In the Therapy Room: Setting Boundaries with Parents

It was raining hard that Tuesday night—the kind of rain that makes you feel alone. Jensonaya sat across from me, shoulders tight, jaw clenched, staring at her hands like they’d betrayed her. She had moved back home six months ago after college, and somewhere between then and now, her father had started treating her like a valet service. She’d started believing him when he said she was selfish for saying no.

“I know I’m being unreasonable,” she said, which is exactly what people say when they’re about to describe something completely reasonable. “But whenever he needs a ride somewhere, he keeps reminding me that he bought me the car. Does that mean  I owe him rides forever?  I pay for everything—insurance, maintenance, gas. But somehow I still feel guilty.”

Jensonaya saw the trap she was in but couldn’t figure out how to climb out of it. She wasn’t drowning in denial. She was drowning in clarity mixed with paralysis. That’s a dangerous cocktail. 🚗

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What You’re Actually Looking At Here

Let me cut through the noise: your father doesn’t need a ride. He needs you to need him. That’s the real transaction happening, and nobody wants to say it out loud because it sounds brutal. But it is.

When Jensonaya moved back home, something shifted in the relational space between her and her father. His role as a provider suddenly mattered again. For a moment, he was needed. Then she tried to set a boundary—”You can’t use me like a free taxi”—(not the best way to set a boundary) and all hell broke loose. What he heard was, “You don’t matter anymore.” So he fought back by activating guilt. By reminding her of the gift. By creating a scenario where she couldn’t win without being the bad daughter.

His internal system had organized itself around a story: her availability equals her love. In some ways this true. Availability, responsiveness and support are the cornerstones of any relationship, but the narrative he had created said that every “boundary” she set was rejection. This frame was invisible to both of them until we named it.

Here’s what kills me about this pattern: it’s not malicious. That’s what makes it so destructive. Her father wasn’t sitting around plotting manipulation. His organizational system was in crisis. Empty nesters panic. They lose structure, purpose, the daily machinery that made them feel important. A boomeranged kid looks like a lifeline—a way to restore coherence to a fractured self-narrative.

But what’s actually happening is that he’s made Jensonaya responsible for maintaining his sense of purpose. And she, with her own relational needs activated, has begun to accept that responsibility as inevitable—even as a form of love.

But lifelines have a way of pulling you under if you’re not careful.

The Part Nobody Talks About 💭

Here’s what the research on guilt and boundaries doesn’t tell you: Your parent’s need to reorganize their identity is not your responsibility to solve.

When her father lost his license two years ago, that became his problem to manage. Transportation solutions—that was his mountain to climb. Instead, he outsourced it. And Jensonaya, being a good kid, caught it.

What was actually happening is that her father’s unmet needs—autonomy, competence, and relational security—had all been transferred into Jensonaya’s container. Instead of addressing these legitimate needs himself, he’d created an emotional script: ask daughter for ride → feel temporarily important → avoid the real work of regaining independence.

And Jensonaya had become trapped in the complementary script: say yes to feel like a good daughter → resent the obligation → feel guilty for the resentment.

This is what happens when two containers with different needs try to stabilize each other through the same transaction. The relational space between them develops its own gravity. It pulls both people toward behaviors that maintain its coherence, even when those behaviors undermine their individual growth or wellbeing.

That’s not love. That’s a system where both people are trying to use each other to meet needs they should be meeting elsewhere.

I told her something she didn’t want to hear: “Your father’s struggle—not having a license, feeling useless, resenting the need for help—those feelings are real. But they’re not yours to fix. The moment you try to stabilize his sense of self by giving him access to the car he gave away, you’ve taken on a role that erodes both of your capacities to grow. You’ve become the container he’s trying to organize himself through, rather than a separate person with your own development to tend to.”

She cried. Real tears. Because part of her already knew that.

The Financial Scoreboard Nobody Wants to Keep 💰

Here’s a hard truth: money is honesty. It’s the one language that doesn’t lie.

Jensonaya was paying insurance, maintenance, oil changes, registration, and fuel. Her father was paying nothing. Not because he couldn’t contribute, but because nobody named it. So in his head, he wasn’t using her car—he was using “their” car.

When a transaction stays emotional rather than becoming financial, it becomes infinitely flexible. It bends to whoever has the greater emotional leverage. Her father’s narrative of abandonment had more gravitational pull than her reasonable request for contribution.

