Let’s talk about boundaries, shall we? 🙅

Matt Hussey

Mar 7, 2024 • 10 min read

Boundaries are everywhere. They turn up in our politics, in our sports, and of course, it's a top trending topic on social media. But they make us feel weird.

We don’t like it when they’re imposed on us, we’re uncomfortable about having to impose them on others, and we’re even more bewildered by how to do it. And yet, everyone is trying to tell us about boundaries: how to set them, communicate them, enforce them, and of course, respect them.

The past two years alone have seen authors become household names off the back of boundaries. The likes of Melissa Urban’s The Book of Boundaries; Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace; Terri Cole’s Boundary Boss; and Michelle Elman’s The Joy of Being Selfish: Why You Need Boundaries and How to Set Them, have done the rounds across TV, podcasts and online.

But, but, but. Like all things wellness-related, in our collective enthusiasm to use these terms to death, words like ‘boundaries’, ‘gaslighting’, and ‘narcissism’ have taken on a life of their own. This is why it’s high time we talk about what we mean by boundaries, where they come from, and why we’ve been using them all wrong.

A bit about boundaries 🤏

The exact definition of boundaries seems to vary widely. But if we took a dart and aimed for the centre of this semantic cloud, a boundary typically is defined as:

A set of internal rules that determine what you’re willing to tolerate from other people.

Boundaries can be physical; so things like personal space and touch. We can have mental boundaries around thoughts and opinions, and of course, we have emotional boundaries that focus on feelings and intimacy.

There are different types of boundaries, according to author Nina Sky (more on some of these later).

Soft Boundaries – A person with soft boundaries merges with other people's boundaries.
Spongy Boundaries – A person with spongy boundaries is like a combination of having soft and rigid boundaries. They permit less emotional contagion than soft boundaries but more than those with rigid. People with spongy boundaries are unsure of what to let in and what to keep out.
Rigid Boundaries – A person with rigid boundaries is closed or walled off so nobody can get close either physically or emotionally. This is often the case if someone has been the victim of physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual abuse. Rigid boundaries can be selective which depending on time, place or circumstances, and are usually based on a bad previous experience in a similar situation.
Flexible Boundaries – Similar to spongy rigid boundaries but the person exercises more control. The person decides what to let in and what to keep out, is resistant to emotional contagion and psychological manipulation, and is difficult to exploit.

And of course, there are different ways in which boundaries are built. There are unilateral boundaries; where one person decides to impose a standard on the relationship, regardless of whether others support it. Think Jonah Hill’s 2023 text tirade to his then partner.

And there are collaborative boundaries, where everyone in the relationship group agrees that a particular standard should be upheld. Like the bit in the 80s classic Predator where everyone decides it would be far better to abandon the mission to fight Central American drug cartels and take on an invisible alien instead.

But where did this chatter about boundaries come from?

Bad Boundaries ⚔️

The idea of the boundary only formally appeared in psychology literature in the late 1980s. However, therapy and psychology have been talking about boundaries for more than a century - and the trouble with them. Sigmund Freud was one of the earliest proponents of strict boundaries in his practice but was also one of the biggest breakers of the rules.

He gave some of his patients gifts, provided financial support to others, set up two of his clients to date each other, and offered a meal to the patient known as the “Rat Man” (ah, it was a different time). Melanie Klein analysed clients during vacations and crossed the professional-familial line by analysing her own children - it didn’t end well. Donald Winnicott touched his clients, and Carl Jung slept with them.

In the 1960s, two family therapists, Murray Bowen and Salvador Minuchin, borrowed ideas from “systems theory” an idea taken from the worlds of biology and ecology to refine boundaries as a fuzzy line that therapists often crossed to a harder, more moral line that must be maintained at all costs.

But bad boundaries aside, the business of border making as we know and love them today, only really emerged after motivational speaker Jeff VanVonderen dedicated a page to personal boundaries in a book called Tired of Trying to Measure Up in 1989.

“Boundaries are those invisible barriers that tell others where they stop and where you begin,” he wrote. “Personal boundaries notify others that you have the right to have your own opinion, feel your own feelings, and protect the privacy of your own physical being.”

This idea was borrowed in 1991 by therapist Anne Katherine in her book Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin, proclaiming the value of divvying up your emotional life. The next two years saw a parade of titles like Boundaries and Relationships: Knowing, Protecting, and Enjoying the Self; and Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life.

