When Tolerance Becomes Enabling: The Value of Boundaries and Consequences

Tolerance, resilience and communication are generally presented as inherently positive qualities. We are encouraged to tolerate differences, become more resilient, communicate better and keep trying to understand each other, as though the problem in every dysfunctional relationship could ultimately be solved by adding more patience, more empathy and more communication.

I think this perspective is incomplete, because none of these qualities is particularly useful without discernment.

Tolerance can be valuable when it allows different people, needs and perspectives to coexist without requiring uniformity. Resilience can help us move through difficulty without being defined by it. Communication can create the conditions for understanding, clarification and genuine connection. The problem begins when these concepts are treated as absolute virtues and therefore applied regardless of context, reciprocity or consequences.

At that point, tolerance can become enabling, resilience can become an ability to endure situations that should probably be changed, and communication can become an exhausting attempt to establish a connection with someone who has no real interest in meeting us there.

Communication requires someone willing to understand

I work in communication, so I obviously believe in its importance. I also believe that one of the most important communication skills is recognising when communication has reached its limit.

We often assume that misunderstanding is primarily a problem of language: perhaps we have not explained ourselves clearly enough, perhaps we should choose different words, provide more context, regulate our tone or make another attempt. Sometimes this is true, and changing the way we communicate can completely change the outcome of an interaction.

Sometimes, however, the problem is not that the other person cannot understand what we are saying. Understanding us would require them to question the interpretation they need to maintain, the role they have assigned to us or, more deeply, something about themselves.

This distinction matters.

There is a considerable difference between communicating with someone who is struggling to understand us and communicating with someone who needs to misunderstand us in order to preserve an existing psychological equilibrium.

In the second situation, improving our communication indefinitely does very little, since the obstacle is no longer primarily communicative. We are dealing with resistance.

The ego has a protective function: it organises identity, beliefs and the narratives through which we interpret ourselves and reality. When new information threatens that structure, the natural response is not always curiosity. It can be rejection, projection, distortion or an attempt to make the other person conform again to the familiar role that restores the previous equilibrium.

This is why some conversations seem to repeat themselves endlessly despite increasingly precise explanations. We keep treating the situation as a communication problem while the other person is treating it as an identity problem.

You cannot communicate someone into wanting to see

There is a widespread assumption that greater empathy and better communication can resolve almost any relational conflict. I find this assumption particularly dangerous when it places responsibility for connection almost entirely on the person who is already making the greatest effort to create it.

Communication requires reciprocity, even when that reciprocity is imperfect. It requires at least some willingness to receive information that may contradict our existing interpretation, to tolerate discomfort and to consider the possibility that our perception may be incomplete.

Without that availability, communication becomes progressively less useful.

You can explain your intentions, clarify what you meant, acknowledge your mistakes, listen to the other person’s perspective and change your behaviour when change is appropriate. What you cannot do is force another person to examine the psychological function that their interpretation of you is serving.

At some point, continuing to explain yourself can even reinforce the dynamic.

If someone repeatedly devalues you, distorts what you say or requires constant validation while refusing to examine the insecurity that produces that need, your continuous availability can become part of the mechanism that allows the behaviour to continue. You may believe that you are being compassionate, patient or emotionally mature while, in practice, you are protecting another person from the consequences of their choices.

This is where boundaries become relevant.

The boundary resolves that contradiction.

It gives the other person a more accurate reflection of what their choices produce in reality.

They may dislike that reflection. They may interpret it as rejection, cruelty, selfishness or lack of empathy. They may still refuse to examine their behaviour. A boundary does not guarantee awareness, and consequences do not automatically produce change.

They do, however, create the possibility of change by removing our participation in the mechanism that was preventing it.

Unconditional love does not require unconditional access

This is also where I think the concept of unconditional love is frequently misunderstood.

Loving someone without trying to control who they are does not logically require supporting every expression of who they currently choose to be. Accepting that another person has the right to make their own choices also means accepting that those choices have consequences and that we have an equivalent right to make choices about our own participation.

Otherwise, what we call unconditional love becomes strangely one-directional: one person is free to behave according to their wounds, fears, needs and unresolved patterns, while the other is expected to demonstrate love by absorbing the consequences.

I do not consider this love. I consider it a suspension of discernment.

If I genuinely recognise another person as autonomous, I also recognise their responsibility for what they choose. Constantly protecting someone from the relational consequences of their behaviour can therefore become a subtle way of denying their agency.

We cannot simultaneously insist that adults are responsible for themselves and then treat every consequence of their choices as something from which they must be protected.

Sometimes allowing someone to lose access to a relationship they continuously devalue is the clearest information we can give them.

What they do with that information remains theirs.

Resilience is useful only when we ask what we are being resilient for

I have similar reservations about the way resilience is often discussed.