Here’s the crucial insight: the brain’s pattern-recognition system is biased toward narratives that protect its existing self-story. Her father’s reality threatened the narrative he’d constructed: I’m still a provider; She confirms the story, I still matter. The brain filtered out the data that contradicted this story.

But love and resentment can’t coexist for long, and resentment, crucially, feels like guilt to the person carrying the burden.

So I asked her: “If your father had to pay you back for every ride, every fill-up, every maintenance cost attributed to his use—would he still ask?”

The answer was written on her face before she spoke.

Here’s what happens: when money doesn’t change hands, responsibility doesn’t exist. It floats. It becomes emotional instead of transactional. And emotion is where the invisible structures of relational power live—the unspoken rules and dynamics that nobody acknowledges but everyone feels.

The Guilt You’re Feeling Is Not Your Guilt 😔

This one matters, so sit with it because I had to say it directly: “You can’t fix your father’s empty nest by becoming his permanent driver. You can’t repair his loss of independence by sacrificing yours. And every time you feel guilty saying no, you’re accepting an assignment that isn’t yours to carry.”

She asked me: “So I’m just supposed to feel nothing? Just watch him struggle?”

No. You feel compassion. You feel concern. But you don’t feel responsibility for his choices or his emotional management. Those belong to him.

And here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable: his struggle with not having a license is actually important. It should create real friction for him. That friction is what might finally activate the parts of him that have agency and problem-solving capacity. When you remove that friction by becoming his solution, you prevent his growth. You become the reason his internal system never has to reorganize itself. This isn’t cruelty—it’s honoring his potential to change and adapt.  Strength isn’t being tough enough to say no and sleep fine at night. It’s being willing to say no and sit with the guilt, the anger, the accusations, the disappointment—and not let any of it reorganize your boundaries. That’s the real work.

I gave Jensonaya a framework:

The Non-Negotiable Line: Your car is yours. The money you earn, you keep. The boundaries you set, you hold. Not because you’re selfish. Because ownership means coherence. Your container maintains its integrity when you control what moves through it.

When her father said, “I bought you that car,” she’d respond: “I know. And I’m grateful. That’s why I take care of it. Would you mind paying me to be your Uber driver? It’s money that I can put towards the insurance and registration.”

Calm. Factual. Not defensive. Not apologetic. Just a question.

What we were doing was building conscious awareness of the relational patterns and power dynamics that were creating the friction in the first place. Once she could see that his anger wasn’t about the car but about his loss of purpose and identity, his anger had less power over her. It became information about his internal system rather than indictment of her character.

He didn’t like it. He got angry. He said she was ungrateful. He said she’d changed. And she held the line.

Your Parent’s Problem Is Not Your Inheritance 🌱

Three months later, Jensonaya’s father signed up for Uber and when she wasn’t available he just used that service instead. Turns out, when his daughter stopped being the solution, the problem actually bothered him enough to organize himself differently. His own internal system, finally without an external prop, had to activate the parts of him that problem-solve, that take initiative, that rebuild competence.

She didn’t force that change. She just stopped preventing it by carrying the discomfort for him.

Here’s what I want you to understand about all of this: when you say yes to something you should say no to, you’re not being kind. You might be an obstacle to someone else’s growth disguised as support. And you’re sacrificing your own wellbeing in the process.

The guilt you feel isn’t real guilt in the present moment. It’s the ghost of your childhood—an emotional pattern that formed early, maybe when a parent’s mood was your responsibility to manage, or when love felt conditional on your usefulness.

That pattern contains the sensation of anxiety, the belief that your value equals your service to others, and the mini-story that if I don’t fix this, I’m abandoning someone I care about. That part of you needs to grow up. It needs to understand that real love sometimes looks like letting people face their own consequences and reorganize themselves accordingly.

Your parents will recover from your boundaries. Research on this is clear. What takes longer to recover from is being the child who gave up everything trying to stabilize someone else’s sense of self.

Don’t do that.

Set the line. Hold it. Stay conscious of the guilt that arises—not as a sign you’re doing something wrong, but as a signal of old patterns activating. Watch those patterns with compassion, but don’t let them move you. And then watch what happens when people actually have to take responsibility for organizing their own lives.

Saying “No” isn’t about approval. It’s about who owns your life. So make sure it’s you.—Jas Mendola