Why can’t I set boundaries? A somatic approach

Everyone’s talking about boundaries in order to answer the evergreen question: “Why can’t I set boundaries?”

There are books about them, therapy worksheets, and social media infographics explaining how to set them in three easy steps. And yet, for so many of us, setting boundaries still feels impossible. We know we should. We might even know what to say. But when the moment comes, something gets in the way, as a knot in the throat, an inability to speak or an unwarranted compliance or agreement that leaves our mouths before we can even realise a boundary got crossed. And even when we do manage to set a boundary, keeping it feels like another battle entirely.

If this resonates, you’re not failing at boundaries. You’re not weak, conflict-averse, or broken as some social media posts may suggest as a way to sell you products or services.

Something more fundamental is happening, and it starts in your body.

Here’s what most boundary advice misses: boundaries aren’t primarily cognitive. They’re not rules you make with your mind or scripts you rehearse in the mirror. Before they’re words, before they’re thoughts, boundaries are physical. They’re felt. They live in your body.

Your body already knows when a boundary is being crossed. It knew before you had language for it. How do we know how to listen to it?

This post explores why boundary-setting feels so hard from a body perspective, and what somatic therapy offers that talk-based, cognitive-led approaches often miss.

Your body knows before you do

Here’s something that might surprise you: your brain didn’t evolve primarily to think, or to perceive the world accurately. According to neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, the brain evolved first and foremost to regulate the body, to keep you alive, to anticipate what you’ll need before you need it.

This process is called allostasis. Rather than simply reacting to what happens around you, your brain constantly predicts and builds an internal model of your body in the world, anticipating threats and resources and preparing your system before the moment of contact. Think of it like a weather forecaster constantly running predictions based on accumulated data.

Interoception (your brain’s representation of your body’s inner sensations) is how these predictions communicate themselves to you. That flutter in your chest, the drop in your stomach or the tightening in your throat are all examples of how your body is preparing you for what it thinks is coming, based on what it has learned from the past.

And crucially: this happens before your conscious mind has caught up.

Before you’ve formed the thought “this doesn’t feel right,” your body is already there sometimes, with a heart rate shifting or your muscles bracing or collapsing. Your body is acting on its predictions.

Based on this, we should confidently say this is why your body knows before you do.

But here’s where it gets complicated and where past experience becomes so important. Your brain predicts from everything it has learned. Every interaction, every relationship, every moment of safety or threat has been filed away, shaping the model your brain runs predictions from.

If your past experience says “saying no leads to punishment”, your body will prepare for threat before you’ve consciously registered that a boundary is being crossed whenever you want to say no. If your past experience says “my feelings are inconvenient or dangerous”, your body will suppress its own signals before they reach awareness. The prediction system is indeed sensitive to history.

This is also why interoception is neither neutral nor objective. Our prior experiences and beliefs don’t just colour how we interpret the world, but they actively shape what we perceive in the first place.

Which means the body’s boundary signals are shaped by everything we’ve been taught, consciously and unconsciously, about whose needs matter, whose “no” gets respected, and what happens when we dare to take up space.

Your body knows before you do. The question is: what has it learned to predict?

How we learned to ignore our bodies

Boundary violation is rarely a simple matter of choice. Our capacity to recognise and honour our own limits is shaped by the social worlds we inhabit. If the body has learned that saying “no” is dangerous, then saying “yes” cannot always be understood as freely given consent.

Writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Manon Garcia have shown that women’s submission is neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, it is produced through social, economic, and legal structures that make resistance costly. In many circumstances, compliance becomes a rational strategy for navigating risk. What appears to be consent may instead reflect an adaptation to conditions in which refusal carries consequences.

We can broaden this analysis to encompass all forms of oppression, recognising how contemporary social, economic, and political systems often compel compliance. Within these conditions, resistance in the form of boundary setting is not simply a matter of choice, and it can carry significant personal, relational, and material costs, making defiance a difficult and sometimes unattainable response.

From a somatic point of view, our bodies learn from repeated experiences of punishment, rejection, exclusion, or harm. Over time, the body may prioritise safety over authenticity, leading a person to override internal signals and cross their own boundaries. Some of us would then learn that self-protection comes through accommodation (have you ever heard of the “fawn” response?).

A somatic understanding of adaptation

Adaptation is not just cognitive or behavioural but also physiological and sensory.

