Boundaries After Narcissistic Abuse: Why “Just Say No” Doesn’t Work When You Were Trained Not To

RELATIONAL TRAUMA & RECOVERY • April 2026

The Quiet Moment When Saying No Feels Like Saying Yes

It’s 8:17 on a Wednesday morning when Ilanit’s phone buzzes on the kitchen counter, screen lighting up next to her half-finished coffee. A former coworker is asking if she can cover a meeting that afternoon. Ilanit’s heart tightens before she’s even finished reading the message. She knows the answer is no. Her calendar is full, and she’d planned this particular afternoon to actually breathe. Her thumb hovers over the keyboard anyway. A familiar knot rises from her stomach into her throat. She types “Sure, I can do it” and hits send before she lets herself reconsider.

Ilanit left a relationship marked by narcissistic abuse two years ago. She’s read the books, sat in therapy, even done executive coaching to rebuild her professional footing. And still, most Wednesdays, she can’t hold a boundary she knows, intellectually, is hers to hold. The knot in her body isn’t confused. It’s remembering. It’s telling her that saying no once meant rage, withdrawal, or punishment, and it hasn’t yet gotten the memo that the relationship is over.

In my work with clients like Ilanit, I want to name something important up front, both for her and for you. This post uses the phrase “narcissistic abuse” the way many survivors use it themselves, as a description of a relationship pattern, not as a clinical diagnosis of any specific person. I’m not in a position to diagnose someone I’ve never met, and neither is this article. What I can speak to is the nervous system of the person who lived inside that pattern, because that’s where fifteen-plus years of my clinical work has actually been.

This is the paradox at the center of this piece: knowing you have a right to say no, and feeling like your body simply won’t let you. Ilanit’s nervous system learned, over years, that limits equaled danger. Her capacity to hold a boundary wasn’t undeveloped so much as actively dismantled, one invalidated request at a time.

What strikes me most, sitting across from women like Ilanit week after week, is how competent they’re everywhere else. Ilanit negotiates vendor contracts for a living. She can hold a hard line with a supplier trying to overcharge her company by six figures without breaking a sweat. Ask her to hold that same line with a former colleague asking for an unpaid favor, and something entirely different happens in her body. The skill is there. The nervous system permission isn’t, at least not yet, and that gap is the actual subject of this article.

We can’t untangle this with willpower or “just say no” advice, because that advice assumes a capacity that was deliberately worn away. This article is about what boundaries actually require after a relationship like this: not a checkbox, but a slow, embodied rebuild, from noticing your body’s signals, to naming what you need, to eventually speaking it out loud in ways that are actually safe for you.

What Do We Mean by Boundaries After Narcissistic Abuse?

What sets this apart from general boundary-setting advice is the history underneath it. It isn’t only about knowing your rights. It’s about convincing a nervous system trained to read limits as threats that you’re not actually in danger anymore when you say no.

This is also why so many survivors describe feeling foggy about what they even want. I recently reread Beverly Engel, LMFT, author of It Wasn’t Your Fault, and her observation about shame stayed with me. She names shame and self-blame as nearly universal in abuse survivors, and in my own clients I see exactly what she describes: the shame doesn’t just follow the abuse, it actively clouds access to a person’s own wants, long after the relationship has ended.

Many survivors live inside what Pete Walker, MA, calls the fawn response: the instinct to appease in order to avoid conflict or punishment. The distance between knowing you have a right to a boundary and actually being able to enact it can feel as wide as an ocean, and that gap isn’t a character flaw. It’s the shape trauma left behind.

One clarification before we go further, because it matters. Nothing in this post is a diagnostic checklist for labeling a partner, an ex, or a family member as narcissistic. If you’re trying to make sense of a relationship, a licensed clinician who can actually assess the specific dynamics, and where relevant, your safety, is a far better resource than any article, including this one.

The Neurobiology of Boundary Suppression

The difficulty holding a boundary after a relationship like this isn’t only psychological. It’s biological, and understanding the mechanism tends to be a relief to the driven women I work with, because it replaces “what’s wrong with me” with “what did my body learn to do to survive.”

