Back in 1992, Dr. Cloud & Dr. Townsend wrote a gem of a book called Boundaries. Since then, it’s sold millions of copies and now you can find all kinds of spin-offs: boundaries in marriage, in dating, with friends, etc…
It’s kind of become a buzzword that I hear a lot lately, and it’s something you & I have delved into ourselves with a group of 30-something’s. Each generation discovers this concept in its own time.
Obviously a boundary by definition is some sort of dividing line, a point you’re not to cross.
What IS a boundary when it comes to relationships, though? How do you set them and can this concept be abused or overused? When do you know you might need to set some?
According to Cloud & Townsend, here are some red flags that might mean your life could use some boundaries: (mental, spiritual, physical, emotional)
- Your life feels out of control
- Trying harder isn’t working
- Being nice out of fear
- Taking responsibility for others isn’t working (what’s your responsibility & what isn’t)
- Inability to say no
In a Christian worldview, a lot of us hear the concept of boundaries and think it sounds selfish. If someone asks us to lead a ministry at church, how can we say no, for example?
Straight from the book (p. 32-33): We are responsible TO others and FOR ourselves. Gal 6:2: carry each other’s burdens. Sometimes we have burdens too big to bear—we’ve all experienced that and would gladly drop everything to show up for a friend or family member in grief or despair. Just a few verses later, Gal 6:5 says “each one should carry his own load.” So, which is it?
Everyone has responsibilities, areas of our life we have to take ownership of—our own “load”, including our feelings and attitudes.
Burden means “excess burdens;” Load means “cargo” or daily toil. The problem arises when people act like their burdens are daily loads & refuse to help OR as if their daily loads are boulders they shouldn’t have to carry.
Our boundaries aren’t solid impenetrable walls. They help us keep the good in and the bad out, but we need to be able to open a “gate” now and then to let sin out & truth in. Of COURSE we need to confess and communicate our pain/issues with others so we can find healing. We need to let others speak truth to us and be teachable/open to learn & grow.
Lots of times you’ll find people who’ve been abused/traumatized make boundaries where they wall themselves off b/c of pain/fear. It’s a learned protective mechanism. This may temporarily prevent pain, but it ALSO cuts you off from vulnerability/love/positive connection.
Scripture doesn’t tell us to be WALLED OFF from others, whether to “keep ourselves safe” or to “punish another”. Scripture is full of language about community and “one-anothers”!
EXAMPLES OF BOUNDARIES (what do they look like?)
Physical: (we teach our kids about boundaries here; how to say no, how to not hit/bite; how to ask before hugging/kissing, ….. who’s allowed to touch them & what to do if they’re uncomfortable)
Speech: “saying no”. It’s ok to say no to being screamed at/humiliated/insulted. How will you accept being talked to? (sass, disrespect, contempt…); also applies to saying no sometimes to pressures/demands of others b/c you feel like you’ll endanger the relationship, so you OUTWARDLY COMPLY but INWARDLY RESENT. Also using your words to let others know what defines you: This is ok, that is not.
Time/Distance: often this happens FOR parents/children at the end of senior year. It’s a developmentally appropriate and important time for young adults to define their own sense of self apart from you.
Choices: trying to lay responsibility of your own choices on someone else (I had to; he made me…)
It’s VERY helpful to have others (counselor, trusted mentor) to HELP YOU set boundaries b/c relationships are important to us and many of us will do/say anything out of fear of losing them.
Others can also help you create consequences for trespassing. (drinking or abuse SHOULD have consequences; parents often yell/nag instead of simply applying natural consequences with love, which would change behavior. )
You can’t change or set limits on other people. You can only do that for yourself. This might involve limiting your exposure to people who insult or berate you, who continually expect you to drop everything for their latest crisis but who have little respect/interest in you personally, etc.
It might also involve saying NO to yourself (self control) or your destructive desires/tendencies.
Shift gears a minute: talk about the confusion around boundaries (what we’ve explained they really are vs. boundaries being “weaponized”) and what we’re seeing is a shift in our culture that’s creating broken relationships and a lot of hurt/devastation.
Recent article on Breakpoint that got me thinking about family (in both a biological and church community context) and what it’s for. Stonestreet and Leander write that:
Family is no accident of history, no social construct that can be replaced. It is so woven into the fabric of biology that no society that has rejected it has survived.