Rather than treating discomfort, anger, fear, or resistance as important information, it learns to suppress, reinterpret, or ignore these signals altogether. Or, better yet, it learns that when these signals are present, adaptation is the answer. This adaptation can show up physically as much as psychologically. For example, the jaw tightens around unspoken words, the shoulders remain lifted in anticipation, breathing becomes shallow and restricted, or muscles stay tense in preparation for conflict that never arrives (please consider these as broad suggestions to explain this point, they are not to be interpreted as the sole correlation to oppression or the only valid body response to oppression).

Over time, some people become hypersensitive to others’ moods and needs while growing disconnected from their own bodily cues. Others experience numbness, fatigue, dissociation, or an inability to recognise what they are feeling at all. A racing heart may be interpreted as a need to comply rather than a signal that something feels unsafe. Exhaustion may become normalised. 

In this way, the body reorganises itself around survival. What once began as a necessary adaptation to difficult circumstances may become an automatic pattern of perception and response. The body learns not only what is dangerous, but also which feelings, needs, and boundaries are safest to adapt to.

Interoception is not neutral

This understanding challenges the assumption that interoception, or our awareness of bodily signals, is neutral.

The body’s predictive systems are shaped by lived experience, including racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. The social structures we live within influence not only how we think, but also how we perceive and interpret bodily sensations, and in this sense, interoception becomes political.

Garcia’s work is particularly useful to understand this because it acknowledges that submission can bring both costs and benefits. There may be something to gain from accepting a boundary crossing, whether social approval, economic security, relational stability, or physical safety. The value of acquiescence is often weighed against the potential consequences of resistance. Instead of asking, “Why didn’t I say no?”, a more revealing question may be: “How was this serving my safety?”

From this perspective, ignoring the body’s signals is not evidence of failure, as we may at times interpret. Often, it is evidence of adaptation. Understanding how our bodies have learned to survive can help us approach questions of consent, boundaries, and agency with greater compassion and complexity.

Rebuilding your body’s boundary system: a somatic approach

If our boundaries are shaped by embodied experiences, then healing boundaries cannot be reduced to learning communication techniques or memorising scripts for saying “no.” Don’t get me wrong, these can be extremely useful to build routines and create a portfolio of boundary-enforcing experiences that can counterbalance those that previously led us to accommodate.

So while these skills can be useful, somatic therapy approaches boundary work from a different direction. Rather than teaching the body a new language, it helps us remember one we once knew.

What do I mean by this?

Our bodies already have an innate capacity to sense comfort and discomfort, safety and danger, openness and resistance. To help you connect to this concept, think of a young child who instinctively moves towards what feels nourishing and away from what feels overwhelming. It is quite amazing to witness how quickly and decisively they respond in a body-led way to environmental stimuli.

Going back to somatic therapy or any type of body-led, body-centred approach, the process of returning back to our bodies often begins with developing a relationship with our internal experience. We learn to notice sensations, impulses, emotions, and patterns of activation without immediately dismissing or judging them. Gradually, we move from simply observing bodily sensations to recognising the difference between a genuine threat in the present moment and a protective response rooted in past experiences.

This distinction is important. Sometimes the body is responding to something that genuinely threatens our safety, dignity, or wellbeing right now. Other times, the nervous system may respond to echoes of earlier experiences: moments of rejection, coercion, shaming, abandonment, or harm that have not yet been fully processed or integrated.

Neither response is wrong.

The body is doing what it has learned to do.

The body is doing what it has learned to do.

The work is learning how to listen closely enough to understand what it is responding to.

This is slow, careful work. It asks for patience, curiosity, and compassion rather than force. The goal is not to become someone who never feels fear, uncertainty, or conflict. Nor is it to develop perfect boundaries. Instead, the aim is to rebuild trust in our capacity to recognise and respond to what is happening within us. Too often, posts and reels on social media promise a static, monotone feeling of “preferably” calmness as the goal of a somatic practice, when we do need to remain fluid and dynamic in order to respond to a fluid and dynamic world. We need our anger readily available for injustices and threats, just as we need access to the entire spectrum of feelings to live life to the fullest.

In summary, the body’s capacity to sense comfort, discomfort, attraction, aversion, safety, and threat has always been there. Beneath the adaptations, accommodations, and survival strategies, the body’s wisdom remains present, just temporarily inaccessible. Somatic therapy helps create the conditions for that wisdom to become accessible again.

Over time, the question shifts from “How do I learn to have boundaries?” to “What happens when I begin trusting the signals that were there all along?”

Somatic exercises for reconnecting with your body’s boundaries

There are different ways to work with boundaries in a somatic way, and I can only from my experience and how I would work with this.

Before starting any in depth work, we need to acknowledge that for some people, turning towards the body can feel surprisingly difficult.