When asserting a limit once brought punishment, rage, or withdrawal, the nervous system encoded those experiences as danger. Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and originator of polyvagal theory, has spent decades describing something I find myself returning to constantly in session: before your thinking brain engages at all, your nervous system runs an unconscious safety check called neuroception.

In a relationship shaped by narcissistic abuse, neuroception gets hijacked. The nervous system starts reading your own limits as threats, because past boundary-setting predicted rage or abandonment. This pushes the body into sympathetic fight-or-flight, or into the dorsal vagal freeze state, and either way, the capacity to assert yourself goes offline.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented that trauma is stored not primarily as narrative memory but as sensory, bodily experience. Which means you can know, intellectually, that you’re allowed to say no, while your body reacts as though danger is still in the room. Some clients describe going briefly speechless in these moments, a real phenomenon tied to reduced activity in Broca’s area, the brain’s speech center, under acute threat response.

This mismatch is exactly why “just say no” lands as insulting rather than helpful. It assumes a capacity your nervous system was trained, methodically, not to trust. Healing this means retraining neuroception itself, teaching the body to recognize safety, one small, repeated experience at a time. Co-regulation, borrowing steadiness from a calm and attuned other, is part of why this work often goes faster in relationship, whether that’s therapy or another safe connection, than it does alone. Deb Dana, LCSW, clinician and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, writes about exactly this kind of borrowed regulation as a bridge back to a body that can hold its own limits again.

There’s also a classical-conditioning piece to this that I find helps clients stop blaming themselves. Repeated pairing of a stimulus, a raised voice, a certain tone of disappointment, a particular time of day, with an unsafe outcome trains the nervous system to treat that stimulus as dangerous on its own, even years later and in an entirely different context. A calendar notification, a phone buzzing after dinner, a partner going quiet mid-conversation: none of these are inherently threatening, and yet for someone whose nervous system learned to associate similar cues with what came next in an earlier relationship, the body can react as though the danger is happening again, right now, in the present tense.

This is part of why boundary work can’t be rushed by information alone. You can explain the entire mechanism to a client in a single session, and her nervous system will still need dozens, sometimes hundreds, of repeated safe experiences before it updates its own prediction. I tell clients this not to discourage them but because knowing the timeline is realistic tends to reduce the shame that surfaces when progress feels slow.

How This Pattern Plays Out in Driven Women

It’s 7:45 on a Thursday evening when Ilanit’s team lead texts: “Can you review the entire project plan tonight? It’s urgent.” Her shoulders drop before she’s even read the whole message. She’d been looking forward to a quiet night to recover from the week. Something older stirs underneath the fatigue, a blend of anxiety and the reflexive need to keep everyone content.

“I’ll do my best,” she texts back, already knowing this means staying up past midnight and running on fumes tomorrow. Ilanit has been out of the relationship for two years, but the fawn response Pete Walker describes is still very much alive in her body. She learned, over years, to appease first and register her own needs second, if at all. Saying no doesn’t just feel hard. It feels like risking abandonment or rage that, on some level, her nervous system still expects.

This pattern repeats itself in driven women often enough that I now ask about it directly in a first session. Their competence and ambition can mask an internal struggle to hold boundaries that were systematically worn down in an earlier relationship. Saying no isn’t only about asserting a right. It’s about calming a nervous system that learned, in intimate detail, that limits equal threat.

Ilanit’s difficulty here isn’t a failure of strength. It’s the residue of relational trauma, playing out in real time, in a body that remembers the cost of “no” long before her mind gets a vote. When women like her try to force the “just say no” advice, what often follows isn’t relief. It’s shame, self-blame, sometimes a kind of numb disconnection from the moment entirely.

I’ve noticed a specific version of this among clients who run teams or companies. They can fire an underperforming vendor over email in four sentences, and then spend an entire Sunday drafting and redrafting a two-line text declining a friend’s invitation. The mismatch isn’t about assertiveness skills, which they clearly have. It’s that the vendor relationship never touched the old wound, and the friend’s invitation, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the friend at all, brushed up against it.

