The Other Side of the Boundary

How the Same Developmental Gap Produces Two Problems at Once

Everything this series has said so far about autistic boundary experience has been told from one direction: the direction of the self whose boundaries are repeatedly crossed, whose limits are overridden or ignored, whose authentic expression has been suppressed in the service of social acceptability. That story is real and it matters and it needed to be told in full before this post could be written.

But it is not the complete story. And the part that has not yet been told is, if anything, more consequential for the relationships autistic people are trying to build and sustain, because it describes something that causes real and repeated harm to real people, and that is almost never discussed in a way that is simultaneously honest about the harm and genuinely compassionate about its origins.

The same developmental gap that produces boundary collapse inward, the self that does not reliably know where it ends and therefore cannot consistently protect its own limits, also produces boundary crossing outward (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Erikson, 1963, 1980; Ryan & Deci, 2017). The autistic person who repeatedly allows their own boundaries to be violated is often, at the same time, repeatedly crossing the boundaries of others. Not necessarily out of disregard. Not out of malice. But out of the same structural absence that makes self-boundary awareness unreliable: the absence of the continuous, embodied, real-time feedback that would make the crossing visible before it happens, or recognizable in the moment it occurs (Bird & Viding, 2014; Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020; Gates et al., 2023).

This is one of the most important things this series has to say, and it requires being said with both clarity and care. Clarity, because the harm is real and denying it does not serve autistic people or the people in relationship with them. Care, because understanding the developmental origins of the pattern is what makes genuine change possible (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Leadbitter et al., 2021).


The Feedback Mechanism That Is Different

To understand why boundary crossing is a structural feature of the autistic developmental pathway rather than a character failing, we need to return to the foundational difference between how autistic and non-autistic people perceive and navigate the social world (Jaswal & Akhtar, 2019; Milton, 2012).

Non-autistic people navigate the social world through what MacMillan has termed body empathy: that immediate, embodied, largely automatic reception of social information from the faces and bodies of others, grounded in high levels of embodied simulation and interoceptive sensitivity and awareness. Body empathy means that the non-autistic person is continuously registering, in their own body and below the level of conscious awareness, something of what the people around them are experiencing. Their comfort, their discomfort, their interest, their withdrawal, the subtle signals of approach and retreat that communicate, in real time, where another person's limits are and how close the interaction is getting to them.

This continuous registration functions as an automatic boundary detection system. The non-autistic person does not have to consciously decide to check whether they are approaching someone's boundary. The check is happening continuously, automatically, through the body empathy feedback loop that has been running since infancy. When a boundary is being approached, the signal arrives before the crossing occurs, and the non-autistic person adjusts, often without being aware that an adjustment has been made.

The autistic person does not have access to that automatic system in the same form. Without the immediacy of body empathy, the signal that a boundary is being approached does not arrive automatically, continuously, and below conscious awareness. It requires more deliberate processing, more explicit information, more time than the speed of social interaction typically allows (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020; Gates et al., 2023; Milton, 2012). By the time the autistic person has processed enough information to recognize that a boundary has been crossed, the crossing has already happened. The response they receive from the other person may be confusion, hurt, withdrawal, or anger, and the autistic person is frequently genuinely uncertain about what produced it (Gates et al., 2023; Sasson et al., 2017).

This is not a failure of empathy in any fundamental sense. Research has consistently found that autistic people have genuine capacity for emotional empathy, for caring about the experiences of others, and for distress when they realize they have caused harm (Bird & Viding, 2014; Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020). What is different is the mechanism through which social and emotional information from others arrives, and the speed and automaticity with which that information is available to guide behavior in real time (Gates et al., 2023; Milton, 2012). The signal is not arriving in time to prevent the crossing. And a boundary detection system that operates on delay, in a social world that moves at the speed of the non-autistic feedback loop, will produce crossings that neither party fully understands (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020; Gates et al., 2023).

How the Developmental History Compounds the Problem

The structural difference in feedback mechanisms is the foundation of the problem. The developmental history that this series has been tracing is what compounds it.

The optimal developmental environment for the autistic pathway would have provided explicit, accurate, and calibrated feedback about the impact of the autistic child's actions on others. Not ambient feedback, not the subtle signals of non-autistic disapproval that arrive through body language and tone and the micro-expressions that body empathy reads automatically, but clear, direct, and genuinely informative feedback that could reach the autistic nervous system through the channels it actually runs on (Gates et al., 2023; Shogren et al., 2021; Thompson-Hodgetts et al., 2023). Feedback that named what had happened, described its impact, and provided enough information for the autistic child to build, deliberately and sequentially, the understanding of others' boundaries that the non-autistic child builds more or less automatically through embodied social experience (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020; Gates et al., 2023).