Resilience is useful when it helps us adapt to difficulties that cannot immediately be avoided or changed. It becomes considerably less useful when it is celebrated as the ability to tolerate indefinitely what should instead be questioned, confronted or left behind.

I’ll be brutally honest: resilience, as it’s often praised, seems a lot like a trap set by manipulators to entice victims into tolerating certain abuses.

I believe, however, that resilience should be an exception and, if anything, an investment that must yield a return: I endure and adapt for a while, judiciously, and in exchange I gain something (first and foremost, ideally, a way out of the difficult situation that required this temporary “sacrifice”).
I call this the ROI of resilience: instead of asking, “How much can I endure?”, ask, “Why am I enduring this, for how long, and what should it enable me to achieve?”.
Resilience without a return on investment (ROI) is, therefore, merely a pointless sacrifice that benefits only a manipulative narcissist – it may serve an abusive partner, but also an employer, a dysfunctional family, an organization, or even a social system that prefers to teach people to adapt rather than change the conditions that make that adaptation necessary.

Being capable of surviving a dysfunctional environment does not make that environment healthy, and increasing our capacity to withstand it does not necessarily represent growth.

This distinction applies to relationships, families, workplaces and even entire social systems. If the only proposed solution to a harmful environment is to make individuals more resilient, responsibility quietly moves from the system producing the harm to the person experiencing it.

The same mechanism appears in interpersonal relationships. Instead of asking whether a dynamic is reciprocal, respectful and sustainable, we ask whether we could become more patient, less reactive, more tolerant or better at managing our emotions.

Those can all be useful questions, but they are not the only questions.

We also need to ask whether continuing to adapt is actually the appropriate response.

Resilience is functional when it increases one’s future ability to break free, change, regain autonomy, or achieve something that justifies the cost incurred. It becomes dysfunctional when it serves primarily to make an unsustainable situation more sustainable, without changing its underlying conditions.

Discernment includes recognising incompatibility

Not every conflict indicates dysfunction, and not every incompatibility needs to be resolved.

Two people can have different values, levels of awareness, priorities, needs or ways of relating without either of them being inherently wrong. The insistence that every difference must eventually be reconciled can itself become a form of control.

Sometimes understanding another person more deeply leads to greater connection. Sometimes it leads to the recognition that the relationship cannot continue in the same form.

Both outcomes can represent successful communication.

We often treat communication as successful only when it preserves the relationship, but this assumes that preservation should always be the objective. I would argue that the purpose of conscious communication is to make reality clearer. Once reality becomes clearer, the appropriate decision may be connection, renegotiation, distance or separation.

Clarity does not owe us the outcome we prefer.

This is why discernment matters more to me than tolerance as an abstract value. Discernment asks us to observe what is actually happening instead of automatically applying a moral rule that tells us what a “good”, loving, resilient or empathetic person should tolerate.

It also requires us to examine our own ego, since remaining in a dysfunctional dynamic can serve an identity just as much as creating one. We may need to be needed, to be perceived as understanding, to rescue, to prove that we are different from the people who hurt us, or to maintain the belief that enough love can eventually make another person change.

At that point, our tolerance is no longer entirely about them.

It is also telling us something about ourselves.

Boundaries give reality something words cannot

There is a point at which another explanation adds no new information.

You have communicated. The other person has received enough information to know how their behaviour affects you. They may disagree with your interpretation, which is their right, but disagreement does not create an obligation for you to continue participating in the same dynamic.

The next piece of information may therefore need to come from reality rather than from another conversation.

Distance can be information. Reduced access can be information. The end of a relationship can be information. None of these outcomes needs to be used strategically to manipulate another person into changing; in fact, the moment a boundary becomes a technique for obtaining a particular reaction, it stops being a genuine boundary and becomes another form of control.

A boundary concerns what I will do in response to a situation I can no longer participate in. What the other person does afterwards belongs to them.

They may use the consequence to question themselves, recognise a pattern and change. They may repeat exactly the same pattern with someone else. They may construct a narrative in which you are entirely responsible for what happened.

Their interpretation does not determine whether your boundary was legitimate.

There is a particular form of maturity in accepting that another person’s process may require consequences you cannot prevent without sacrificing yourself, and that their evolution is ultimately outside your control.

Communication matters enormously, but communication also includes knowing when there is nothing left to explain.

Tolerance has value, but only when we remain capable of recognising what we are tolerating and why.

Resilience has value, but only when it serves our ability to live rather than merely increasing our ability to endure.

Love has value, but love without discernment can easily become participation in someone else’s unresolved dynamics.

Sometimes the most respectful thing we can do for another person, and for ourselves, is to stop interfering with the feedback their own choices are already producing, and accept the incompatibility, rather than wear ourselves out trying to put up with it.