On Boundaries, Miscalibration, and Relearning Unconditional Love

This essay documents a set of mistakes, the reasoning that led to them, and the recalibration that followed. The intent is not self-exoneration but accuracy and precision, in the interest of clarity.

✨

I set necessary boundaries during a period of high stress and elevated threat perception. The boundaries themselves were justified but the way I enforced them was not. In hindsight, I could have set these boundaries in a healthier and more proportionate way.

I used excessive force. By force, I mean emotional intensity, speed, and finality, not aggression. The result was collateral damage including relational rupture that did not need to be as severe as it became.

More broadly, I defaulted to decisiveness over calibration. I compressed time, nuance, and relational context in favor of rapid closure. This was not limited to a single interaction. It showed up as a string of abrupt exits, rigid framing, and an intolerance for ambiguity once my internal threshold was crossed.

In all of this, I acted within my capacity at the time, and I got what I wanted, or at least what I thought I wanted. Life felt objectively better in the immediate aftermath. That relief made the changes feel necessary. But what feels better in the short term does not necessarily remain better once the dust settles and collateral damage becomes visible.

I had two main drivers.

First: threat compression. Under sustained pressure, I collapsed nuance in favor of speed and safety. When the nervous system is overloaded, “end it decisively” feels safer than “hold complexity,” bypassing nuance and possibly empathy in the process.

This can look like many things: hanging up a call abruptly, intentionally pulling away or severing contact with someone in a heated manner, subtle provocations framed as validation or testing. The pattern is speed over resolution. That perception of threat felt detonating, and it demanded a hasty solution.

Second: boundary conflation. I treated boundaries and emotional force as the same thing but they are not. A boundary is a limit one imposes unto oneself. For me, it was a matter of self-respect. Force is another dimension. Not physical force, but emotional finality, heat, and scorched-earth framing. It is a delivery system. I can apply my boundaries with proportionate force, or not, but suffer the consequences. That nuance matters, but I did not catch the boundary-versus-force distinction until after the fact. Another way to think about this is mixing up necessity with intensity.

In retrospect, I was protecting myself with the theoretical tools I had, but those tools were shaped by fatigue, prior harm, and limited bandwidth. I had done the theory: cognitive work, therapy, journaling. But theory is not practice. En el calentón, in the heat of the moment, theory either holds or collapses.

My capacity explains my behavior but does not excuse the damage.

From the outside, the approach can reasonably look like scorched earth. I only felt the full effects after the dust settled. My family is healthier and safer now, and I am a softer person than before, but that does not negate the fact that I misapplied force at key moments. One could reasonably ask: if damage occurred, if people were burned, how can it also be true that my family and environment are safer? I am still watching that tension.

After the fact, I briefly adopted a faulty frame, a totalizing explanation:

If I were a better parent, a better person, this would not have happened this way.

This frame feels honest, but it is inaccurate. It can masquerade as insight, but it is a sidestep. It collapses a multi-variable outcome into a single actor in order to preserve coherence and control. That move trades truth for narrative simplicity.

I am glad I noticed this pattern.

A more accurate statement is:

I made specific mistakes, in specific seasons, under specific constraints, and those mistakes mattered.

Precision matters because vague guilt prevents integration and specific responsibility allows it. You cannot and will not make yourself healthier, and therefore your environment, by shaming yourself. Precision softens and sharpens the blow, and clarifies the insight.

I separated:

• Boundaries from heat (temperature, attitude, activation)
• Intent from impact
• Capacity at the time from ideal behavior in hindsight

This led to a clean internal statement, without justification clauses:

I protected myself, and I caused damage I regret.

No defense or counterfactuals and no demand for repair or extra pressure. That can come later, but this is not about that. That sentence is now sufficient because it is accurate. It holds under pressure and scrutiny.

The most obvious surface area now for me to put these learnings into practice is parenting my younger children.

When my five-year-old now shows signs of dysregulation, I make explicit that love is not contingent on mood or behavior. I use simple language, repeatedly:

• There are things I don’t like, but I always like you
• My love is not a reward or a punishment

The observable result is immediate softening and regulation. Sometimes cooperation. This clarified something for me: my children do not test limits to defy authority; they test to verify our attachment and its qualities.

When I put my boundaries up in the past and did not consider how these could be perceived or even actually paired with abandonment threat, even without intention (we talked about intent earlier), escalation would follow. It’s so obvious now. And when my boundaries are paired with presence and warmth, when my boundaries are shaped to match the attachment I want to cultivate, regulation follows.

In short, the biggest mistake I made was failing to separate limits from perceived abandonment and other repercussions. That mistake was costly.

So yeah, if you are setting boundaries:

• Do not assume force equals effectiveness

• Ask whether you are enforcing a limit or discharging accumulated heat

• Act from self-respect, but balance it with care, with warmth

• Slow down, slow the fuck down

• Replace global or “broad statement” self-sentencing with specific inventory

• Evidence matters. Where there is no evidence, there is often noise

• Precision reduces distortion

• Precision requires active listening

• Precision requires honesty in internal systems. It requires coherent definitions of words, values, and intent

• Love is not conditional

• Boundaries do not negate care

• Limits and warmth are not mutually exclusive

Integration Check

There were things that worked, even inside failure.

First, I noticed the damage instead of rationalizing it. That matters. Many people double down on outcomes and call the costs “necessary.” I didn’t.

Second, I did not outsource responsibility to intention. I separated what I meant from what landed, and I stayed with the impact.

Third, I resisted global self-condemnation. I rejected the frame that I am “the problem” in favor of identifying specific errors under specific constraints. That kept me engaged instead of frozen.

Finally, I tested the recalibration in real time. I did not keep this insight theoretical. I am applying it now with my children and partner, where feedback is immediate and unfiltered.

These strengths do not erase the mistakes. They explain why repair and integration were possible at all.

I do not need to punish myself to acknowledge harm. I do not need to rewrite history to live with it. The lesson is not “be softer” or “be harder.” It is “be precise,” and apply that precision with care.

Most damage comes not from having values, but from misapplying them under load. This matters especially in periods of high volatility, when emotion, speed, and fear distort judgment.

Precision is not cold. It is stabilizing.