The Boundaries We Hold For Ourselves

We talk a lot about the boundaries we hold toward our children. But there’s another kind — quieter, less visible, and often the first to collapse. This is about that one.

I want to start with a question.

Not about your child. Not about what’s happening in their life, or what they did or didn’t do this week.

How full is your cup right now?

I mean that genuinely. Because something came up recently in a conversation with some of the mums I work with — and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

One of them described living with a child in addiction and mental health crisis like this: it’s like having a cup with a constant drain in the bottom. A small leak, always running. No matter what you pour in — a walk, a weekend away, an evening with a friend — it’s running out the whole time. You have to keep pouring things in just to stop it hitting empty.

Another described it as a radio playing in the background at a certain volume. It never fully goes off. You can turn it down sometimes. But it’s always there.

The drain is always running. The noise is always there. And most of us are working so hard to manage what’s going on with our children that we’ve forgotten — or maybe never quite learned — how to manage what comes in to us.

That’s what I want to talk about today.

A Different Kind of Boundary

If you’ve spent any time thinking about boundaries in the context of loving someone who is struggling — with addiction, with mental health, with all of the chaos that can come with both — you’ve probably been focused on the boundaries you hold toward them. The ‘if you do this, I will do that’ kind.

But there’s another kind. And I think it’s the one that collapses first for most of us.

The boundary around what we let into our own inner world.

Think about what that actually includes.

The news we keep scrolling even when it winds us up. The late-night Googling about addiction, about bipolar, about medication, about outcomes — because we read one article once and now the algorithm has decided that’s all we want to see. The conversations we replay at midnight, looking for what we should have said differently. The friends who ask how our child is doing, and we feel obligated to give a full update — even when we went out specifically to have one evening where we weren’t thinking about it.

The standards we keep holding ourselves to — the hour-long workout, the gourmet meal, the perfect response — even when we’re running on almost nothing.

These are all places where a self-boundary has quietly dissolved. Not through weakness. Not through failure. Through depletion.

Of Course It Collapsed

Before we go any further, I want to say something.

Because I suspect some of you reading this are already doing the thing where you add this to the list of things you’re not managing well enough. Another area where you’re falling short. Another reason to feel like you should be further along than you are.

Please don’t.

Of course the self-boundaries have collapsed. Look at what you have been carrying.

The research on sustained stress is clear: when we are living under chronic pressure — the kind that doesn’t resolve, the kind where the drain is always running — our capacity to regulate, to protect ourselves, to make intentional choices genuinely diminishes. This isn’t a character flaw. It isn’t weak parenting. It is what prolonged stress does to a human nervous system.

In survival mode, the first things to go are almost always the ones we do for ourselves. Because they feel optional. Because everything else feels more urgent. Because love and fear and hypervigilance don’t leave a lot of room for much else.

If the self-boundaries have slipped — that is not evidence that you are failing. It is evidence that you have been under enormous pressure for a very long time.

What matters now is not that you didn’t protect yourself perfectly. What matters is what you choose next.

Why This Is Not Optional

I want to be clear about why self-boundaries matter here — and it isn’t just because you deserve more rest (though you do).

It’s because of something much more practical.

A question I come back to a lot in my work with mums is this: who do you want to be in this? Not what do you want your child to do, or how do you want this to end — but who do you want to be, how do you want to show up, during the hardest stretch of it?

When you’re overwhelmed — really overwhelmed — access to that question collapses.

You can’t find the steady version of yourself when your nervous system is flooded. You can’t make a values-led decision when your brain is in threat response.

The neuroscience is clear on this. Under sustained stress, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for intentional responding, for values-based decision-making, for choosing how we show up — goes offline. What takes over is pure survival mode. And from survival mode, we cannot access the mother we are trying to be.

The approach that underpins my work talks about influence coming from steadiness, connection, and clarity. Not from panic. Not from depletion. Not from resentment.

Protecting yourself is part of showing up for your child. Not instead of it. You cannot pour from empty — that’s not a motivational poster. That’s nervous system reality.

What Actually Works — From Inside It

Someone asked me recently what I actually do. Not what I know about. What I do.

I want to answer that honestly, because real is more useful than theory.

I don’t always get it right. I have had plenty of moments lately where I’m in the middle of it too — where the drain is running fast and the cup is lower than I’d like. My son struggles with addiction. This isn’t work I do from a place of having it solved. It’s work I do from inside it, same as you.

But I’ve noticed that what helps me falls into two very different places.

What I do in the moments.

When something hard is happening — when the phone goes, when the request comes, when I can feel myself starting to tip — I don’t have a technique. I have a question I come back to.

‘Who do I want to be right here, right now?’

And underneath that, something that functions as an anchor: remembering that how I respond has a ripple effect. To my husband. To my other children. To my grandson, who is with us full time, and who is watching how I move through hard things even when I think he isn’t.

That isn’t pressure for me. It’s steadying. It brings me back into myself. It reminds me that this moment is bigger than just this moment.

Alongside that: this too shall pass. Not as denial, not as pretending it’s fine — but as something I have come to genuinely trust from having been through enough hard stretches to know that the wave does eventually move through.

And something that took me a while to understand: the question works after, too. Not just during. There are times I’ve lost it. Said something I wish I hadn’t. What I’ve found is that coming back to the question afterwards — working through what happened, what the steadier version of me might have looked like — is not failure. That is the practice. That is repair. And it has always, eventually, moved me forward.

What I do outside the moments.

The in-the-moment work only holds if there’s something in the cup to begin with. And so the more important work, for me, is the ordinary, unglamorous stuff I protect in the background.

Not looking at my phone for the first part of the morning. Not working late at night — and I want to be honest here, because late-night work is my escape. It’s the thing I reach for when I don’t want to sit with what I’m feeling. It feels productive. It feels useful. But a lot of the time it’s avoidance with a better reputation. And I’m aware of that.

Sleep. Food that actually nourishes me. Getting up a little earlier to move before the day starts and takes over. Getting outside when I can — even briefly. Walking when my grandson is at soccer. Being organised enough that I’m not adding unnecessary friction to an already full day.

None of these are dramatic. None of them require a big announcement. They are small, quiet acts of keeping the cup from hitting empty.

And here’s what I want to say about all of them: they are self-boundaries. Decisions about what I protect and what I allow in. Holding them — even imperfectly, even partially — is what makes everything else possible.

The 20-minute walk that actually happens is worth infinitely more than the hour-long session that doesn’t. The boundary held gently and imperfectly is worth more than the one you plan to hold perfectly someday.

Where To From Here

I want to leave you with two questions. Not a long list.

First: where has a self-boundary quietly collapsed for you?

Not a boundary toward your child. But a boundary around you — around what you let in, around what you’re holding yourself to, around what you allow to take up space in your inner world.

Second: is there one small thing you could quietly reinstate?

Not perfectly. Not permanently. Just this week. One micro-thing. One small act of keeping the cup from hitting empty.

And if nothing comes — if you’re reading this from a place where even thinking about it feels like too much — then the only thing I want you to do is this.

Notice that. And be kind to yourself about it.

Because noticing is the beginning. And kindness is what makes it possible to keep going.

Showing up as the mother you want to be remembered as requires something left to give. Protecting that — even in the smallest ways, even imperfectly — is not selfish.

It is part of the work.