That feedback is rare. Most of the feedback autistic children receive about boundary crossing arrives through exactly the channels that are least accessible to the autistic nervous system: through the non-autistic social signals of hurt, withdrawal, and displeasure that body empathy reads fluently and that the autistic child, without body empathy, may not register at all (Gates et al., 2023; Milton, 2012; Sasson et al., 2017). The correction environment discussed in Post 2 offered feedback, but it was feedback oriented toward behavioral conformity rather than genuine understanding of others as centered selves with equally real perspectives and equally real limits (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Leadbitter et al., 2021). The over-support environment discussed in Post 3 withheld even that, removing the encounters with others' genuine limits that might have begun building the understanding through direct experience (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Kegan, 1982; Ryan & Deci, 2017).

The bullying that so many autistic children experience in the social environments of childhood and adolescence adds another layer of complication (Cappadocia et al., 2012; Humphrey & Hebron, 2015; Maïano et al., 2016). The autistic child who has learned, through chronic victimization, that the social world is fundamentally unsafe, and who has developed the defensive self-protection described in Post 4, may have even less developmental access to the experience of others as centered selves whose boundaries are worth reckoning with, because the social world has presented itself primarily as a threat to be managed rather than as a collection of equally real people to be genuinely encountered.

By the time the autistic person reaches adulthood, they may be carrying years of accumulated relational experience in which their boundary crossings produced consequences they did not understand, in environments that did not explain those consequences in ways they could receive and use (Gates et al., 2023; Shogren et al., 2021; Thompson-Hodgetts et al., 2023). The working model built from that experience is not a working model oriented toward recognizing others' boundaries. It is a working model oriented toward navigating a social world whose rules feel arbitrary, whose reactions feel unpredictable, and whose signals arrive in a form that is genuinely difficult to read (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Erikson, 1963, 1980; Gates et al., 2023).

What Boundary Crossing Costs Relationally

The relational consequences of repeated boundary crossing are significant, and they deserve to be named directly rather than softened into abstraction.

Relationships depend on both people having a felt sense of safety with the other. That felt sense of safety is built partly through the experience of having one's limits recognized and respected, of being in contact with another person who is genuinely attending to where one stands and adjusting their approach accordingly (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Reis et al., 2004; Reis & Gable, 2015). When that recognition is consistently absent, when bids for space or privacy or changed behavior go unregistered, when the same limits are crossed repeatedly without apparent awareness or adjustment, the relationship begins to feel unsafe in a specific and serious way. The person whose limits are being crossed is not experiencing their partner or friend or family member as malicious. They are experiencing them as someone whose presence requires constant management, whose approach cannot be predicted, and whose attention to the self's own needs consistently overrides attention to the needs of others (Reis et al., 2004; Yew et al., 2023).

Over time, that experience produces the relational outcomes that are well documented in the literature on neurodiverse relationships: withdrawal, resentment, the gradual erosion of trust, and the particular exhaustion of a person who has been trying to communicate their limits through signals that are not being received, who has concluded either that the other person does not care or that something is wrong with their own limits for being so consistently invisible (Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023; Yew et al., 2023).

Neither conclusion is accurate. But neither conclusion is unreasonable given the experience that produced it. And the gap between the autistic person's genuine care for the people they are in relationship with and the relational experience those people are actually having is one of the most painful features of neurodiverse relationship dynamics, for everyone involved (Milton, 2012; Stafford et al., 2023; Yew et al., 2023).

The Double Experience

What makes this aspect of autistic boundary experience particularly complex is that it coexists with everything described in the previous posts. The same autistic person who is crossing others' boundaries without awareness may simultaneously be allowing their own boundaries to be chronically crossed without being able to name or protect them. The self that does not reliably know where it ends is having trouble in both directions at once: unable to consistently hold its own limits, and unable to consistently register the limits of others.

This is not a paradox. It is a description of what happens when the developmental foundation of the boundary sense has not been adequately built. A robust boundary sense is not simply the capacity to say no to others. It is a developed understanding of the self as one centered being among many equally centered beings, each with equally real needs and equally real limits, existing in relationship through the ongoing negotiation of those needs and limits in ways that are genuinely mutual (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Erikson, 1963, 1980; Ryan & Deci, 2017). That understanding requires the developmental experience of both sides: the self's own limits being recognized and respected, and the self recognizing and respecting the limits of others (Kegan, 1982; Ryan & Deci, 2017).

When the developmental environment has not provided the conditions for that understanding to build in either direction, both sides of the boundary experience are compromised simultaneously (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Kegan, 1982; Ryan & Deci, 2017). The self that cannot hold its own limits is often, and for related reasons, the self that cannot reliably register others' limits. And the relationships it enters carry the weight of both difficulties at once, which is part of why Neurodiverse Relationship Dynamics™can be so consistently and so genuinely difficult for everyone involved (Stafford et al., 2023; Yew et al., 2023).

What an Optimal Environment Could Have Done

MacMillan's Spiral and Staircase Model™ points toward what the autistic developmental pathway needed in order to build the boundary sense in both directions.

