THE TRUTH ABOUT BOUNDARIES NOBODY TELLS YOU

Episode 7 – The Truth About Boundaries Nobody Tells You

In this raw and deeply personal episode of UNCHARTED, Lisa peels back the layers on something most of us think we understand—boundaries. But not the Instagram-quote, face-mask, “just block him” kind. We’re talking about the soul-cracking, nervous-system-shaking kind of boundaries—the ones that feel more like grief than growth.

Lisa shares her own story of navigating love, in 15-year marriage and then a relationship with addiction, betrayal, and self-abandonment a relationship that inspired her feature film CoinRunnersMovie.com, and a pattern of overloving that many women will recognise. She explores how boundaries can feel like heartbreak, how getting loud is often the last attempt to be heard, and what it really means to choose yourself, especially when it feels like everything is falling apart.

You’ll hear the truths no one talks about:

• Why holding a boundary can feel like betrayal… of you
• How we mistake chaos for connection
• Why “getting loud” doesn’t make you crazy—it makes you human
• And how burning the bridge might actually be the beginning of rebirth

Lisa breaks down the painful reality of letting go of someone you love when they can’t meet you where you are. She talks about the cost of self-abandonment, the grief of shared dreams, and how boundaries aren’t about controlling others—they’re sacred promises to yourself.

This episode is part podcast, part therapy session, and part love letter to every woman who’s ever questioned whether her standards were too high, her voice too loud, or her boundaries too much.

Because you are not too much. You were just in a space too small for your truth.

Whether you’re in the middle of a breakup, trying to break a toxic pattern, or learning to love yourself louder than the silence someone left behind—this episode will meet you right where you are.

And if no one’s told you today:
 You didn’t lose anything that was ever truly yours.
 You’re not selfish for choosing peace.
 And your boundaries?
 They’re not the end.
 They’re the beginning of everything right.

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Transcript

 I'm looking for a woman in finance. Crypto, five four, amber eyes. I'm looking for a woman in finance with crypto. Five, four, amber eyes. I'm looking for a woman in finance. Crypto, five four, amber eyes. I'm looking for a woman in finance. Crypto, five four, amber eyes. I'm looking for a woman in finance. Crypto, five, four.

Amber eyes. I'm looking for a woman in finance. We could fight for amber eyes. I'm looking for a woman in finance. We could fight for Amber. I'm looking for a woman in finance. crypto five four amber eyes. UNCHARTED. Let's go.

 Welcome to Uncharted, the podcast that rips the map right out of your hands and rewrites the rules on money, crypto, psychology, and success. I'm Lisa N. Edwards, crypto trader, investor and entrepreneur with 25 plus years in markets and five multimillion dollar businesses behind me. I've seen bull runs, crashes, scams, celebrity deals, and I'm here to give you the raw, unfiltered truth about building wealth in a system that's rigged unless you learn how to beat it.

And today we're diving into boundaries, self-worth. Emotional power and the game behind the game. The one where your nervous system, not your logic, keeps you stuck. And yeah, we'll take a few detours into healing identity and what it really means to choose yourself. This is unchartered. Let's get started.

  UNCHARTED Let's go.  

 Okay, so today we are talking boundaries, and if you follow me for crypto and trading, this episode may not be for you, so I'm just letting you know now. But if you love psychology as much as I do, let's jump in. So boundaries, I'm exploring the aftermath of what happens, not the kind of, you know, you read in a self-help book when.

There's a checklist of, you know, say, no, stand tall. Do something for yourself. You know, like, take a bubble bath, put a face mask on. Block them. Yeah, yeah. Block them. Forget them. Not that thing, because. Real boundaries don't happen like that. So we're talking about the truth, the stuff you don't see on social media, the stuff that you is behind, the psychology of a boundary and why people set them.

So today's episode might feel sort of more like a therapy lesson or a therapy session than a podcast because we're talking about something we think we all understand until we actually have to do it, because boundaries. They don't always feel empowering, and sometimes they feel like a slow, silent heartbreak.

Sometimes they feel like you're walking away from something you prayed would work, and other times they feel like grief. They feel like losing someone who's still alive. So boundaries, you know, not the cute little quotes that you get. You know, on Instagram, not that stuff, real boundaries. Like, you know, if somebody cheats, that's the end of a relationship.

Somebody does something that absolutely breaks your boundaries. What's the aftermath of that? So I'm talking about the kind that wreck you before they rebuild you. The kind that leave you sobbing on the floor, the kind that make you feel like the bad guy. Even though all you did was choose yourself when the other person wasn't choosing you.

