Therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab built a career on one distinction most people never learn to make: the difference between what you’re obligated to do for family and what you’ve simply always done. Her book Set Boundaries, Find Peace spent months on bestseller lists, and in the excerpt Tawwab published through Penguin Random House, she defines a boundary plainly: “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.” The root of self-care, she writes, is setting them, not avoiding conflict, not being nicer, but stating limits out loud and holding them.
Tawwab’s framework sorts boundary styles into three categories, and most people recognize themselves in at least one. Porous boundaries show up as oversharing, difficulty saying no, and a pattern of taking on other people’s problems until you’re depleted and anxious. Rigid boundaries look like the opposite, walls instead of limits, built to keep people out so thoroughly that vulnerability and closeness become impossible. Healthy boundaries sit between the two: they require knowing your own capacity, saying no without over-explaining, and accepting someone else’s no without treating it as rejection.
Why family boundaries are the hardest kind
In her excerpt, Tawwab traces boundary struggles directly back to the household you grew up in. “Family histories and personalities determine how we implement and accept boundaries,” she writes, and families that operate on unspoken rules, where needs are supposed to be intuited rather than stated, tend to raise adults who never learned to assert themselves in the first place. She points specifically to households shaped by addiction, where a parent’s condition can erode a child’s sense that their limits will be respected at all.
That history is exactly why boundaries with parents and in-laws feel different from boundaries with a coworker or a friend. On her Substack newsletter, Tawwab writes about an unspoken family contract, the assumption that kinship alone obligates you to a certain level of access, availability, or sacrifice. Her own words on the subject: the real work is “discerning the difference between what we’re obligated to do and what we choose to do.” That single sentence reframes most family conflict. Showing up to a holiday isn’t required because you’re related; it’s something you decide, and deciding against it isn’t a betrayal.
Her actual rules, in her own words
Tawwab’s published guidance breaks down into a short set of repeatable principles, drawn from her book and her own writing in Set Boundaries, Find Peace:
- State it, then act on it. Her book frames boundary-setting as two separate steps, first communicating the need verbally and directly, then following through with a concrete behavioral change if it isn’t respected. A boundary you never enforce isn’t a boundary.
- Clarity is your job, not theirs. As she puts it in Set Boundaries, Find Peace: “People don’t know what you want. It’s your job to make it clear. Clarity saves relationships.” Parents and in-laws are not expected to guess.
- A boundary is not a wall. Tawwab draws a sharp line between the two: “Boundaries are not walls. A wall keeps people out, while boundaries show people how to exist in a relationship with you.” The goal isn’t distance, it’s a workable way to stay close.
- Their reaction is information about them. “How they treat you is about who they are, not who you are,” she writes, a line meant to blunt the guilt that shows up when a parent responds to a limit with anger or silence.
- Expect discomfort, not consensus. Tawwab is direct that agreement isn’t the goal: “The hardest thing about implementing boundaries is accepting that some people won’t like, understand, or agree with yours.”
Tawwab also runs limited-enrollment courses built around this material, one, “Breaking the Family Pattern,” is described on her official site as tackling “the most difficult conversations you’ll ever have, those with family,” aimed specifically at the gap between understanding boundaries intellectually and actually holding one with a parent or sibling who’s used to a different arrangement. The existence of a whole course on the topic underscores her own point: knowing the rule and living it are two different skills.
What makes her framework useful isn’t novelty, therapists have talked about limits for decades. It’s the refusal to let boundary-setting become an excuse for cutting people off. Rigid walls and healthy boundaries produce very different outcomes, and Tawwab’s writing keeps returning to that middle path: state the need, expect some friction, and don’t mistake someone’s discomfort with your limit for proof that the limit was wrong. A boundary that never gets tested by pushback usually wasn’t a boundary, it was a preference nobody challenged yet.