Judith Herman, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, author of Trauma and Recovery, insists that safety has to be the foundation before boundary work can hold. In session, I start here too: not by pushing a client to assert a limit before her body believes it’s safe to, but by building that felt safety first, patiently, so the boundary that eventually comes has somewhere solid to stand.

Related Clinical Topic: The Fawn Response

Pete Walker, MA, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, describes fawning as a survival strategy: becoming more appealing to a threat in order to survive it. “Fawn types,” he writes, “seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others.” It’s an adaptation, not a personality trait, and it doesn’t automatically switch off just because the relationship that required it has ended.

I think about that line often when I sit with women who, like Ilanit, describe a version of themselves so oriented around anticipating other people’s needs that their own have become nearly impossible to locate. The fawn response is efficient at exactly one thing: keeping you safe inside a relationship where safety was conditional. It’s not efficient at helping you know, afterward, what you actually want.

Rebuilding that knowledge takes time and, in my clinical experience, usually goes better with support rather than alone, because the fawn response formed in relationship and tends to heal the same way: through a different, safer relational experience, whether that’s therapy, a support group, or a trusted friendship where your “no” is actually received without cost.

One thing I ask clients to track, gently, is the gap between an automatic yes and a considered one. Not to judge the automatic yes, since it kept them safe for years, but to start noticing the half-second before it happens. That half-second, over time, is where choice eventually becomes possible again. Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, therapist and author of Being a Brain-Wise Therapist, writes about healing happening right-brain to right-brain, in relationship, through repeated moments of felt safety rather than through insight alone. That’s consistent with what I see clinically: clients rarely think their way out of the fawn response. They feel their way out of it, slowly, inside relationships that don’t require it of them anymore.

Both/And: Knowing Your Rights AND Having a Nervous System That Doesn’t Believe Them

Radka sits across from me on a Monday afternoon, coat still on, as though she might need to leave quickly. She’s 44, a director at a biotech firm, and she tells me about a text she got that morning from a close friend inviting her to a celebration lunch for a promotion. “I know I should just say yes,” she tells me. “I like this friend. I want to celebrate her. And I sat there re-reading the text for ten minutes because some part of me was convinced that saying yes was somehow going to go wrong.”

“I typed ‘I think I’ll pass today,’” she says. “And then I stared at it for another five minutes wondering if that was going to make her think I don’t care about her. I don’t even know what I’m protecting myself from anymore. There’s no one here to be afraid of. There’s just a lunch.”

Sitting with Radka, I felt the particular ache I recognize in this pattern: not confusion about what’s true, but a nervous system that hasn’t caught up to it yet. She knows, cognitively, completely, that she’s allowed to want things, to celebrate, to say yes without penalty. And her body still runs the old subroutine anyway, because for years in an earlier relationship, wanting things out loud reliably invited criticism or withdrawal.

This is the both/and I want to name plainly: you can know your rights and still have a body that doesn’t fully believe them yet. That isn’t a contradiction to resolve through more willpower. It’s the accurate, unglamorous shape of trauma recovery in progress. Holding both truths at once, rather than treating the nervous system’s caution as a personal failing, is often where the real work of this phase actually lives.

Stephen Porges’s account of neuroception explains part of what’s happening in Radka’s body. Her nervous system’s automatic safety check can misread a present, harmless invitation through the lens of a past that taught her invitations sometimes came with hidden costs. The mind sees a lunch. The body, for a moment, still braces for something else.

In our sessions, I don’t ask Radka to force a boundary before she’s ready. I ask her to notice the both/and without judgment: I know this is safe, and my body isn’t sure yet. That noticing, repeated often enough, is itself the beginning of the nervous system updating its own information.

The solution isn’t to muscle through and force a premature boundary. It’s to patiently build the nervous system’s tolerance for holding one. That’s slower than most driven women want it to be, myself included when I imagine being in their position, and it is, in my clinical experience, the only version of this work that actually lasts.

