Healthy Boundaries for Real Intimacy: How to Stay Protected and Connected in Your Relationships
- Keith York LMFT
- Dec 1, 2025
- 4 min read
Learn the therapist-backed skills to build healthy boundaries, break old patterns, and finally create the intimate, connected relationships you’ve been longing for.
By Keith York, LMFT Couples Therapist in Orinda, CA
Here’s a bitter fact:
You will never experience true intimacy without healthy boundaries.
Reread that last sentence.
That’s how important boundaries are for healthy, human connection.
One last painful fact: most of us never learned what a healthy boundary is, because children don’t have boundaries - they’re supposed to learn them from their parents.
And unless you were lucky enough to have emotionally healthy parents, you missed out.
Most of us missed out.
Over and over I have one or both members of a couple sitting in my office telling me: “My therapist says I need to have better boundaries… but I don’t even know what that means.”
You will never experience true intimacy without healthy boundaries.
Let me put that more plainly:
If you are too open, too porous, too thin-skinned, you will be reactive, controlling, dependent, or retaliatory.
You will not be capable of healthy intimacy.
And on the other side:
If your boundaries are too firm—if you’re behind walls—you may be protected, but you are not connected. Many of us know that position well: “Talk to the hand ’cause the face don’t give a damn.”
Boundaries are your skin.
Self-esteem is your skeleton.
Health is in the middle.
Self-Esteem: The Circle of Health
At East Bay Relational Recovery we talk about the “circle of health,” the place between the one-down of shame (“I’m worthless, defective, unlovable”) and the one-up of grandiosity (“I’m superior, above the rules, contemptuous of others”).
Most therapy focuses on bringing people up from shame. We also bring people down from grandiosity.
You cannot be intimate from either extreme.
Real self-esteem is an inside job.
It is your natural birthright.
It cannot be earned, and it cannot be lost.
Your worth is no more—and no less—than anyone else’s.
Boundaries build on that foundation.
Healthy Boundaries: Protected and Connected
Healthy boundaries allow you to be protected and connected at the same time.
Disordered boundaries go two ways:
Too little → Boundaryless, porous, overly open. Connected but not protected.
Someone says, “You’re fat,” and you go on a diet. Someone says, “You’re not funny,” and you stop telling jokes. Every stimulus lands straight in your chest.
Too much → Walled off. Protected but not connected.
You’re in the fortress. No one gets in, including the people you love.
When we’re grounded—what we call the Wise Adult, the prefrontal cortex, is in charge—we can hold the balance.
Conversely, when we’re triggered, flooded, or in the emotional brain, we lose that balance and default to one side or the other.
Take a moment to check in:
When you get flooded in a heated moment with your spouse, when you’re off your game, do you tend toward porousness—or walls?
Boundaryless or walled-off?
How do you become inaccessible to your partner? How do you protect yourself and painfully cut yourself off from intimacy and connection?
Boundaries vs. Limits: Don’t Confuse Them
Most people use these words interchangeably, but relationally, they aren’t the same.
Boundaries are internal.
Psychological. Private. Inside you.
Limits are interpersonal.
They involve saying no to someone else.
You don’t “set a boundary” with your mother-in-law. You set a limit.
And limits are good. Saying no is good. It protects you, your partner, and your relationship.
Standing up for yourself is a gift to the ecosystem of a relationship.
In Relational Recovery groups, couples, and individual counseling, our very first rule is the “pass rule”: you can say no. And the therapist’s response is always “Thank you.”
Because protecting the biosphere of the relationship system is relational wisdom.
Relationships Are Ecosystems: Welcome to Ecological Wisdom
You and your partner are linked.
You are in the system together.
You cannot rise above it and control it. That’s the patriarchal delusion of control.
Whether control looks like commanding (“Sit down, shut up, do what I tell you”) or like managing and appeasing (“codependence”), it is still control.
Ecological wisdom says:
You are part of the biosphere.
Keep it healthy.
And here’s ecology at work:
If one of you wins and the other loses, you both lose.
Not because we’re idealists—but because the loser will make the winner pay.
Inch by inch of over-accommodation becomes resentment, and resentment is the death of generosity.
Overextending yourself is not loving.
It is not generous.
It is a setup.
Responsible Distance-Taking (a.k.a. Limits Done Well)
Intimacy requires healthy closeness and healthy distance. Saying no is a form of distance-taking.
But there are two ways to take distance:
Unilateral, provocative distance
Storming out, shutting down, creating a rupture.
Responsible distance
No.
Here’s why.
Here’s when I’ll be back.
“No, I don’t want to make love. I’m overwhelmed. I need 30 minutes to reset. I’ll check back in with you.”
This is how you create a break, not a rupture—and how you avoid being chased by a panicked partner.
If you want distance, take it skillfully. Make it safe for your partner to let you go.
The External Boundary
And finally, a word about your physical boundary: your body, your space, your privacy. You decide how close people stand, how they touch you, or who gets access to your drawers, your phone, or your conversations.
Simple.
Basic.
Non-negotiable.
Step Into Relational Living
If what you’ve read here resonates—if you recognize the porousness, the walls, the codependence, the resentment, or the aching desire to do relationships differently—then let today be the day you take one step toward living relationally.
Join us at East Bay Relational Recovery
Call or email us today for information or to set up an initial appointment.
You don’t have to keep reenacting the patterns you inherited.
You can learn the skills you were never taught.
You can build boundaries that protect you and connect you.
Take the next step. Your relationships—and your life—are waiting.
Written by Keith York, LMFT, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Orinda, California, serving Orinda, Lafayette, Moraga, and the greater east bay area of San Francisco. Keith specializes in couples therapy with a focus in Gottman Method Therapy and Relational Life Therapy.
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