According to these early authors, boundaries began to take on the hue we now know today. Authors argued that boundaries “empower us to determine how we’ll be treated by others”. They compared boundaries to the borders of the gardens found in the homes of suburban America. You are free to do what you like in your backyard, and the border to that inner world is something you need to defend.

But inside this analogy lies a deeper idea. That while boundaries are important, they are also things to be possessed, and enforced. As we will see later on, by using a simple idea of a fence or border, creates an opportunity to weaponise that border and keep people out.

Boundary Issues 🫸

People are messy. Relationships are even messier. Boundaries and borders are neat and simple. They clarify and clean up this messiness by creating easy to spot dividing lines. They’re designed to make life neater, more manageable. A great idea no doubt.

But part of the problem with boundaries today comes from who we think they are for and how we think they are applied. Let’s go back to Jonah Hill’s interpretation of boundaries. If you remember back in the halcyon days of 2023, his then-partner Sarah Brady leaked a series of exchanges between the pair. In it were expectations about how Hill wanted Brady to behave. These boundaries as Mr Hill interpreted them, were the conditions of a romantic relationship.

But this assumption relies on the idea that boundaries are rules for other people. Trawl through TikTok - if you can stand it - and you’ll find a repetition of this idea. My boundaries are sacred, and you HAVE to respect them.

But in reality, boundaries are nothing more than rules for ourselves. It would be lovely if people lived by our rules, but that isn’t really how the world works. Instead, what this skewed interpretation offers, like so many other ideas floating around on the interwebs, is a simple answer to a complicated problem: I am the captain of my ship, and you can GTFO if you don’t agree and do everything I say.

The best-selling authors of boundary books promote an idea that if you use the right words, you can control and protect yourself from being exploited by others. And if they do not adhere to your rules, they should be cast out of your life - and then you should make a short video about how empowered it made you feel.

I’m sorry to report, it does the exact opposite.

Blurred Lines 🫨

Now, before I dive in further, it’s important to recognise that we all want to feel love and respect from others, and sometimes we have people in our lives who don’t do that. So any advice that focuses on helping someone examine their core beliefs around self-worth is valid. But it’s no silver bullet. I have worked with clients for years on why they keep finding themselves in relationships that mistreat them.

It’s not because they don’t understand the concept of a boundary, or they’ve not articulated themselves well enough. It’s because there are deeper, more powerful ideas about self-worth and how they were enforced early on in life. We learn A LOT from the relationships we had with our primary caregivers. For example, let’s say you had a parent who ignored you, mistreated you, or wasn’t around all that much.

Because our survival depends on this relationship, quite literally, we find a way of tolerating it. We find a way of living that allows our boundaries to be trampled and exploited, because the primary drive is to maintain the relationship above all else.

Fast forward a few decades and we find ourselves behaving in the same way to friends, partners, and bosses. IT IS NOT BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T BOUGHT A BOOK OR GONE ON A SEMINAR. It’s something much harder to disrupt: how do you protect yourself from being abandoned by the relationship you believe is vital for your survival?

But let’s go back to boundaries for a moment. The contemporary definition of a boundary as a set of rules for other people may sound like empowerment, but ultimately it leads to an increasingly combative, isolated existence. If someone crosses our boundary, according to internet parlance, you should walk away. But how many times can you do that before it’s just you, on a perfect boundary island, with no one else around?

Sure it might feel empowering, but you’ve overlooked the grander narrative that binds us all together: we are social animals that need relationships to survive. We need people to care for us when we are sick, to support us when we’re going through a hard time, and to celebrate us when things are going well.

But those things only come when we sign the invisible social contract that says we will try and do the same for others. We can’t demand things, and expect to give nothing in return. The same applies to boundaries. It is good to set rules for how we would like to behave and be treated. But we must be more flexible with how we apply them, curious when we let them down, and willing to forgive when someone knowingly or unknowingly walks all over them.

We may find that at work we need to be disciplined with our time, and how we communicate, but in a relationship we may take a more fluid approach.

Both are boundaries. Both are rules for ourselves. But both accept that a boundary only works if both parties see a benefit.

Things we learned this week 🤓

If you would be so kind 🙏

I am terrible at marketing. Literally terrible. But I’m trying to get better, and I need your help!

If you enjoy my witterings, please do share with someone or subscribe, it really helps.

I love you all. 💋

Sign up for The Brink