Emotional Boundaries After Trauma: A Conversation with Karlee Holden

Written by Roland Bal

Karlee Holden and I explore emotional boundaries related to having dealt with an abusive childhood. We look at what makes it so difficult to set emotional boundaries when there has been a lack of validation, and how neglect and a lack of boundaries in childhood shapes the way we relate to ourselves and others as adults.

Karlee trained in Somatic Experiencing, Psychology, NLP, and Acting. You can find her work at peaceoutstress.com.

How Anger Becomes Boundaries

One of the main symptoms of not having boundaries is anxiety and depression — both widespread, and both often a symptom of not having been able to deal with repressed anger. Anger, in its healthy form, is the energy that allows you to set boundaries. It does not stay as anger. It channels itself into willpower, healthy limits, and motivation.

But when that anger is not owned or expressed constructively, it overflows. You might act it out through fault-finding, criticising, blaming, or self-righteousness. The energy is there, but it has no container. Or it turns inward — "I'm not good enough," "I'm so stupid," "Why did I do that" — and eats away at your sense of self. Either way, the anger is never resolved or used constructively as boundaries. It just keeps feeding on itself.

Why Boundaries Are So Hard After Childhood Abuse

When I work with people who have experienced severe or prolonged childhood abuse, I have to be very careful when I start addressing boundaries. There is very often a deeper need underneath the inability to set them — the need to feel loved, to feel validated, to feel accepted. That need overrides the ability to set boundaries. It is why the pleasing response was chosen in the first place.

So once you start to work with anger and boundaries, you are bringing someone into a dangerous zone — the same dangerous zone. If I set a boundary, this person might not accept me or love me or might reject me again. And so the guilt comes in, and the boundary does not get set. You have to address those deeper parts before the boundaries can hold.

When you own your part, you immediately become better for yourself, everyone around you, and everything begins to flow.

Starting with the Body

I often start with very simple somatic exercises. Can you cross your arms and see if that contains your energy field a bit more? Close your eyes and see how that feels — does it bring up stress or relaxation? That gives a bodily, felt sense of what boundaries are before we even use words.

Then, bit by bit, you take the pressure up. Can you put a hand in front of you and feel how you are protecting your own space? Can you connect with that? Does fear come in? Is it manageable? Can you play with the distance? And once there is a bit more containment, you can even work with a person who has crossed your boundaries — say stop, or I don't want you to come closer. Each step tracks whether there is containment or collapse, and if there is collapse, you work on containment first.

Walking Away Is Also a Boundary

There are situations where you simply cannot act, where the other person does not want to hear it. The act that you can do is to remove yourself from an abusive environment. Walking away is a boundary. And sometimes it is the most powerful one available.

What follows is often grief. If that person does not change and respect your boundaries, you grow apart, and that can feel like a loss. The attachment is real, even if the dynamic was not healthy. You have to let yourself feel that grief, and then it reprogrammes — the connection was not healthy, it was a form of love that came with a cost, and you now have the choice to find connection where you are respected and treated in a way that works for you.

The Known vs the Unknown

The dilemma is that the known — even if it is abusive, painful, and full of suffering — has a certain safety to it. Once you start to address those pain bonds and speak out your boundaries, people might fall away. You might have to change relationships, change jobs, change where you live. You are moving into the unknown, and you are dealing with your emotional baggage of the past at the same time.

It is a shaky and upsetting period. But it gets easier once you have gone through it a few times. You start to trust yourself more. The first time is the hardest — it feels like a tornado, and you feel you are all alone and nobody understands. But each time you honour yourself and set a limit, and the world does not end, resilience builds. And you begin to see that boundaries are not walls. They are the foundation that makes genuine connection possible.