How to set boundaries as an Asian American
Clinical contribution by Israa Nasir, Anise Health Director of Clinical Strategy
“Setting boundaries” has become an ultra-buzzy concept. Under many-a-TikTok video you’ll find comments suggesting boundaries as the go-to for any interpersonal issue.
Fighting with your mom? Set a boundary!
Moved in with your partner and feeling suffocated? Set a boundary!
Snowed under at work? You guessed it… set a boundary!
Boundaries are an incredibly valuable tool to keep your relationships healthy and prioritize your mental wellbeing. But to use them effectively you have to first understand what they are, the challenges they can present, and how to actually go about setting and upholding them.
As an Asian American, the way you feel about and implement boundaries can be heavily influenced by culture, family dynamics, and what you were taught growing up. You might find that the typical Western advice on boundaries doesn’t always fit your experience. Telling your mom she’s “toxic” or cutting off a family member might sound neat and tidy on social media, but in real life? It can clash with cultural values of family obligation, respect, and interdependence.
This guide unpacks why boundaries can be challenging for Asian Americans, what boundaries are, why they matter even for our culture, and how to set them in ways that feel authentic to your values, not just imported from a social media trend of self-care.
Challenges of setting boundaries as an Asian American
Intimacy as involvement
In an Asian American household, you may find that your family feels entitled to your time, or opinions on your choices and personal life. Keeping things to yourself or wanting to share without receiving feedback can seem like dishonour or disrespect.
Within Asian American cultures, sharing opinions and providing solutions is one of the most common love languages. Intense interdependence is often what allowed our communities to thrive as immigrants outside their countries of origin.
Where expressing emotions and physical affection may not always come naturally, Asian Americans typically show support through problem-solving and action. Immigrant families also often have a history of uncertainty and scarcity, meaning a certain anxiety around providing security and abundance for their children as a form of love. What you view as a frustrating habit of chiming in with opinions on your future and (usually) unsolicited advice, might be the best way they know how to connect with you.
Clash of cultural boundaries
Living as an Asian American child of immigrants, you often face conflicting definitions of respect. Asian culture may actually impose some boundaries on you that feel incongruous with American culture, like ways of greeting and speaking to one another that are more reserved and less intimate. Simultaneously, American culture may lean towards boundaries that contradict your Asian norms, like being more reluctant to invite new people home for dinner, or being more independent from your parents. Navigating these dualities can obscure your intuition on what boundaries feel right for you.
Plus, you may face judgement from one side or the other, with American friends viewing your family’s behaviour as invasive and violating your privacy, while your Asian family could view your American friends as lacking deference and respect.
Family as an excuse
In Asian cultures, while there can be many expectations on how we behave with family, it can also be used as a justification for unpleasant behaviours. Shouting and arguing in the home can be dismissed with “we’re family, we fight,” while aggression can get swept under the rug with “that’s just what your father’s like”. (There can also be a more heavily gendered lens to family dynamics in Asian households). Essentially, family can be used as an excuse not to have boundaries: We don’t need to save face with each other, because we’re stuck with each other regardless.
While it may be difficult to counteract years of cultural norms, you can start to explain your boundaries to your family by showing them—and asking for—the same love and respect that you would a friend. If we wouldn’t shout at friends or give unsolicited advice to them out of respect (and potentially shame), why should we do it to each other? Shouldn’t we love each other and respect family even more than friends?
Flexing an under-used muscle
All of these factors can add up to boundaries feeling deeply unfamiliar or uncomfortable to you, not just in the family context, but with partners, friends, and in the workplace, too.
If you decide to implement them in your life, you may find yourself frustrated with how unnatural it feels to ask that your emotions and desires be respected, or even to stand strong in the face of pushback or learn how to navigate it. The best thing you can do for yourself is acknowledge that you are doing something brand new. Just as you wouldn’t expect to jump in a pool for the first time and pull off an olympic lap of the butterfly, it’s unreasonable to expect yourself to be an expert in the realm of boundaries.
Even when you become more used to it, there’s no “right” or “perfect” way to do it, as each relationship and situation is nuanced. The real skill is being patient and committed to advocating for yourself calmly and clearly.
