"Just Cut Them Out!" & Other Insta-Advice
Advice like this doesn't just narrow our lives — it makes us less resilient.
I’m Hailey Paige Magee, a life coach who helps people break the people-pleasing pattern and set empowered boundaries.
I, like so many other “influencers,” kickstarted my career (and Instagram account) five years ago by sharing pithy, blunt statements intended to give viewers a “hell-yeah, f***-’em-all, I-deserve-this!” feeling.
The punchier the better.
The more self-righteous the better.
I, like so many of my followers, was desperate for a space to be encouraged in my boundary-setting. I wanted encouragement to stop overextending myself for others’ benefit and to start setting some limits in my relationships.
At the time, statements like
“If they don’t respect your boundaries, cut them out!”
and
“The only people who get upset when you set boundaries are the ones who benefitted from you having none”
and
“If they don’t bring you peace and alignment, they’re not meant for you!”
and
“The only person you can’t live without is yourself!”
felt like permission, like a tiny cheerleading squad custom-designed for me. Time to stop self-sacrificing and take a stand!, they cheered.
I sought these quotes hungrily and shared them eagerly. I snipped misaligned relationships out of my life with the same eagerness Will Ferrell snipped paper snowflakes in Elf.
Fast-forward five years and a lot has changed for me.
I read a fuck-ton. I spent a few semesters in graduate school. I learned that, according to Bowen Family Therapy, cutting off a relationship can be just as dysregulated a way of handling conflict as enmeshment and codependency.
I became familiar with Taoism and Buddhism. I questioned monogamy. I got cancelled by someone I considered a friend. I watched the American political system implode on itself again and again and again.
I set some boundaries too limply and others too heavy-handedly. I consumed not only content that echoed my initial desires but challenged them (@Seerut Chawla, @Clementine Morrigan, more).
A big soup of personal, spiritual, professional, and socio-cultural shifts found me craving—and building a newfound appreciation for—nuance in the personal growth and self-help-isphere.
Today, messaging that encourages cutting people off carte blanche or abandoning relationships because they “don’t soothe your nervous system” rings hollow for me. (*I’m not talking about situations where this advice is applied abusive relationships.)
I’ve learned through personal experience how narrow and limited my life can become if I’m seeking absolute “total love and light” from everything and everyone around me, as Instagram so often suggests.
I’ve also learned through personal experience that this sort of mentality decreases my sense of resiliency because I don’t give myself the opportunity to work through hard situations or sit with, instead of run from, discomfort.
I’ve wanted to talk about this for a while now because, as becomes more apparent each day, this inability to “have the hard conversation” and engage with other people as nuanced human beings is not just a personal or relational issue; it’s a social one.
Black-and-white advice in the selp-help-isphere seems be a microcosm of the black-and-white dehumanization I see at the social and political level, too.
Now, I notice how black-and-white messages with a “just cut them out!” mentality:
Encourage us to be uncompromising and “my way or the highway” in relationships
Encourage black-and-white thinking that not only affects our relationships, but our ability to think critically and our ability to see other humans as complex, multi-faceted, and nuanced
Discourage us from working through hard moments with loved ones and friends
Discourage us from questioning how we can use our own internal boundaries to make our relationships feel better (by differently managing our own time, space, energy, and privacy)
Discourage us from getting creative about our boundary-setting and considering all of the ways we could find compromise or design creative solutions to temper discomfort
Discourage us from taking time to experience the beauty of compromise and the deepening of intimacy after working through hard moments together
Limit our own sense of resilience because they discourage us from learning how to tolerate any experience that is less-than-perfect
Give us a false sense of superiority: that others need to operate on our terms at all times, and if they don’t, they’re not good enough
In the past, I think black-and-white advice resonated with me because it was exactly what I wanted to hear.
You see, if you struggle to set boundaries and assert yourself, of COURSE you want relationships to be a perfect fit. When a relationship is a perfect fit, you never have to address your hurts and state your needs. You never have to have “the hard conversation.”
It’s ironic, isn’t it? Advice that’s framed as supposedly advocating for boundary-setting (“just cut them out if it’s not perfect!”) actually discourages people from being in situations where they’d have to actually practice the skills of boundary-setting, self-advocacy, and self-expression. That practice can look like:
Sitting down with someone and talking through how they’ve hurt you
Limiting how much time you spend with a person to make the relationship feel sustainable
Having different “tiers” of friendship, some with whom you spend a great deal of time and others with whom you spend little
Determining which topics of conversation are fair game for which relationships, and determining which topics would be better kept private
Once we learn that we can trust ourselves to stand up for ourselves, the less we need our relationships to be a “perfect fit” in order to be worth our time.
I now know that even if someone has a behavior I find frustrating or inadvertently hurts me, I can set boundaries, express myself, and state my limits.
I don’t need my relationships to “always feel good to my nervous system,” because I understand that I can influence my relationships with boundaries, honesty, and transparency. I’m not a passive participant in my relationships anymore; I’m a co-creator.
I also know that I can control my own space, time, energy, and level of engagement. I have firmer emotional boundaries and have also developed self-soothing skills to tolerate temporary discomfort.
Barring abusive and actively toxic relationships, I can confidently say that the times I have opted to move through discomfort and talk through challenges, grievances, and resentments with my loved ones have resulted in the deepest and most meaningful, resilient connections in my life.
No doubt, it is the less comfortable path. It means that I have to sit with discomfort more often. I have to speak up and be vulnerable. Sometimes I have to give others the benefit of the doubt, or some grace, and let my ego and sense of self-righteousness go from time to time.
But honestly, it feels more “me.” I feel like seeing in these shades of grey has helped me strike a balance between my values of independence and interdependence; loyalty and self-respect; generosity and self-care; advocacy and acceptance.
Are you craving more nuance these days, too? I will be exploring ideas like this in this new Substack, and I hope you subscribe and join me for the journey! Unlike my Instagram or coaching blog, which are spaces for my professional voice, my writings here will be less educational and more explorational: a combination of me processing my own experiences and reflections—exploring nuance—asking questions, often without answers—and imagining and the implications of adopting more nuance for our relationships, our culture, and our world. These writings will not be published anywhere else.
This really makes sense and helps during these very conflicted and confusing times. I have experienced a lot of loss, including estrangement, so don’t tend to take connection lightly. I have been challenged with several relationships where ideas and what feels like values no longer align. Thank you for this perspective!
I really needed to hear this today. I feel I'm very much in the gray with my partner. He's trying his best to love and rebuild trust but struggles with resentment towards his affair partner for walking away and drinks heavily to cope. I'm trying to set boundaries and determine what my next steps are. This was a nice hopeful reminder.