The Systemic Lens: When “Healthy Boundaries” Becomes Another Standard You’re Failing to Meet

Ilanit scrolls through her phone one Sunday evening and lands on a post titled “10 Ways to Set Healthy Boundaries.” Say no without guilt. Prioritize your needs. Communicate clearly and assertively. She reads it twice, and something in her chest sinks. The advice reads less like help and more like a mirror reflecting everything she still can’t quite do. One more standard she’s failing to meet.

What Ilanit is running into is a broader pattern I see constantly in this work. The cultural script around boundaries tends to assume a level playing field, as though everyone starts from the same baseline capacity to say no. That assumption simply doesn’t hold for someone whose nervous system was trained, methodically, to equate limits with danger.

Judith Herman’s three-stage model of trauma recovery is useful here again. The first stage, establishing safety, has to come before boundary work can hold, and yet the cultural conversation about boundaries routinely skips that step, placing the burden on survivors to simply perform assertiveness as if the earlier conditioning never happened.

That oversight can feel shaming in a very particular way. “Healthy boundaries” becomes yet another measuring stick, and coming up short against it isn’t a personal flaw. It’s the predictable result of a culture that underestimates what trauma actually does to a person’s baseline capacity.

Beverly Engel’s work on internalized shame matters here too. When someone is already carrying deep shame from an earlier relationship, and then is handed a cultural expectation to simply “set boundaries” without acknowledgment of that history, the shame often intensifies rather than resolves.

There’s a particular version of this I see almost exclusively in driven, accomplished women. They can run a department, manage a household, coach a client through a crisis, and still feel like a beginner the moment a boundary needs holding with a specific person from their past. Competence in one part of life doesn’t transfer automatically into another, especially when the second part is wired directly into old survival circuitry rather than learned skill. I’ve had clients apologize to me for this gap, as though their professional capability should’ve somehow inoculated them against a nervous-system response that has nothing to do with intelligence or discipline.

I want to name the gender layer here too, because it isn’t incidental. Women are still disproportionately socialized toward accommodation from childhood, praised for being easy, agreeable, low-maintenance. Layer a relationship marked by narcissistic abuse on top of that existing conditioning, and the result is two reinforcing systems telling the same nervous system the same thing: your needs are secondary, and asserting them carries a cost. Recovery has to work against both layers at once, and the more recent one is rarely the only one worth addressing.

Of course this is hard. You’re not imagining the difficulty, and you’re not failing at something simple. You’re attempting a nervous-system-level task inside a culture that markets it as a weekend self-help project. That mismatch is structural, not personal, and naming it as such is often the first real relief a client feels in this part of the work.

The Path Forward, and a Note on Safety

Radka sits on her kitchen floor one Saturday night, journal open, pen in hand, trying to name something she actually wants rather than something she thinks she should want. The exercise feels both freeing and, in an odd way, frightening.

The sequence I walk clients through, roughly, is noticing, then naming, then speaking. Peter Levine, PhD, psychologist and developer of Somatic Experiencing, describes trauma as leaving “frozen residue” in the body, activation that was never fully discharged. Noticing often starts small: a subtle tightness in the chest, an unease in the throat, when someone asks for your time. Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, calls the earliest phase of this work resourcing, building the felt sensations of safety before anything else is attempted.

Once a sensation is noticed without judgment, naming comes next, first internally. “I’m feeling overwhelmed.” “I need time to rest.” Naming, after years of suppression, is itself a significant act, even before a single word is spoken aloud to another person.

Speaking a boundary externally is the final, and hardest, step, and this is where I want to slow down and be direct, because generic advice to “just tell them how you feel” can be actively unsafe advice in the wrong circumstances.