As Joshua Coleman wrote in The Atlantic, “Studies on parental estrangement have grown rapidly in the past decade, perhaps reflecting the increasing number of families who are affected.” In one survey of mothers aged 65 to 75, one in 10 reported being estranged from an adult child. Some 62% reported contact less than once a month.
Part of the beauty of biological families is that they are…built around obligation, a duty to the other, not merely as a means of self-fulfillment.
There are certainly cases in which family members are abusive, controlling, or in the true sense of an exhausted word, “toxic.” Still, the spirit of the age is one that teaches us to prefer the company of those who ask less of us. Will these replacements endure the demands of life, illness, and aging?
In a June episode of the podcast HOW TO START OVER, the hosts lean into the question of what happens when family conflicts reach a stalemate—you know, you’re disagreeing politically with someone at a holiday meal, or the right wing conservative Grandpa can’t stomach the atheist leftist aunt.
Coleman (the guest of that episode and the author of the article mentioned above) says that trauma or abuse can certainly precipitate estrangement—an adult child is too hurt to forgive or a parent can’t own up to the ways they may have fractured the relationship.
Sadly (but maybe not surprising?) Coleman’s research shows about 70% of estranged parents had a divorce from the other parent, which you can imagine how that might go….. distance, blame, a new spouse or spouses/family members step in. There can be a lot of emotions/issues there that, if not addressed, can lead to no contact (e.g.., Jana’s father).
More interesting: sometimes an adult child has been TOO loved, one of the consequences of the anxious over-parenting we talk a lot about (that has intensified over the past 30 yrs or so). The grown child has just had enough of the pressure/non-separation and so they initiate it (often in a hurtful way).
What I found so interesting about the issue is that since the mid 19th c, there’s been a turn toward the individual and away from community. That’s not a newsflash to anyone—it’s become kind of a badge of honor for America, in fact. “The rugged individual.”
So today we find ourselves at the logical conclusion of that, where personal growth and happiness is the highest value. Coleman says parents from the early 1900s reported wanting their children to be essentially church-going, good citizens, good members of the community, which included respecting/honoring parents.
Today if you ask parents what they most want for their kids I think you’d hear they want their child’s elusive “happiness,” whatever that might mean in the moment, and (whether they know it or not), implying that might or might not include mom or dad in the equation. (are we writing ourselves out of our kids’ scripts??)
What you see on social media a lot now (& is music) is this idea that if a person does you wrong, even once, cut them out of your life. No real attempt at reconciliation, forgiveness, understanding, opening a gate for “truth” like boundaries were designed for. We just slap a label on the person: they’re “toxic” or “I’m setting this boundary” and therefore you’re out of my life.
The problems with eliminating a person from your life are many. Cutoff eliminates opportunities for personal and relational growth, but the pain left by the relationship remains. Resorting to cutoff keeps you from working on implementing healthy boundaries & it doesn’t make the past hurts go away. It might seem like an easy fix to avoid future pain caused by the relationship, but it doesn’t undo what was already done.
That’s Nowhere scriptural & at its root is the antithesis of how relationships work and what they’re for. Everyone has faults and makes mistakes, everyone has degrees of trauma and baggage from their own families/experiences, etc. The point of a community (and a foundational community like a family) is to learn give and take, giving grace, seeing one another as people and probably hurting people. How might that change how you interact?
If we stick to people who just mirror ourselves, that doesn’t help us grow or mature or learn. It MEANS something to care for a sick sister or an aging parent. It changes us in deep, important ways. It BENEFITS us to learn to work through conflict lovingly, to learn to listen and let others have a seat at the *Thanksgiving* table even if we may deeply disagree with them. (We can’t change others or limit others; only ourselves….this is a fertile practice ground!!)
Tell me more. What questions do you have? That must feel _______________.
Work on direct communication in a loving/calm way. This can be in small bites rather than a marathon.
Get some counseling!
Really great add’l resources: Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown, Ph.D., The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships and Why Won’t You Apologize?: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts, both by Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.
https://verilymag.com/2020/05/toxic-friendships-signs-of-a-toxic-friend-2020