You Can Love Someone and Still Say No

What compassion and boundaries really mean — and why you need both

For years I suffered at the hands of an abusive father who drank too much. When he drank — and sometimes when he didn't — I had the distinct feeling that I was in his way. That he would have preferred life without me in it.

I lived in that environment until my teenage years, when I finally accepted that I would never receive the love I craved from him. That acceptance was a relief — but it opened a long season of mourning. Because to make peace with him not loving me, I had to make peace with the story I had built around it: that I was unlovable. Not worth understanding. Not worth caring for.

Decades later, after deep and difficult inner work, my perspective was transformed. And here is what I found on the other side of it.

When I look at my father through the lens of compassion, I no longer see only what he did. I see the context of his whole life. A man desperately wrestling with himself, with pain, with the meaning of it all. Someone so wrapped up in his own confusion that when you came close, you received what was spilling from his overflowing cup: anger, resentment, shame, blame. None of that had anything to do with me. It said nothing about my worth or my identity. It only spoke of the nightmare he was in and the effect of that on me.

Compassion does not mean excusing harmful behaviour. It means separating the person from the action — and holding both truths at once.

And here is where boundaries enter. Because Brené Brown was right: there can be no true compassion without boundaries. They are not opposites — they are partners.

I spent time with my parents only when we could be sober and respectful with one another. There were times I drove four hours to see them, arrived at their front door, sensed the environment was not right, and turned around. I would say as gently as I could: "I love you, and I was looking forward to this time together— but I can see this isn't the right weekend. I'm going home." And then I drove four hours back.

That boundary meant that when the good days came — when my father was more himself, capable of a joke or a moment of real connection — I was there for those too. Not carrying the weight of having stayed through the bad ones. The boundary created the conditions for something real.

This is what compassion with boundaries looks like in practice. Not above the mess — but walking right through it, clear-eyed and open-hearted.

In my forthcoming book, I explore the concept of co-creation — the possibility that our most painful experiences are also our greatest teachers — and what it means to find freedom on the other side of them.