If there’s any ongoing contact with a person who has been coercive, threatening, or violent, this article isn’t the place to get guidance about that specific situation, and I want to be direct about that rather than gesture past it. A licensed therapist experienced in relational trauma and, where relevant, a domestic violence advocate can help assess actual risk in ways a blog post can’t. The National Domestic Violence Hotline, available at 1-800-799-7233 or thehotline.org, is staffed around the clock and can help think through safety planning specifically, separate from the broader emotional work this article addresses. Practicing a new boundary isn’t the same task as staying safe around a person who may respond to that boundary with escalation, and conflating the two can put someone in real danger.

For most of the boundary work I do with clients like Radka and Ilanit, the practicing happens somewhere lower-stakes than the original relationship: in therapy, with a trusted friend, in a support group, or in small everyday moments like the lunch invitation Radka almost declined out of old habit. That’s not a lesser form of the work. It’s usually the wiser sequence, because it lets the nervous system practice new experiences of safety before it’s asked to hold a boundary somewhere the stakes are higher.

I also want to name a distinction I make often in session, because it tends to relieve pressure rather than add to it. Setting a boundary and getting the outcome you hoped for are two different things, and conflating them sets survivors up to measure their own progress by someone else’s reaction, which was exactly the dynamic that made boundaries dangerous in the first place. A boundary is something you do. How another person responds to it’s information about them, not a verdict on whether you did it correctly. I’ve had clients hold a beautifully clear, calm boundary and still get met with anger or silence, and I’ve had to remind them, more than once, that the boundary still counted. It was still theirs. The other person’s reaction didn’t undo it.

This distinction matters even more when the person on the other end of a boundary has a history of reacting to limits with escalation. In those specific situations, and only a licensed professional working directly with you can assess whether yours is one of them, the calculus changes. Sometimes the wisest boundary is an internal one, a private decision about your own future contact or availability, communicated indirectly or through reduced access rather than a face-to-face declaration. That isn’t weakness or avoidance. In situations involving real risk, it can be the safest and most self-respecting option available.

Judith Herman’s three-stage model remains the throughline here: safety first, then remembrance and mourning, then reconnection with ordinary life. You can’t build a sturdy boundary on a nervous system that doesn’t yet believe it’s safe, and no amount of correct information changes that sequencing.

Ilanit, several months into this work, tells me about a Tuesday when a former colleague asked her for a last-minute favor. “I said no,” she tells me. “Just, no, I can’t this week. And I felt sick for about ten minutes afterward. But I didn’t take it back.” That’s not a triumphant ending. It’s a data point, and in my experience, the accumulation of data points like that one is what recovery actually looks like, far more than any single dramatic confrontation.

Rebuilding this capacity isn’t linear, and it’s not fast. It’s a spiral, not a straight line, anchored in your body’s own timeline rather than anyone else’s expectations for how quickly you should be able to just say no.

I think of Radka’s kitchen-floor journal entry and Ilanit’s small, sick-feeling no to a former colleague as the same kind of evidence, gathered from two different lives. Neither moment made headlines. Neither one felt triumphant while it was happening. But strung together over months, moments like these are what actually rewrites a nervous system’s prediction about what happens after you say no. Not a single dramatic stand, but a long accumulation of smaller, survivable ones.

If you’re trying to build boundaries after narcissistic abuse and finding that “just say no” collapses the moment you try it, I want to name why. With someone who doesn’t respect your limits, a boundary isn’t a polite request they’ll honor. It’s a decision you make about what you’ll do, regardless of their response. That’s a different and harder skill, and the fact that the simple advice hasn’t worked isn’t evidence that you’re weak. You can hold compassion for how hard this is and, at the same time, keep practicing the small, concrete limits that protect you. Both can be true at once. This piece is educational and isn’t a diagnosis or a substitute for care from a licensed professional. If you’re in an abusive situation, you deserve support from people trained to help, and you can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. When you’re ready for support in this, I’m here.

Warmly,
Annie

Warmly, Annie

Related Reading

• Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
• Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
• Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
3. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
4. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. PMID: 40735382.
5. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Fearful-avoidant attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby’s unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
6. Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Badenoch, Bonnie. Being a Brain-Wise Therapist. W. W. Norton & Co., 2008.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
• Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W., 2018.

Medical Disclaimer