Boundaries, Avoidance & the Art of Not Deleting Everyone Who Disagrees With You

We’ve learned a new language and we’re drunk on it. Protect your peace. Cut the cord. Love and goodbye. It sounds like therapy. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s just avoidance in disguise.

As a therapist I love boundaries. I teach them daily. They are oxygen for relationships, the quiet architecture that lets two people breathe in the same room without disappearing. But I’ve also watched the word get hijacked to justify something far less brave: removing anyone who reflects a reality we don’t like. That isn’t protection. That’s a curated echo chamber. An echo chamber feels like safety until you realise even Epstein had dinner guests who called it ‘just networking.’”

The difference most people miss is simple. Boundaries don’t usually end relationships they change how we stay in them. Avoidance ends relationships because staying would require hearing impact without collapsing, tolerating being wrong, letting two truths exist at once, feeling small and not running. One is adult work. The other is an exit strategy. And from the outside they can look identical, especially once they’ve been filtered through inspirational social media stories.

A real boundary sounds like: I need us to talk about what happened. Avoidance sounds more like a quiet rebrand and a disappearing act. A boundary says: I can care about you and still disagree.

Avoidance translates disagreement into disrespect and files the person under “lesson.”

A boundary says: This relationship needs a new shape. A boundary takes space to regulate before repair; avoidance calls the nervous system a spiritual authority and issues a lifetime ban.

Avoidance shrinks the circle until we mistake followers for friends.

Here’s what I’ve learned in rooms with real humans.

Boundaries book in conversations, avoidance books the next flight. One says, This feels uncomfortable I’ll stay and talk. The other says, This feels uncomfortable I’ll reinvent myself somewhere with better lighting.

If your version of healing requires deleting anyone who remembers the plot, turning feedback into evidence of betrayal, and reframing every rupture as proof you’re evolved, that isn’t inner work. It’s emotional ego protection.

Of course there are moments when a boundary truly is necessary. When dignity is being truly eroded. When repair has been attempted rather than fantasised about in the shower. Real boundaries hold complexity: I care about you and this can’t continue like this.

Avoidance in disguise feels different. Discomfort gets translated into moral verdicts. Conflict becomes “unsafe.” History is rewritten to keep one person innocent and the other cast as toxic. The common denominator in every rupture quietly becomes… everyone else. If your world only gets smaller, not healthier, something isn’t being protected, it’s being defended.

From a psychotherapy lens, I see this all the time. The Child part hears: You’re wrong → you’re not loved → leave before you’re left. The Adult then invents a philosophy to justify what the nervous system already decided. Distance calms the body, but it doesn’t always heal the story. Healing would ask something braver: stay long enough to feel the heat, let someone matter and still challenge you, learn that disagreement doesn’t erase belonging. None of that fits neatly into a carousel slide.

We live in a culture that confuses serenity with silence and safety with sameness. It tells us that anyone who disrupts our internal narrative is a threat to our peace. But relationships are where we grow the muscle of self. If every rupture ends in exile, we never learn how to repair, how to be wrong, how to be seen as imperfect and remain loved.

So the quiet test is this: am I leaving to protect my values, or to avoid feeling pain? Am I choosing me and people, or just choosing a cleaner storyline? Am I setting a boundary, or auditioning for a life where no one ever questions me?

Authenticity isn’t measured by how many people you cut out. It’s measured by how much reality you can stay present for. Boundaries widen a life. Avoidance edits the cast. And one of those paths builds intimacy, while the other just builds content.