When Identity Work Makes Boundaries Harder

Identity work is often described as freeing. And over time, it can be. But for many people, the beginning stages feel anything but empowering. Instead, there’s confusion, grief, anxiety, and a quiet question that shows up in therapy again and again:

“Why do boundaries feel harder now that I understand myself better?”

That question isn’t a sign that identity work is failing. It’s often a sign that something foundational is shifting.

For people who grew up needing to adapt in order to stay safe, boundaries were never neutral. They carried consequences. Saying no might have meant conflict, withdrawal, punishment, or being labeled as difficult or ungrateful. In those environments, silence, compliance, or over-functioning weren’t personality traits, they were strategies. They worked because they kept relationships intact and reduced risk.

Identity work interrupts those strategies.

As people begin to name who they are, what they need, and what feels misaligned, the automatic behaviors that once kept them safe start to loosen. That can feel deeply destabilizing. Boundaries don’t immediately feel protective; they feel dangerous. From a nervous system perspective, this makes sense. Strategies that were reinforced over years don’t disappear simply because insight arrives. Letting go of them before new forms of safety are fully established often increases distress, not relief.

Another reason boundaries feel harder is that awareness tends to grow faster than capacity. As insight increases, people begin to notice where they’ve been minimizing themselves, tolerating harm, or staying quiet to preserve connection. That noticing can come with grief, anger, and a sense of loss. It can also activate fear, especially for people whose systems learned that asserting needs led to rejection or harm.

Research on trauma and chronic stress supports this pattern. Increased self-awareness and meaning-making can initially activate stress responses before regulation and integration catch up. This isn’t regression; it’s a predictable phase of change. Just because you can see the boundary doesn’t mean your system feels safe holding it yet.

For neurodivergent individuals, this phase can feel especially intense. Many neurodivergent people have spent years masking— adjusting communication, behavior, and needs to fit environments that weren’t built with them in mind. Masking is associated with increased burnout, delayed emotional processing, and heightened sensitivity to relational rupture. When identity work begins to reduce masking, boundaries can feel unfamiliar or even threatening. The nervous system hasn’t yet learned that safety can exist without constant adaptation.

This isn’t a lack of resilience. It’s the result of prolonged exposure.

It’s also important to name that distress during identity work does not mean identity work is harmful. For some people, this phase includes spikes in anxiety, emotional reactivity, intrusive thoughts, or passive suicidal ideation. These experiences deserve to be taken seriously without being pathologized. Research on minority stress and long-term invalidation consistently shows higher rates of mental health distress, not because people are weak, but because sustained stress changes how the nervous system responds to threat.

Awareness can feel unbearable when it arrives before support, containment, or permission to move slowly.

What actually helps during this phase isn’t more pressure to “set boundaries correctly” or to be confident about them. What helps is pace. Safety. Relational support. Spaces where boundaries don’t immediately require action, explanation, or defense. Therapy can be one of those spaces— not as a place to force change, but as a place to understand patterns, experiment with language, and build tolerance for discomfort without collapse.

Boundaries aren’t a moral achievement. They aren’t proof of healing. They’re a capacity that develops over time, often after survival strategies have been honored rather than shamed.

If boundaries feel harder after identity work, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It often means you’re unlearning survival. And unlearning takes time, context, and safety— not willpower.

References

• Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in minority populations.

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.

• Hatzenbuehler, M. L. (2009). How stigma “gets under the skin.”

• Cassidy, S. et al. (2018). Autistic traits and suicidal ideation.