What are boundaries?
Boundaries could be defined as rules or lines that you don’t want to be crossed. In reality, they are more nuanced. They are an expression of your needs and a request for the people you interact with to respect them. They’re also like a promise to yourself to uphold your own needs.
For example, when your livelihood is seen as part of the collective well-being, your career moves might feel like a group project. You may need to assert that you can make career decisions on your own, without unsolicited input from your parents. Instead of snapping at them, “Stop telling me what to do!” you could express a boundary by saying, “I’m excited to keep you up-to-date with my job hunting process, and I don’t want any advice right now.”
Our cultures can emphasize the importance of community or being hospitable. That means that you might love having an open door policy in your home, yet find it disorientating when that one friend always shows up totally announced. A boundary could be, “I love when you swing by my place, and it would be super helpful if you could let me know 10 minutes in advance so I can accept. Otherwise, I can’t guarantee I’ll be available, or I may lose momentum on a task I’m half way through.”
You can either provide an explanation of your boundary, or choose to simply express it, particularly if you feel like providing context creates a dynamic where you feel the need to justify your own needs.
Remember, boundaries are not walls to keep people out, but guideposts to help them understand how to have a healthier relationship with you, and if you set them well, they should help, not hinder, your relationships with others, and yourself.
Why boundaries matter
Boundaries keep your relationships healthy and sustainable. That includes your relationship with yourself! They delineate what is important to us, and prevent unnecessary miscommunication, misunderstanding, and resentment from silently building up.
If someone says that boundaries don’t work for Asian cultures, suggest that it’s a valuable way to help others understand you and show up in a way that’s fruitful. Showing up better for people we care about and maintaining relationships are absolutely in line with our values.
On a personal level, boundaries are helpful for protecting your energy, both physical and mental. You only have so much bandwidth in a day, and they help you conserve it for the things and people that matter most.
Essentially, boundaries are a way to feel personal agency over your relationships (vs feeling like they are “happening to you”) and help them thrive. The goal of boundaries is to help your dynamics feel clearer, less tense, and more mutually supportive, so that you don’t end up over-extended, resentful, or burned out. They may seem selfish - especially if you’ve been raised in an Asian American family with an ethos of sacrificing yourself for others, but they can be one of the kindest things you can do for both yourself and the people around you.
Common signs that Asian Americans experience that show you need to set boundaries
Many feelings can be an indicator of unmet needs, and unmet needs can show you where you need boundaries. Here are a few feelings that signal that boundaries could be beneficial to you
Burn out
With expectations around perfection, performance, and showing up for people, it can be easy to over-extend yourself. If you’re feeling drained of energy, reluctant to wake up and get to your day, and apathetic towards things that usually excite you, you could be burnt out. One of the best ways to avoid or remedy this feeling is to be proactive about implementing boundaries.
This could mean saying no to social gatherings that feel like obligations, making your capacity clear at work, or even setting a boundary with yourself around social media, for example, and opting for a calming yoga sequence instead.
Resentment
Resentment often seeps out in unexpected moments. If you find yourself feeling disproportionate anger or frustration towards someone in response to relatively insignificant situations, it’s likely a build up of feelings that have been left unacknowledged.
While expressing your emotions and asking to be treated differently is an important moment of reflection for the other person, this is also an invitation for you to realise you are an active participant in your life. While in some circumstances you are genuinely the victim, in many areas of life it’s empowering to realise we are allowing ourselves to be treated in certain ways, too.
Helplessness or Powerlessness
Some value systems around how we keep relationships or practice respect can influence what we think we’re allowed to do. As we get older and learn our own needs, this can become overwhelming or stifling.
Feeling constantly at the mercy of others or the changing winds of life can be a sign that you could afford to set some boundaries. This feeling can often result from circumstances we feel we can’t change—the job that we have, the parents we’re born with, even the partner we choose that we don’t want to go back on. We think, “They are who they are” or ”It is what it is, so I just have to live with it.” In reality, even if you don’t want to cut off a person or quit a job, there are still ways that you can have a stake in those areas of your life and choose where you want it to go.