So sometimes the hardest thing to do is love yourself. And today I'm going to explain what I've learned about setting boundaries, especially when you love someone and especially when that person you love the most. Should always be, you. You should love yourself more than anyone else, and that's why boundaries matter.

So, let me start with this. You set the boundary and your relationship ended. You didn't actually lose them. You lost the illusion. So the illusion that they were ever gonna step up, the illusion that if you love them enough, waited long enough, cried hard enough, they finally meet you where you've been standing this whole time, finally rise to your standards.

And your standards are not too high. They're your standards, but that illusion, it needed to die. So click your heels , Dorothy. This is not Kansas anymore. It's literally not

 have a feeling. We're not in Kansas anymore.

So now you're here. You're not in Kansas anymore, holding space for the truth and the truth. She's  brutal, and a beautiful thing. The truth will wreck you and then it will rebuild you, and one day she'll hand you peace. Let's talk about what that process actually looks like and let's talk about the lies we tell ourselves, the self betrayal.

So no one really prepares you for how boundaries can feel like abandonment they feel like you are abandoning yourself. So you finally say, I won't accept this anymore. That's it. That's a deal breaker. And even though you know it's right, it feels like you've just betrayed yourself because part of you still wanted to hold on.

You expected them to fight, for you to show up, to prove your boundary mattered, but they didn't. And you're left in silence wondering if you made a mistake when all you did was choose you, you finally chose you. So for me, this journey started long before I even knew what a real boundary was. So I stayed in a 15 year marriage that both of us had emotionally checked out probably 8, 9, 10 years before.

And we told ourselves we were doing it for the kids. We told ourselves that, you know, this was the right thing to do. But we were only just surviving and surviving in silence and holding onto something that had already died, and the alternative was just too confronting. So then I found myself with someone who I loved a lot until when it got into an emotional sort of issue. For him, his advice was numbing and in this case drugs. And at the time he lived in Thailand, so there was easy access. And when I found out I put him into rehab, probably didn't wanna be there. I paid and then he promised he'd get better. He said he'd stop the drugs, stop stealing the money for the drugs, which I constantly had to pay back.

He looked me in the eye and told me everything I wanted to hear, and I believed him. And we broke up again through really traumatic circumstances. Then six months, I came back. He was still in recovery and we had screaming arguments about him buying drugs in the streets of Copenhagen where we lived at the time.

I screamed hoping he would hear me, and he still did what he wanted to do anyway. He bought and used the drugs because he was still addicted. Because that's what trauma does. It confuses love with loyalty, and it makes you question your own truth. And in those moments of grief, you start to doubt yourself.

You start to think maybe you are too harsh, maybe you should have waited. Maybe if you go back it'll be different. But it just wasn't. So coming back didn't fix anything. Well, it did for a while until it didn't. It only confirmed what I already knew. I believed  in him because he didn't. I wrote a whole movie about it.

So CoinRunnersMovie.com if you wanna check it out. Um. And I gave it everything, my heart, my trust, my future. But I had a boundary, a clear one. If you go back to drugs, this relationship ends. And when he crossed that line, he'd been clean for almost a year. When he relapsed and I left and it literally broke me, it ripped me through the middle, in a way I can't even explain, but.

I kept my word to myself and I ended it. That boundary. It was never the problem. The problem was me. So the problem was abandoning my boundaries before he had fully healed and going back. So I wasn't just about to do that a second time, but because that boundary had been so painful to hold, so absolute, my next relationship, new guy, I softened.

He was also an amazing man and I loved him too much, if that's even possible. Can you love somebody too much? I think you can, because some of that love needs to go to you, not all to them. So he had a lot going on as well, and I made excuses for him. I think I was in Bob, the builder mode. You know, the, he can fix it, and I was the, she can fix it, Bob the builder, she can fix it.

But that's another podcast. So I told myself I was being more understanding, more flexible, but in reality, I was letting things slide. That should have been deal breakers. I didn't speak up, then shrink back down, and then I'd speak up. Shrink back down. I'd say, this doesn't feel right. This hurts me when you do this.

Say this and be met with withdrawal, manipulation, silence, and every time it chipped away at my sense of safety, I started watching videos about avoidant men, how to speak to them, how to soothe them. How to edit myself to be less, to be less emotional, less expressive, less me. But every time I shrank, the pain got louder.

The pain got louder. That's the part no one speaks about. It's not just the discomfort, it's the pain. It's the deep childhood wounds rising to the surface, screaming for your attention. Yes. You, the person looking back at yourself in the mirror because when the pain gets louder, eventually, so do you.

That's what happened. That's why you start raising your voice, not to attack, but to be seen, to be understood, to matter in a space that kept making you feel invisible. And for a moment, getting louder feels like reclaiming power, but in truth. It rarely lands that way. Instead, it opens more wounds. It pushes that other person away, and you are crazy.

