Boundaries mostly working

What this means

Your answers land in the low range, which here means your boundaries are mostly doing their job. You can say what you do not want, the limit tends to survive contact with someone who would rather it moved, and you can care about a person without taking their problem home as your own.

It is worth being precise about what a low score is not. It is not a measure of how often you say no. Someone who refuses everything and someone who agrees to everything can both be paying a high price, and this scale is built to catch both, which is why several of the statements describe walls rather than gaps. A low total means the three parts are in workable proportion for the life you are actually living, not that you are good at holding people off.

The three parts move independently. Naming is whether you can say the limit out loud, in words, at the time. Holding is whether it stays put when the other person is disappointed, annoyed or persistent. Permeability is whether you can tell your feelings from theirs. Plenty of people land low overall and still have one part carrying less than the others: fluent at saying no to a colleague and mute with a parent, or clear and firm and still soaked through by everyone else's mood.

So the useful thing to read here is not the total. It is the one or two statements you answered worst inside an otherwise low score. That is where the pressure sits, and it is usually attached to one specific relationship rather than to you in general.

What to do next

Check the exception rather than the average. Most people in this range have a single relationship where none of the above applies. Boundaries are not a trait you carry around; they hold or fail in a particular room with a particular person, and the one that fails is the one worth thinking about.

If there is an exception like that, get concrete before anything else: what the limit actually is, in one sentence, and what you will do if it is not respected. A limit without that second half is a request, and requests depend on the other person agreeing.

Keep an eye on the permeability statements over the next month. That is the part that slides without announcing itself, usually during a stretch when someone close to you is struggling and the line between supporting them and managing them quietly disappears.

If there is a conversation you have been putting off, Lovon can help you work out the wording before you have it.