Boundary Issues
How boundaries became the rules for mental health—and explain everything
Lily Scherlis
We are obsessed with invisible circles. “Personal boundaries”—or often just “boundaries”—are the hallmark of emotional maturity, ethical integrity, and social desirability. Wellness influencers and book-writing therapists promise that if you clarify the line dividing you from those around you, your boyfriend will stop envying your career and start doing the dishes. Children will stay out of your home office. Friends and lovers will stop using you as a screen for their projections. As you are released from everyone else’s psychodrama, your racing thoughts will quiet, and your ability to concentrate will return. You will learn to say the word “no,” protect your time, and double your salary. You will promptly reply to the text of a friend in crisis to say, “Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity right now,” and then you will fall asleep within fifteen minutes of turning out the light.
People use the language of boundaries first and foremost to communicate hurt: the word shows up after something painful has happened, usually as a retroactive narrative to make sense of the damage: a boundary was crossed. Renaming the event this way redescribes the hurt as a violation, a form of emotional trespassing. This lets me off the hook, in some ways: “there is a boundary here” gives me something to say to the offender without having to describe my woundedness. And then, if they respect it, the two of us get to bask in our new, shared optimism that changing our relationship is as simple as drawing a line.
Books, podcasts, articles, social media posts, and talk shows are all sharing the message of boundaries: set them, communicate them, enforce them, respect them. The past two years alone have produced Melissa Urban’s The Book of Boundaries: Set the Limits That Will Set You Free (2022); Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself (2021); Terri Cole’s Boundary Boss: The Essential Guide to Talk True, Be Seen, and (Finally) Live Free (2021); and finally Michelle Elman’s The Joy of Being Selfish: Why You Need Boundaries and How to Set Them (2021). They are featured on CNN, Forbes, Oprah Daily, the New York Times, the Goop podcast. Tawwab’s book had an advance of six figures and was the direct result of a viral social media post. In other words, boundaries sell.
For these authors, boundaries are invisible to the naked eye, requiring the special techniques of CBT or DBT or self-help bestsellers or self-care influencers for you to learn to perceive them. Or you can learn by trial and error, like a dog wearing a shock collar who learns the location of the electric fence. It’s like everyone in the world is mindlessly wandering toward your vulnerable core, and if you don’t tell them where to turn back, you might get trampled.
As it turns out, everything can be explained as a matter of boundaries. Annoyingly, boundaries seem to slip and slide into conversations where they don’t belong: on NPR, a reporter tells another reporter about a woman who accused her friend of not respecting her boundaries. The offending friend was guilty of getting an unappealing haircut just before the accuser’s wedding. We can roll our eyes and say she’s abusing the term, but “boundaries” chronically slip out of bounds: experts have wildly different accounts of what boundaries partition. They divide what’s you from what’s me, but also designate appropriate and inappropriate behavior, and/or compartmentalize different realms of life. For many therapists, every hard feeling might be a “boundary issue” in disguise: Tawwab sees through her clients’ stories to the “real” issues beneath: bad boundaries. For her, if you peel back all the layers of someone’s self-narrative, you find a deeper level of the psyche where everything boils down to boundaries. You can assimilate each and every trouble to a single schema of healing.
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Boundaries do this by teaching us to relate to other people as if they are the one thing social systems are most determined to protect: property.
I am not anti-boundaries, but they are so rarely questioned—they have a seductive moral authority as the dominant metaphor for how human relationships should work. If you invoke this discourse of the sacred thresholds between people, you will be heard. But I doubt that there is a deeper plane of existence where boundaries live. There is no substratum beneath the appearances of things where lines between people are etched: boundaries are just a wildly influential story about how people work.
Attempting to excavate where “personal boundaries” came from and why they became so ubiquitous is like following an unmarked trail. When contemporary psychologists write about boundaries in venues like Psychology Today, they discuss them in the present tense with no citations. For these writers, boundaries don’t need a history. They simply exist, and therefore require management. I found this highly suspicious, and so I did a lot of digging. The story of boundaries, which I’ll retrace here, first took me back to the early 1990s, when boundaries erupted suddenly into the self-help mass market, and then further back, to the mid-1960s, when they cropped up on the fringes of ego psychology, and then to some very basic ideas people in the 1960s and 1990s and 2020s couldn’t and can’t help but project onto ancient and natural history.