How to set boundaries in Asian American contexts
The steps for setting boundaries often look the same across cultures. We’ve put together a guide on identifying the boundaries you should set, how to hold them, and some categories of boundaries to get you thinking about ways to set them.
Knowing the challenges around setting boundaries in our cultures, we might require different strategies around how we hold it.
These differences show up most in two ways: the consequences when your boundaries are crossed, and what your boundaries look like in practice.
On choosing and enforcing consequences
Consequences aren’t punishments or blackmail for keeping boundaries. They’re simply a fundamental part of a boundary: Consequences transform it from pleading requests to a plan of action that comes from a place of self-respect.
The idea of a consequence is that there are two routes to feel better and minimise the impact: the ideal path is to work with the person or scenario, but if that doesn’t work, you always have the option of taking things into your own hands. This goes a long way in minimizing feelings of helplessness or powerlessness
In conversation, this can look like: “If you can’t hold back on giving your input, I’ll start sharing fewer updates until I’ve made my decisions,” or “If I keep getting late-night messages, I think I’ll burn out and the quality of my work will decline.” In practice, though, these conversations might look different. We’ll cover that in the next section.
Altogether, here are some examples of how to communicate why your boundaries matter and what happens if they’re not kept:
Boundaries at work:
“I’ve noticed I feel anxious when I get work messages late at night. That anxiety is making it harder for me to rest and show up motivated the next day. I really value this job and want to do my best work. To get there, I need to disconnect after 7 p.m. If that doesn’t happen, I feel like the quality of my work will start to decline, and I’d like to proactively solve that.”
Boundaries with family:
“I’ve noticed I feel discouraged when I get advice every time I update you on my job search. That discouragement makes me want to share less with you. I value our relationship and I want to keep you involved, but to do that, I need you to just listen for now. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll hold back on sharing details until I’ve made my decisions.”
Boundaries with a partner:
“I’ve noticed I feel a bit drained when we spend all our free time together at home without any personal downtime. Over time, that’s making me less present and less excited during the special moments we do share. I really value our relationship and I want our time together to feel meaningful and fun. To maintain that, I need a little space each day to recharge on my own. If that doesn’t happen, I think I might start pulling away unintentionally, and I don’t want that for us.”
Remember: upholding your consequence is what makes the boundary real. If you don’t follow through, others learn that your boundaries are negotiable. Enforcing them consistently isn’t about punishing someone else, it’s about keeping your word to yourself and being proactive about your well-being.
The reality of practicing boundaries in Asian American contexts
We can only control our own actions. Boundaries are tools to do that. They let us request how people act around us but in the end, they may still act in ways that cross our limits.
Regardless of whether you follow through to enforce your boundaries or not, people may refuse to learn or it could simply take them a long time to adjust and relearn new ways of interacting. Life may still demand we keep these relationships, especially if our livelihoods are tied to it, or for in-laws or even children who are in your care.
Western values alone won’t always meet our needs and contexts. We still hold values from our cultures and may need strategies that fit our lives. Yes, confrontation and discomfort are necessary parts of life. In Western cultures, confrontation is more acceptable or tolerated than in Asian contexts, even if it isn’t always positive. We may want to figure out the balance of where confrontation makes sense in our relationships, knowing that one set of our values prefers to avoid it.
That means that sometimes, holding your boundary could be a strategy like redirecting a conversation or removing one’s own self. It can also mean choosing how and what you share about yourself without letting them know that you’ve decided to withhold information.
Clinically trained therapist and Anise Director of Clinical Strategy, Israa Nasir says “Western models will always tell you that in order to be authentic, you have to be 100% transparent. I think we have to be discerning about what is appropriate at what time and for whom.” We know that trauma dumping isn’t necessarily authentic but having no sense of boundaries. Taking a similar framework for our families, it might mean sharing half-truths about our lives.
For example, if someone keeps pressing about when you’re going to have children, you can sidestep by bringing up health issues. A purely Western perspective with no cultural context might perceive this as lying when it’s a way of holding onto your peace and agency.
Protecting your sense of self still fits into Asian value systems. It’s just a part of managing our relationships so that we can care for each other better.
