around you are therefore used to that. It can be very difficult, can't it, to start changing those behavior patterns, to start not people pleasing, you know, to stop always being the person that messages or phones or makes arrangements. If you stop doing that, the often an anxiety that can come up for people is. Well, if I stop doing that, then nobody will invite me out or nobody will contact me, or I'll be all alone, and I think it's. It is about testing things out, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I always recommend to my clients is to there's going to be people in your life where it's difficult to set boundaries, and those are the people that it might be a little bit more challenging because of you know whether they might have maybe narcissistic traits or maybe they're just emotionally unavailable.

Dr Liz White 22:59

The best place to start is in your safer relationships, while you're practicing and you're getting used to it, because it's you know, you have to learn a certain level of being assertive and if you're not used to that, that can be really difficult. But when you practice that in your safer relationships and people are, they respond well to it and you realize, oh, actually me, just me just asking for something or me saying something that I'm not happy with. It's not the end of the world and nothing bad happened. The other person received it. Well, and I perhaps I kind of thought it would be this really big thing and I've realized that actually they've just accepted it. Yeah, and I've, I've spent all this time overthinking about it and worrying about it and it it wasn't even a thought for them. Yeah, building that confidence, isn't it in doing something different and learning and experiencing.

Dr Liz White 23:55

As you say, the world doesn't end and actually the relationship can withstand that shift, although, having said that, there are some relationships that where that's much more tricky in terms of you know that the other person might not respond in a positive way or pushes back and says well, why aren't you doing xyz? And what would you say to someone who was having that experience? I think sometimes it helps to connect to your why, like why you were trying to set this boundary with this person. A lot of the time, when we're trying to set boundaries, it's not because we're trying to be difficult or that we're trying to push them away. If anything, we're trying to have a better relationship with them. We're trying to have an element of closeness with them and we're trying to show that in order to do that. These are the ways that we can have a good relationship. This is how, how I want to be treated, this is how you know. This is how the relationship can function well and we we make that effort with people because we care and because we want to have them in our lives, not because we want to be difficult. Yeah, and so we.

Dr Liz White 25:03

We touched on trauma childhood trauma we haven't gone into too much depth and maybe that's that'll be another podcast episode because it's a massive subject. Yeah, but maybe someone who is, who knows that they've experienced a childhood that was actually really difficult and they recognize that their boundaries aren't great because of that and there is that sort of trauma background what might be a first small step for someone in that situation, if they're really recognizing I'm I'm really in the thick of this and I can't I feel like I can't change any of this what might be something to that. Someone could sort of go away with one time that can just be whiting down different boundaries and sometimes I've separated that into categories. So, for example, like time boundaries, yeah, what, what might their boundaries be around time and what might their boundaries be around work? And so, yeah, just trying to find the smaller things. And so when I'm talking about time boundaries, it might be that you know it makes you anxious if you're running late for something and so obviously being on time that's something that's important to you.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dr Liz White 26:18

It could also relate to you know how much time you're spending at work, if you're you know, because what I tend to find is that if you have problems with boundaries and relationships. You've probably got issues with boundaries in lots of different areas, yeah, and the areas that you can control are the ways that you're showing up and so, for example, at work, it might be that you're you know you're over giving at work, you're answering emails late into the night. You know you're responding to things on the weekend. You're you know you're over giving at work, you're answering emails late into the night. You know you're responding to things on the weekend, you're overworking, and so those are the things that you can have more control over, and so when you are coming from it from that perspective, you're kind of looking at the part that you play in the things that you can do, rather than relying on somebody else understanding your boundaries and having to constantly reinforce those boundaries and trying, try and work through those relationship dynamics.

Dr Liz White 27:09

Yeah, and I like that because it's, yeah, sort of simple well, seemingly simple, I think for someone who who struggles this, it's not simple. And even, yeah, sort of not responding to emails at the weekend could be a really big thing for someone. And I think it can be a big thing for someone because there can be so much fear around the consequences and the repercussions, especially if you have a childhood experience of there being very negative consequences if you step out of line or whatever it was. Um, you know there's a repeated experience of being punished or reprimanded and so you are going to expect that, aren't you in your adult relationships? So, you know, you might think you might expect your boss to to fire you. You know that sort of catastrophizing.

Dr Liz White 28:08

So, yes, I think it's sort of trying to identify the absolute smallest thing that you can just try, just like dipping your toe in and then taking it from there, isn't it? Yeah? Yeah, the things that don't have massive consequences for you and, you know, just building up your, your tolerance to sit with the discomfort of that, because it will be uncomfortable initially, yeah, and, but with practice it's one of those things that does get better, but it's as hard as it is. It is one of those things that get best, that gets better with practice. Yeah, absolutely well, thank you so much for coming to talk to me about boundaries today. Absolutely pleasure.

Dr Liz White 28:49

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of hello therapy. We'd love for you to join our growing community over on substack. You can sign up for free or become a paid subscriber for access to exclusive perks like never before seen video interviews and downloadable guides designed to support your mental health. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe so you never miss a new release, and if you got value from this episode, it would mean the world if you left a five star review. As always, check the show notes for my full disclaimer. Thanks again for listening.