You Understand Boundaries - So Why Do You Continually Back Pedal on Your Own?
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You’re overwhelmed. You’re dying for help, but afraid to ask for it. And yet, you say yes every time someone asks you for something, only to deeply regret it later when your nervous system is fried the fuck out.
You’ve read all the bestselling books and listened to all the podcasts on boundaries. Why can’t you shake these patterns?
In this blog, I’m going to share why you keep saying yes even though your body is screaming-crying no, how being mixed influences these habits, and how you can finally get more comfortable expressing your feelings, needs, and boundaries so that you can build fulfilling relationships without burning out.
Your Nervous System is Wired for Connection
Connection and belonging are basic human needs. We have survived – and thrived – as a species because of our evolutionary tendency toward collaboration.
This starts at birth. As infants, we are fully reliant on our caregivers for safety and getting our needs met, from food to our emotional needs. In many ways, when we are infants, our caregivers' nervous system is a surrogate nervous system for us, because we have to learn how to understand and manage our emotions.
For many years, science understood the nervous system as having two primary functions:
Up-regulation: the sympathetic nervous system is what helps our bodies to generate energy, whether for the purpose of play or protection (e.g. fight-or-flight mode).
Down-regulation: the parasympthetic nervous system helps our bodies slow down, whether to rest and digest food, or shut down to a more extreme level to keep only the basic organs functioning as a way to conserve energy or feign dead to a lurking tiger.
But more recent research has helped us understand that the nervous system is actually much more complex than that. Part of that complexity includes how the parasympathetic nervous system is designed to help us find safety through connection.
According to the polyvagal theory of the nervous system, the parasympathetic system has two nerve pathways – one being the vagus nerve, which uses connection to modulate the nervous system and communicate to the body that because we are not alone, we are more safe from the dangers of the world.
This pathway is primed for connection, starting at birth, as our nervous systems build the capacity to self-regulate our emotions and physiology. As we age, that pattern continues. While we are no longer fully reliant on other people to meet our basic needs, our health and wellbeing fares far better when we feel connected and supported.
Because of this, the nervous system never stops looking for connection. And if you struggle to feel adequately connected, it will continue to look for it, even at the expense of your own dignity and sanity. This means that even though you might intellectually understand boundaries, actually setting them is scary, because it might mean that you’ll lose the relationship.
This is a really common fear for people who had to earn belonging, whether in your family unit, your school, your community, or elsewhere.
Why Mixed Race People Struggle in Relationships
Connection is a complex topic when it comes to multiraciality. Many mixed race people report a lack of belonging, even within their families and closest relationships. There are at least three themes I see emerge in my work with biracial and multiracial clients.
Mirroring from Caregivers
As infants and children, monoracial parents are not always able to provide the mirroring necessary to help multiracial children make sense of their experiences.
Mirroring is when a parent or caregiver reflects back a child’s emotions, facial expressions, thoughts, or behaviors so that the child feels validated and understood.
Even the best parents can be empathetic, yet unable to effectively support mixed race children due to lack of experience and education.
And of course, the reality of living in a world dealing with the ongoing impacts of colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism means that other parents can be emotionally stunted due to their own traumas or lack of time, energy, and resources to effectively parent.
Psychological Safety and Belonging
Another reason multiracial people struggle is the lack of acceptance offered in broader community settings. You may have been the only mixed race person in your school or at your church. You might have experienced monoracist microaggressions from your peers. All of this communicated to you that you were different and that you didn’t quite fit in.
Secure Connection to Culture
As a multiracial person, you may not feel entitled to claim certain cultural lineages or practice certain traditions. This can often be compounded by your parents' personal relationships to culture, which may be fraught due to assimilation into whiteness, forced displacement as a result of slavery or war, and so on.
The Belonging Wound
These experiences shape what I call the Mixed Race Belonging Wound. The belonging wound captures the way we have internalized these experiences, what they mean about who we are and where we belong, and the subsequent ways our bodies adapt to protect ourselves or gain connection.
The belonging wound manifests in a few different ways. You might tend toward more avoidant behaviors, having given up on feeling seen or finding belonging. On the other hand, you might be driven by more anxious behaviors that cause you to people please so that you are liked. Finally, you may use different strategies depending on the circumstance or relationship.
If you’re someone who tends to struggle expressing your needs or saying no when requests are made, you likely lean toward the anxious end of the spectrum, constantly pursuing connection or preserving your existing relationships even when that means abandoning yourself.
How the Mixed Race Belonging Wound Has Helped You…and How It’s Hurting You
Importantly, this belonging wound is not a flaw – it’s an adaptation based on all your previous experiences in relationships, especially the early ones with your family and community.
As a mixed race person you’ve spent your whole life reading the room, sussing out what people think of you, and giving others what they want. This vigilance is armor that your body has used to feel safe, and protect yourself from rejection, misunderstandings, and microaggressions.
As a result, you’ve learned to earn belonging by being agreeable, helpful, or invisible, and to be honest, this has come in really handy in certain contexts, like in your career, where you’ve gracefully shape-shifted and code-switched in order to advance.
But in your closest relationships, you actually just feel tremendously alone. You might have a lot of relationships or otherwise feel connected, but that relies on how consistent and responsible you are for other people’s needs and feelings. At the end of the day, you don’t really feel seen by anyone, or safe taking up space in your relationships.
You might feel like you’ve figured out the whole mixed identity thing, but those deeper patterns designed to help you feel a sense of belonging are still lingering, making intimacy impossible.
How to Build Relationships Where You Actually Feel Seen and Held
You’re actually great at relationships. You’re a social chameleon, naturally attuned to the needs and interests of others. But if you actually want to feel seen and held in your relationships, you have to start being more honest about what you actually feel, want, and need. You need to feel more comfortable saying “NO,” or even, “not right now,” or, “yes, but.”
And in order to do that, you need self-trust and strong communication skills to express your feelings, needs, and boundaries without abandoning yourself to preserve the relationship.
The self-trust part is important here because you can know everything about boundaries, have all the boundary scripts, all the self-regulation skills, and still question whether you can really do what you know you need to do, say what you know you need to say, when it comes down to it.
How Somatic Coaching Can Help
That’s why I created Bold Belonging, a four-month coaching experience for mixed race people who feel a lack of belonging in their families that helps you build an intentional support circle of at least 3 chosen family in 16 weeks - even if you’re afraid you’re “not enough” or “too much.”
The Bold Belonging approach to clear communication encompasses four key pillars:
Somatic Self-Trust: Approach every conversation and recover from every conflict with energy that says ‘I got this’.
Doubtless Decisions: Assess your needs and make relationship decisions without asking everyone around you for validation.
Balanced Boundaries: Communicate limits clearly without overexplaining, disappearing, or cutting people off unnecessarily.
Courageous Care: Ask for support, receive care, and build relationships where your needs are allowed to matter too.
By the end of the first month, you'll be prepared to have your first honest conversation.
Imagine saying, “that doesn’t work for me,” without rewriting the message six times.
Imagine asking for help without feeling like a burden for needing it.
This is what’s possible – and more – when we work together. I’m currently accepting new clients for Bold Belonging, but space is limited.
Book your free call and let’s talk about how Bold Belonging can help you express what you feel, need, and want – without spending the next three days questioning whether you said too much – so you can keep building toward relationships where you can actually show up as your full self, complexity and all.