It needed explicit, accurate, and calibrated feedback about the impact of its actions on others, offered through channels the autistic nervous system could actually receive (Gates et al., 2023; Shogren et al., 2021; Thompson-Hodgetts et al., 2023). Not the ambient signals of non-autistic disapproval, not the subtle withdrawal of social warmth that body empathy reads automatically, but clear and direct information: what happened, how it landed, what the other person experienced, and what a different approach might have looked like. That feedback, offered consistently and without shame, is what allows the autistic developmental pathway to build sequentially the understanding of others' perspectives that the non-autistic pathway acquires more continuously and more automatically (Fletcher-Watson & Bird, 2020; Gates et al., 2023; Leadbitter et al., 2021).

It needed genuine encounters with others as centered selves, in relationships and environments where those others maintained their own limits clearly enough that the autistic child could learn from the encounter, where a crossed boundary produced a response that was informative rather than punishing, where the feedback loop between action and consequence was clear enough to be received and used (Kegan, 1982; Ryan & Deci, 2017; Shogren et al., 2021).
And it needed the kind of holding environment that could name what was happening without locating the problem in the autistic child's character or intentions, that could say clearly and without cruelty: what you just did crossed a limit, here is how it landed, here is what would have worked better, and you are capable of learning this even though it does not come automatically (Kegan, 1982; Leadbitter et al., 2021; Shogren et al., 2021). That combination of honest feedback and genuine confidence in the autistic child's capacity to grow is the developmental condition that allows the staircase to rise in this domain as in every other (Kegan, 1982; Ryan & Deci, 2017).

That environment is rare. Most autistic people have not moved through it. And the consequence, across the developmental arc that this series has been tracing, is a self that arrives at adult relationships without the boundary sense that those relationships require, not from lack of care, but from lack of the developmental conditions that would have built it.

What This Means for Autistic Adults

For autistic adults who recognize themselves in what this post is describing, the developmental framing is important to hold onto, because shame is not a developmental condition that produces growth (Erikson, 1963, 1980; Kegan, 1982). The boundary crossings that have happened in adult relationships are not evidence of bad character. They are evidence of a developmental gap, and developmental gaps, unlike character flaws, can be addressed (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021; Leadbitter et al., 2021; Shogren et al., 2021).

What addressing them requires is the same thing the optimal developmental environment would have provided: explicit, accurate, and calibrated feedback, offered in the spirit of genuine support rather than judgment, about the impact of specific actions on specific people in specific moments (Gates et al., 2023; Shogren et al., 2021; Thompson-Hodgetts et al., 2023). Not general criticism. Not the accumulated weight of relational grievance delivered in a moment of conflict. But clear, direct, and genuinely informative feedback that the autistic nervous system can receive and use, offered consistently enough and patiently enough that the sequential understanding it supports can actually build (Gates et al., 2023; Leadbitter et al., 2021).

That is something that can happen in therapeutic and coaching relationships, and in close friendships where both people understand enough about the autistic developmental pathway to build the right conditions for that learning to occur (Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023). It is not easy work. It requires the therapist, coach, or friend to maintain their own limits clearly enough that crossed limits are named rather than absorbed, while also understanding the developmental origins of the crossing well enough to name them without shaming the person who crossed them (Kegan, 1982; Leadbitter et al., 2021). This developmental work is best done outside of intimate partnerships, where the power dynamics, mutual vulnerability, and relational stakes make the caregiving role genuinely incompatible with the equality that healthy partnership requires (Reis et al., 2004; Stafford et al., 2023; Yew et al., 2023). When a non-autistic partner takes on the role of developmental support for an autistic partner, the relationship itself tends to suffer in ways that serve neither person well (Parker & Mosley, 2021; Stafford et al., 2023; Yew et al., 2023).

But the person on the other side of that partnership is not a neutral or neurologically unremarkable presence in this dynamic. They are bringing their own neurological architecture into the relational field, an architecture that carries its own distinct capacities and its own specific boundary vulnerabilities, and one that has received almost no attention in the developmental psychology literature as a neurological experience in its own right. Understanding what that architecture is, what it produces developmentally, and why the boundary difficulties that emerge from it in neurodiverse relationships are not character weaknesses or learned dysfunctions, is essential to understanding the full picture of what happens when these two nervous systems meet. That is what the next post is about.

Next in this series: The Other Architecture, high body empathy, boundary vulnerability, and the non-autistic developmental pathway.

This was Article 6: The Other Side of the Boundary

This is Series III — Boundaries Across Neurologies: Autistic Development, High Body Empathy, and Neurodiverse Relationships

Articles in the Series:

1. The Boundary Gap
   What Developmental Psychology Has Never Quite Named

2. When the Self Is Not Allowed to Choose
   Over-Control and the Autistic Developmental Pathway

3. When the Self Is Never Challenged
   Over-Support and the Limits of Unconditional Accommodation

4. Narcissistic Behaviors, Autistic Development, and the Optimal Environment
   A Theoretical Framework for Future Research

5. Masking as Boundary Collapse
   What Happens When the Self Learns to Override Itself

6. The Other Side of the Boundary
   How the Same Developmental Gap Produces Two Problems at Once

7. The Other Architecture
   High Body Empathy, Boundary Vulnerability, and the Non-Autistic Developmental Pathway

8. Boundaries in Neurodiverse Relationships
   When Two Architectures Meet

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