Comes out the version of you shaped by trauma, not intentionally, but it comes out suddenly and you are left feeling more unloved more misunderstood and more abandoned than before. And that cycle, it hurts like hell because it confirms your deepest fear that even when you try to be heard. No one listens.

No one stays. You just feel abandoned. So that's what I've been doing. I've  been fixing the childhood wounds, but my nervous system was wired for chaos. By then, it was screaming, just hold on. Maybe he'll change tomorrow. But I've learned how to love through hope and not love through truth.

And that's not the best way. And you feel like the villain in your own story. Like you gave up, but you didn't give up. You woke up, you stopped editing yourself to keep the peace. You stopped twisting your needs into knots so someone else could stay comfortable. You finally said, this isn't working for me, 

But that's not the romantic moment. Empowerment influences talk about, so like the Let Them theory, and don't get me wrong, I love Mel Robin's book, but there's a time and a place for letting people, and there's a time and a place for boundaries. She does touch on that in the book, and that takes emotional intelligence.

So that's knowing the difference and. It's messy, it's painful. It's you crying on the floor, doubting if you are even allowed to want what you want,  and that's normal. That's human. No one warns you about setting a boundary. That might mean they walk away or worse. You kick them out five times and they ghost you they trigger everything in you that never healed from childhood, and then when it becomes overwhelming, you beg them back. They stay, but they withdraw and the cycle continues. And now you're in the echo chamber of your own silence, wondering if maybe you were too much, too emotional, too needy, too loud, too strong, too whatever.

So here's the truth. You were never too much of anything. Maybe you didn't have all the tools you needed, maybe you were still learning. And more than likely. They were too unwilling. You didn't lose a soulmate. You lost a mirror that only showed your reflection when it suited them.

And now you're standing here trying to hold the shattered pieces of your old story and wondering, who am I if I'm not fighting for someone to love me properly? So let me tell you. You are someone who finally decided that you matter. And boundaries aren't about controlling others, they're about protecting your peaks.

So I wanna reinforce something important here. We need to get something straight. A boundary isn't a way to change someone. It's, even though, I'll be honest, I believe that at times it's not a way to change someone. And it's not, if I say this, maybe they'll realize it's definitely not a way to change them, because they usually don't.

So a boundary is your line in the sand. It's like, this is my side, this is your side. That's the boundary. It's a fence. Think of it as a fence. So it's no threat. It's not an ultimatum. It's a sacred promise to yourself. It says, these are my standards and I will no longer accept being disrespected, lied to, or kept in the shadows while other women linger in the picture thinking they can have a chance. Verbal abuse, drugs, or whatever the situation you've gotten yourself into. It's not about controlling them, it's about choosing you. Even when it hurts, even when it costs you the version of love you thought you had, the fairytale, the everything. It's you saying to your soul, to your nervous system, I'll no longer abandon myself just to make someone comfortable.

Not to avoid conflict, not to keep the peace, not to hold, the love that only ever loved the quiet version of you, not the real you, the unedited, messy you, because that person is beautiful. And when you finally make that promise and mean it, something in you shifts, and it doesn't always feel like strength in the moment.

Sometimes it feels like your chest is being cracked wide open. Sometimes it feels like the oxygen is being sucked from the room because that boundary doesn't just separate you from them. It separates you from the version of you that was willing to disappear to be loved. That allows you to be seen. So setting a boundary and upholding it allows you to be the little you inside of you that you've been betraying that boundary distinguishes who you've been and who you are becoming.

And oh my God, it hurts, especially when all your dreams were built with them in mind. When your future had their name written all over it, and when your life you were chasing just wasn't yours, it was ours and you loved every part of that, even the messy version of them, but they just didn't feel the same and they just didn't respect your boundaries.

 You had to let go of the late night plans, the shared goals, the business ideas, movie scripts, quiet moments, you.  thought meant forever. Inside jokes. Him playing the piano that filled the house, the first three chords of a song played on the guitar that, you know, said he'd never let go.  You are letting go of all of that.

It's not just letting go of a person, it's letting go of a future you desperately wanted to believe in. But here's what nobody tells you. That future, the one you imagined with them was never going to happen the way that was, not in the way you needed. Because if we are real, you wouldn't be standing here having to beg for consistency, explain  why respect matters, or justify your own feelings.

