Boundaries, Coregulation, and The Myth of Emotional Independence

I’ve spent enough time on TikTok’s mental health corner to come across hundreds of videos with hashtags like #traumadumping, #toxicpeople, #protectyourenergy, #emotionalvampire, or #choosingmyself. They rack up thousands of views, with content creators giving advice for identifying when someone else’s emotions or needs are too much, and what to do to keep them from bleeding into my own life.

There is, of course, a time and place for these kind of #boundaries. Some relationships are basically corrosive, and some people will take as much as you let them. Setting limits (or cutting ties altogether) might very well be the only way to protect your own wellbeing. 

But most of my relationships don’t rise to that level of threat. 

And yet I can’t find any trending videos that give me language for staying in relationships and friendships and communities, for showing up through the ups and downs and coming out of tough times with both people stronger.

We’ve built a rich vocabulary for what to avoid in relationships. And that advice isn’t all wrong. It’s just that, left unbalanced, it’s basically just a prescription for isolation.

From a therapist’s perspective, the imbalance is worrying. Human beings aren’t wired to carry our hardest experiences alone, and real connection (with more than just a therapist) is part of what makes a full and healthy life possible. 

The role of coregulation in relationships and how humans learn emotional balance

The trending language of “emotional independence” suggests that the healthiest version of ourselves is the one least affected by others. Don’t take on someone else’s feelings. Don’t let their bad day bleed into yours. Protect your peace. It sounds like wisdom, and sometimes it is. But if you pull back far enough, it starts to sound like a denial of how we’re biologically wired.

From the moment we’re born, we are impacted by other people’s emotions, and that’s actually a good thing. When an infant cries, their body isn’t able to calm itself down on its own. In fact, it’s not until a caregiver steps in that an infant is able to calm—the caregiver is literally showing their brains how to move from distressed and alarmed to relaxed and safe. Researchers call this coregulation, and it’s the building block of emotional development. The ability to calm down and feel safe is learned only through the presence of another person. At its heart, coregulation in relationships is the process of two nervous systems working together to create safety and stability, allowing each partner to move through stress with greater ease.

Coregulation goes far beyond infancy, though. Studies of interpersonal emotion regulation show that adults still rely on each other to manage stress. A partner’s calm tone can lower your heart rate (a cool feature of humans that scientists have named “social buffering”). According to neuroscience’s “social baseline theory,”  our brains expect the presence of others, and therefore being alone requires more metabolic effort. We are literally built to borrow strength from each other.

Seen this way, being affected by another person’s emotions isn’t a failure of boundaries, it’s just biology. We’re supposed to register distress in someone we care about. We’re supposed to feel it in our own bodies.  And rather than pulling away, we’re supposed to respond in ways that bring both people back to steady ground.

We need each other to be happy

Cutting off relationships might protect you from harm, but it won’t make you happy. Avoidance only takes us so far. If our biology is built on coregulation, and that means we need to steady each other through the ups and downs, then it’s not enough to keep our emotional space “clean.” We also need relationships strong enough to hold us when life gets messy.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed people for more than eighty years, has made the answer about as clear as research ever gets: what matters most for health and happiness isn’t money or career success or even how fit we are. It’s the quality of our relationships. As Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz put it in The Good Life, “Human beings need nutrition, we need exercise, we need purpose, and we need each other.”

But those bonds don’t maintain themselves. “Like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy,” they write. “Our social life is a living system. And it needs exercise.” I think that’s the piece many of us forget. Just like working out, relationship “exercise” doesn’t always feel comfortable. Sometimes it means you have to have a hard conversation. Sometimes it means you have to show up when you’re exhausted. Sometimes it means hearing the same story again, or rearranging your calendar so the people who matter to you don’t always get the leftovers of your time.

The truth is, most of us aren’t very good at this (myself included!). Last year, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called loneliness a public health epidemic, with health effects on par with smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. And when you look at how little we talk about the work of staying, it makes sense. We know how to warn each other about “toxic people.” We don’t know how to celebrate the ordinary, unglamorous ways people hold each other together.

If relationships are what make life worth living, then that has to change. While self-regulation is important, coregulation in relationships demonstrates how shared emotional regulation can foster trust and stability. 

We need to start naming these moments, and we need to make that language just as popular as the advice to walk away. Until we can talk about it (and digest it publicly) we’ll keep mistaking isolation for maturity.

Questions for interdependence

TikTok tells us to decide if a relationship is good for us or bad for us, but that’s too simple. A more helpful question is: how healthy are the relationships I’m part of, and what could I be doing to make them healthier?

Some ties really are corrosive, but others are just underfed. Many are probably pretty solid but need more attention than we’ve been giving. Looking across the landscape instead of zooming in on one person changes what we see, and helps us identify if it’s a “them” problem or an “us” problem.

Here are some questions worth asking:

• When conflict comes up, do I know how to work through it, or do I avoid it?
• Do I make time to reach out to others, or do I only respond when others reach out to me?
• Who in my life could I lean on in a hard season, and do they know they could lean on me too?
• Have I practiced letting people see me need help and noticing when others need help, too?
• Do I notice and tend to the smaller connections like my neighbors, coworkers, or acquaintances that add steadiness to my life?
• Am I showing others the steadiness and presence I hope to receive?

It doesn’t go viral as easily, but community and belonging thrive through presence, reciprocity, and everyday interactions. If we can start talking about these things as openly as we talk about cutting off what’s toxic, we might finally give ourselves the language (and the skills) for happiness and health.