If you’ve spent years disconnected from your bodily experience, whether through trauma, stress, oppression, chronic busyness, or simply the demands of everyday life, practices that invite you to “feel into your body” may feel confusing, frustrating, or even overwhelming. You may notice very little at all and most likely be unsure of what you’re supposed to be sensing.

That is why I don’t see somatic boundary work as applying techniques, especially at an initial stage. Before we can listen to the body’s signals, we often need to rebuild our relationship with the body itself.

Rather than forcing ourselves to feel more, we can begin from a place of neutrality and curiosity. The goal is not to uncover profound insights or intense emotions. The goal is simply to rediscover what it feels like to inhabit a body. And once this part of the work is well underway, people start to notice that the way they establish boundaries and respond to boundary violations has already changed.

Learning new ways of understanding the body

If you’d like to explore further, Returning Home to Our Bodies by Abigail Rose Clarke offers a compassionate and accessible introduction to embodied awareness. What I particularly appreciate about the book is that it expands our understanding of the body beyond nervous system regulation alone and offers practical ways of relating to embodiment that feel gentle, grounded, and achievable.

Start with the mundane

One misconception about somatic work is that it requires special techniques or extraordinary experiences. In reality, some of the most meaningful practices emerge through ordinary moments.

When connecting with the body feels difficult, start with something simple. Hold a glass of water and become curious about the experience. Notice the temperature of the glass against your fingertips. Feel the texture of the surface. Pay attention to the effort required from the muscles of your hand and arm as you lift it. Notice the sensation of the glass touching your lips, the movement of water inside your mouth, and perhaps how far you can follow the sensation of swallowing.

The purpose isn’t relaxation or mindfulness for its own sake. The purpose is learning how to notice. Before we can track complex boundary signals, we first learn how to stay present with ordinary bodily experiences. Next, you might do a mindful walk in a natural setting (plenty of guided mindful walks available online) or a body scan. And if something feels difficult, try something else and see what works for you. Ultimately, the goal is to remain curious to your body, so choose what feels easy (and this is per se a way to set a boundary).

Practising grounding from neutrality

Grounding can be a valuable resource, but it is often introduced when people are already overwhelmed.

Instead, it can be helpful to explore grounding when you feel relatively okay. When your nervous system is settled, spend time noticing the contact of your feet with the floor, the support of the chair beneath you, or the weight of your body being held by the earth.

From this place of familiarity, grounding becomes easier to access when challenges arise. Over time, you begin to recognise the difference between feeling disconnected from your body and feeling connected to it. This awareness becomes an important foundation for boundary work because it helps create a space between what is being asked of you and how you choose to respond.

After all, before we can ask “What do I want to say?” we often need to ask a simpler question:

“Can I feel myself here?”

Consider working with a qualified somatic therapist

For many people, this is best explored alongside a qualified somatic practitioner who has undertaken supervised clinical training. Somatic therapy offers a relational space in which body awareness can develop gradually, safely, and at a pace that feels manageable. Rather than being pushed towards difficult sensations, you are supported in building the capacity to notice, understand, and stay connected to your experience.

What changes when you listen to your body?

This is the million-pound question.

Truthfully, I cannot tell you exactly what you will feel if you begin reconnecting with your body. Nor can I promise that once you do, all your boundaries will be respected, that saying no will become easy, or that you will never again find yourself agreeing to something that doesn’t feel right. Sometimes saying no will still be costly. Sometimes accommodation will remain the safest available choice.

After all, we don’t live in a world that consistently honours human limits. We live within systems that often reward productivity over rest, compliance over resistance, and extraction over care. Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression are not disappearing anytime soon. Learning to listen to your body does not exempt you from these realities.

And let’s be honest: this isn’t a transformation that happens overnight. If someone promises you that, be sceptical.

But I do believe it offers something invaluable.

It expands time, it will offer you tiny moments of space that can open up between what happens and how we respond. Somatic work doesn’t necessarily change the circumstances around us, but it can help us notice what is happening a little earlier.

You begin to catch the signal sooner. It could be a sinking feeling in your stomach or the tightening in your chest. But you stop doing so just sometimes. And sometimes is more than before. Therefore, you find yourself pausing where you once reacted automatically, and within that space, something new becomes possible.

When we become more connected to our bodies, we gain access to information that was previously outside our awareness. We create a little more space between impulse and action, between expectation and response. In that space, choice becomes more possible.

For me, that is the value of somatic work. Not that it teaches us to have perfect boundaries, but that it helps us recognise what is happening inside us before we automatically override it.