But first, we should talk about where I did not find “boundaries”: most major schools of psychoanalysis. Although most boundaries experts work in traditions far from analysis, I think a lot of readers imagine that the self-care industry is simply bending Klein or Freud or someone slightly out of shape. Writing on boundaries has the general effect of implying a psychoanalytic origin: “Our first growthful realization was of separateness,” therapist David Richo declared about babies in 1991. “Our first task was letting go, i.e. acknowledging a personal boundary.” Richo, who later authored How to Be an Adult in Relationships, asserts the boundaries doctrine as an obvious, established truth of developmental psychology. He makes it sound as if the experts are all in harmony here, in the same way that most physicists agree gravity exists. Even if the psychoanalytic heavyweights do generally believe that individuation is a key process, many psychoanalysts seem to agree that psychoanalysis is more or less designed to muck up people’s boundaries, to trouble their placement, their firmness, their brittleness.
To say “our first task was letting go” recalls a pervasive bad reading of Jacques Lacan’s notorious paper on the mirror stage from 1949: at some point a baby sees its image in the mirror and realizes that it is the entity right over there—it’s a whole, complete, separate thing, however discombobulated it might feel. In this popular misunderstanding, living in the world means slowly getting used to being a hermetically sealed skin sack. It’s easy to skim a gloss of the essay and think the point is that we are delimited, not oceanic, and this is a good, mature way to be. But the actual emphasis is that we step into a new stage of development by means of attaching to a false image of ourselves. We aren’t the bounded picture in the mirror. But to be social, we have to delude ourselves into performing a degree of coherence we simply can’t live up to.
Meanwhile, for Freud, psychic thresholds are fraught and multiple—not only between me and you, but between ego and id, conscious and unconscious, inside and outside worlds. He does describe early experience as suffused with the desire to bring good things into the self and leave bad things out, thereby establishing what’s me and what’s not me, but these divisions are not “sharp frontiers like the artificial ones drawn in political geography.” He goes on: “We cannot do justice to the characteristics of the mind by linear outlines like those in a drawing or in primitive painting, but rather by areas of colour melting into one another as they are presented by modern artists.” Rather than guarding its territory, Freud’s ego “tries to mediate between the world and the id, to make the id pliable to the world and, by means of its muscular activity, to make the world fall in with the wishes of the id.” Over the course of our lives, we may increasingly define our edges, becoming more resistant to identifications, but this isn’t the goal, per se. A magic circle is a defense like any other, and our grip on it might need to be slackened before we can change.
Boundaries dropped suddenly into popular culture in the early ’90s, amid an efflorescence of self-help. In 1989, motivational speaker and “interventionist” Jeff VanVonderen dedicated one page to personal boundaries in a book called Tired of Trying to Measure Up. “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.” And then the floodgates opened: in 1991, a therapist named Anne Katherine published Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin, proclaiming the value of divvying up your emotional life. In December of the same year, the psychoanalyst Ernest Hartmann (the son of the famous ego psychologist Heinz Hartmann) published Boundaries in the Mind. Soon boundaries were everywhere: from Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s distinctly Christian Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life (1992), to Charles L. Whitfield’s Boundaries and Relationships: Knowing, Protecting, and Enjoying the Self (1993). All this quickly spawned a subgenre of HR discourse: boundaries flourished in the professional literature of social workers, healthcare providers, clergy members, therapists, and lawyers. People across the workforce were encouraged to store their work stress in a Tupperware container that lives permanently in the office kitchenette fridge. According to these early authors, boundaries “empower us to determine how we’ll be treated by others”; they swap “control of another” for “honor of another.” Like the mind was for some, boundaries are a muscle you strengthen or let atrophy. And, like any good liberal idea, they amplify choice, letting us “choose what to let in and what to keep out.”
