The very important concept that I hate: "Boundaries"

A client recently brought in a book on “boundaries” by two Christian psychologists. The book is very meaningful to him and I listened to his enthusiastic testimonial. I didn’t want to say anything because my client enjoys talking with me, and because I have never been happy about this Special Deluxe Meme of Psychology.

 

My feelings about it are slightly sick. There are various facets of this sick. One, the concept is shallow. “Put up a wall” of sorts, is all it says. Two, it is negative. Rather than the positive “have good self-esteem so you care about yourself," it says “wear armor.” Plus, the whole self-helpy tone of it, such an adolescent-sounding slogan that never quite grew up.

 

Not to ignore the other side of the wall: those peremptory sorts who don’t recognize other people's boundaries – where they leave off and the other person begins. We had an Asperger’s apartment-mate for a year and some months, 25 years old, who would skip up to me while I was writing Progress Notes and Assessments, stand at my side with a silent deer-like stare, assuming that I was permeable, that I had time and attention to give her. My wife, a social worker and nurse, gave her lessons in boundaries, probably a hundred times with many different blunt and nuanced speeches, some louder than others. But boundaries was not something that she couldn’t do. Boundaries was something she couldn’t be. And that is my main problem with the concept.

 

A person doesn’t “have” boundaries: She is emotionally aware of her self as a person of value and therefore others’ selves as persons of value. She feels her own privacy and peace, her own difference, and others’ privacy and peace and difference. Without the first feeling there won’t be the second. Someone with no self-esteem will be intruded upon and is likely to intrude upon others, a fact that may be missed as she is likely to be afraid of the other person. She will timidly and ignorantly step into their space as she doesn’t know integrity in her bones. (This will include, paradoxically, the Narcissistic or Antisocial character, who has only prosthetic self-esteem and fear at the deepest base of his psycho-history.)

 

You can’t teach someone boundaries, many books notwithstanding. All these blessings to be strong, be courageous, say ‘no,’ be assertive, love oneself, stop apologizing, set limits, sung by television stars and girl singers, deflating the currency of psychology to sweet nothings. What therapy can do is change the person’s inner weakness to strength, her fake smile and numbing and compromising to real feelings and armed guards. That’s not establishing “boundaries.” It’s growing a whole person.