When Loving Someone Is Hurting You — Lysa TerKeurst's Good Boundaries and Goodbyes

Your phone buzzes on the counter. You see the name before you see the message, and your stomach tightens before you've even read a word. You set it face-down and keep chopping vegetables, telling yourself you'll deal with it later.

Later never really comes, though — not the honest kind. What comes instead is a familiar rehearsal in your head: how to respond so they won't get upset, how to phrase it so nothing escalates, how to keep the peace even though there hasn't been real peace in this relationship for a long time. You've gotten so good at managing someone else's reactions that you've lost track of your own. You tell people you're "fine." You are tired in a way sleep doesn't touch.

Setting a boundary in relationships often starts in ordinary moments like this one, long before any hard conversation happens.

Lysa TerKeurst spent years living inside that exact exhaustion. For most of her adult life, she operated on an unspoken rule — one she'd absorbed from church culture as much as anywhere else — that loving someone well meant absorbing whatever they gave you. Forgiveness, she believed, meant re-opening the door every single time, regardless of whether anything had actually changed on the other side of it. She kept score of her own failures to be patient enough, generous enough, understanding enough. She rarely asked whether the relationship itself was safe.

What broke that pattern wasn't a single dramatic moment. It was a slow accumulation of relationships — some with extended family, some with people close enough to know exactly where it would hurt most — that kept costing her the same parts of herself over and over. She started noticing a pattern in her own body: dread before phone calls, relief when plans got cancelled, a kind of low-grade grief she couldn't name because she hadn't been taught the language for it.

What shifted for her wasn't a decision to stop loving people. It was learning to separate loving someone from giving them unlimited access to her heart, her time, her peace. She began asking a different question before every difficult interaction — not "how do I keep this person happy" but "what does it actually look like to love this person well, including myself in that equation." Some relationships changed shape. A few she had to let go of entirely, not out of bitterness, but because staying open to ongoing harm wasn't love — it was just depletion wearing love's clothing.

Many readers describe their own boundary-setting starting quietly, in private reflection, long before it shows up in any conversation.

TerKeurst's central idea is disarmingly practical: boundaries aren't the opposite of Christian love — they're what makes sustainable love possible in the first place. As she puts it,

"Boundaries aren't just a good idea, they are a God idea."
— Lysa TerKeurst, Good Boundaries and Goodbyes (Goodreads)

That single sentence undoes a lot of quiet guilt for readers who've been taught that a good Christian never says no. What would change in your closest relationships if you believed a boundary could be an act of love rather than a failure of it?

I've spent more hours than I'd like to admit rehearsing conversations I never had, hoping the discomfort would just resolve itself if I stayed patient enough. It didn't. What finally moved me wasn't courage — it was running out of the energy it takes to keep pretending everything was fine.

Structurally, Good Boundaries and Goodbyes reads less like a theology text and more like a conversation with someone who's been exactly where you are, walking chapter by chapter from naming the problem to actually building the skill of drawing a line. What it keeps circling back to is that healthy relationships don't feel like walking on eggshells — that without real trust, no amount of good intentions on your part can manufacture safety for both people, and that TerKeurst treats trust as something almost as essential to a relationship as breath itself. She's careful to distinguish forgiveness from reconciliation, and reconciliation from unlimited access, which gives readers permission to hold all three separately instead of assuming they're the same obligation. TerKeurst draws heavily from her own painful season of family and marital rupture, alongside Scripture and pastoral counseling insight, rather than abstract relational theory. This tends to land hardest with readers who've spent years being the one who accommodates — the peacemaker, the fixer, the one everyone assumes can absorb one more thing.

What surprised me, reading it, was how little the book asked me to become someone harder or colder. It kept asking the opposite — to become someone honest enough to say what's actually true, even when true is uncomfortable.

If you've been carrying a relationship that costs you more than it gives back, Good Boundaries and Goodbyes is worth sitting with.

If you're curious, you can find it here: Good Boundaries and Goodbyes.(Affiliate Link)

Is Good Boundaries and Goodbyes a good book for Christians?

Yes — I'd say it's especially good for Christians who've felt guilty for even considering a boundary. TerKeurst roots everything in Scripture and pastoral experience rather than secular self-help language, which made it easier for me to trust.

Does this book tell you to cut people off?

Not exactly. It's much more careful than that. Most of the book is about learning what appropriate access looks like in different relationships — goodbye is presented as a last option, not a first instinct.

How is this different from Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend?

Cloud and Townsend's book is more foundational and instructional. TerKeurst's is more personal and narrative — she's writing from inside her own painful relationships, which made it feel less like a manual and more like a companion.

What if the person I need boundaries with is family?

That's actually a lot of what TerKeurst writes about directly. She doesn't pretend family boundaries are simple, but she's honest that blood relation doesn't automatically grant unlimited access to your life.

Can setting boundaries actually be biblical?

I used to wonder that myself. TerKeurst makes a compelling case that Jesus himself modeled boundaries — withdrawing, saying no, not explaining himself to everyone who demanded it — which reframed the whole idea for me.

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