So the boundary. It's not the end, it's the beginning. It's the moment you stop negotiating your worth. It's you finally whispering to your younger self, the version of you who was always hoping, always fixing, always waiting. I've got us now I won't let us go for love. That makes us feel small and yeah, it's sad, it's lonely and there's grief, but there's also truth. There's clarity, and there's a kind of peace that only shows up once you've burned the illusion to the ground. Someone told me that I was burning a bridge here and, but in reality, I was setting fire to the path that kept leading me back to pain. I was creating space for rebirth. Because sometimes fire isn't distraction. It's transformation. So think of when a fire goes through a forest and you know, some seeds need fire to grow. That's what's happening here. And maybe there is no bridge left to cross. Your person needs to swim. He needs to learn how to swim. Maybe that's the deal here.

Maybe that's a lesson they need to learn to treat you better. So that's what a boundary is. It's saying, this is what I will accept, and if you can't give that to me, you're not welcome in my life. And that shift, it's not about being over it, it's being honest enough to say, I loved you deeply. I hoped completely, and I still choose me.

And when you get to that place, you stop looking back at someone to catch up. You start walking forward toward the kind of love that needs to meet you there, whether it's that person or whether it's somebody new. So where you don't have to scream to be heard, where your dreams aren't dismissed, where your softness isn't taken for granted.

And that boundary. That was the beginning of everything, right and the second you realize that something shifts in you, not instantly, not all at once, but gradually, like a tide pulling back from your own shoreline. You stop begging, you stop over explaining, you stop managing someone else's feelings at the cost of your own.

And that's when your life begins, not the one you built on potential and maybe some what ifs, but the one rooted in what is. Here's another truth no one tells you about. Boundaries can feel lonely. Like you're standing in an empty room where someone used to live or an empty house where someone used to live.

As your nervous system resets, you'll miss the chaos, the dopamine hits, even the conflict, because even the conflict was connection. In a weird way. It was a familiar pattern, but real love is patient and kind, not self-serving because when someone took up so much space in your nervous system, that absence feels like silence.

And silence can be deafening. But silence is where healing begins. You'll feel that space with your voice, with your needs, with your dreams that no longer revolve around being chosen by someone else. You'll start choosing you. And let me tell you something else. The first time someone respects your boundary without punishment, without it turning into a guilt trip or a disappearing act, the moment will feel like.

Safety like home. So what does choosing yourself actually look like? Sometimes it looks like not replying. Sometimes it looks like saying, this doesn't work for me, and sitting in the following discomfort . Or sometimes it looks like we are broken up and you don't get a backstage pass to my life anymore.

So. That can be with friends as well. So this is not just romantic partners. Sometimes you need to set boundaries with friends and family, and sometimes it's deleting that person's numbers. Sometimes it's therapy. It's been a lot of therapy for me, and to be honest, I've learned a lot about myself over the last few years since the stuff with Copenhagen. That's been a long journey and sometimes blocking people. Maybe it's him. Maybe it's his brother, his mom, dad. Not because they will call, but because you might. And sometimes it's just letting the tears fall without rushing to fix them. Choosing yourself isn't glamorous. It's not Instagramable 24 7.

It's real work. It's standing in front of the mirror and saying. I'm worthy of love just as I am and my boundaries are reasonable even if you don't want to agree with them. And if they couldn't see that, that's not your job to make them. So I see all of these young girls on Instagram and I often like, comment on a lot of the posts.  saying how their boyfriends disrespected them with another girl or done something like that. This is where your boundaries come in and you have to be prepared to walk away. You have to be prepared to lose that person, and that's not going to make any sense until you get to this point.  If you're listening right now and you're sitting in the heartbreak that comes after that boundary, you're not weak.

You are not broken. You're becoming beautiful, recalibrating. You are remembering who you were before the world told. You had to settle for those crumbs. You didn't lose anything that wasn't ever truly yours. You know the quote, if you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was.

 That quote, again, if you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was. That's not just about them, it's about you. You set it free when you stopped chasing, when you held the boundary, when you finally chose yourself over the illusion. That's the let them theory in action.

You are choosing you and letting them be them. That doesn't mean  they have to agree with the boundary. They don't have to, and that's why they may not come back. So you realize that's the illusion. It had to die for you to live in your truth, to stay here, to stay in the truth, hold your boundary even when your voice shakes, because one day someone will meet you there on the other side of that boundary, maybe it's a person you let go of a new improved version of them that loves and respects and prioritize and values you.

Or maybe it's someone new and they'll say. I see you. I've got you. Until then, you've got you. This reminds you that choosing yourself isn't selfish. It's sacred. Thanks for being here with me today, and if this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who needs it. And remember, your peace is not negotiable.  See you next time, and don't forget to check out everything else. All my links are below, all my crypto stuff, all my movie staff, I'll catch you on another social media platform. Thanks for listening.