Being a person involves wanting a level of intimacy and security you can never get, and trying to get it through other people. Meanwhile, capitalism ensures that most people’s basic needs go unmet, while people simultaneously develop new needs for shiny new products and experiences. In other words, everyone has a lot of needs right now. Boundaries discourse responds to this by saying “no.” Too many of us—the boundaryless—are too tangled up in each other’s endless needs and desires. But we are teachable, and if we learn to manage boundaries correctly, they can unhook us from obligation, protecting us from dissolving into someone else’s demands.
Boundaries do this by teaching us to relate to other people as if they are the one thing social systems are most determined to protect: property. Most boundaries books of the ’90s unselfconsciously steal imagery from land ownership. As Cloud and Townsend put it, “just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn’t.” Or, to be blunt, “if I know where my yard begins and ends, I am free to do with it what I like.” Ownership is the cornerstone of boundary ethics, and the self is a particularly pesky thing to own, because its edges are invisible. “In the physical world, boundaries are easy to see,” Cloud and Townsend go on. “Fences, signs, walls, moats with alligators . . . they give the same message: THIS IS WHERE MY PROPERTY BEGINS . . . . In the spiritual world, boundaries are just as real, but often harder to see.” The ’90s fetish for the suburban lawn is everywhere: “Like any fence, boundaries require maintenance,” writes Anne Katherine. “Some people are like ivy. . . . It’s tiresome, but if we let these people stay in our lives, we must keep pruning them and throwing the behavior weeds out of our yards.” “Good fences make good neighbors,” said Robert Frost, whose neighbor may or may not have hated him.
To put all this in context: Cloud and Townsend wrote their book in a place—the Western United States—that had been sliced and diced into ownable plots by the government in the past two centuries; many of the settlers who bought them built fences, which literally killed many bison thanks to the invention of barbed wire. Cloud and Townsend published the book at a time—1992—when the United States was trying to become an Ayn Rand novel. If liberalism is about having the freedom to own things and having your ownership protected by the state, neoliberalism is about having more freedom to own more things, and being held responsible for how much you do or do not own. As Cloud and Townsend write, “to rescue people from the natural consequences of their behavior is to render them powerless.” Boundaries are all about holding individuals responsible for their lots in life.
The problem with “boundaries” is that the world is designed to force us into financial and emotional dependence upon one another, and our primary metric for measuring the health of a relationship is being able to perform independence. Boundaries make dependence look like misplaced possessiveness. To survive and thrive, we are encouraged to unhook from one another, sealing ourselves off as individual cells rising the ranks of society: your time and energy are something you own and lease out to others. Having good boundaries is enforcing the terms of your lease, and abiding by the leases of others. Having bad boundaries is demanding squatters’ rights.
A lot of us—me, my friends—try, generally, to live by models of intimacy pitted against possessiveness. Other people aren’t objects to be controlled, many of us feel, refusing to apply property logics to our friends and lovers. To be possessive of another person, for instance, by controlling their sex life, is to fail to accept their separateness, to fail to respect the boundary between us. We try to acknowledge and then nudge away jealousy as a relic of a violent, expropriative regime; boundaries rhetoric makes this actionable. But boundaries themselves—a key tool in this work—are literally based around relating to yourself like a plot of land you own. To be “possessive” of another person is to fail to recognize the boundary between their property and yours—to let your dog poop on their lawn, so to speak.
If the cultural logic of boundaries is seductive even to those of us who do not like property logic, perhaps it’s because social structures are constantly trying to take things away from us. The most obvious way to protect your scarce resources and threatened autonomy under this value system is to invoke its own rules and use its own special magic words. It doesn’t feel like the right time to ask your neighbor to take down their picket fence when a SWAT team is surrounding their house.
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This is a sticky topic to write about: I worry that everyone will think that I am motivated to critique boundaries because I lack them. To critique this cultural logic is to imply that you expect people to exceed their capacity, to keep you emotionally afloat in a radically unfair world—to do things no one can do on your behalf. Boundaries escape criticism because to criticize them is to suggest you are the kind of person who asks others to scratch an itch beyond their reach. I know the itch cannot be scratched. But why do we have to tell a person that they violated a sacred line in order to let them know they hurt us? And why is the property line the crucial metaphor that gives our words moral force?
Worse, critiquing boundaries risks implying you condone abuse, or are blind to power. The language of boundaries is all over the arbitration of abuse: boundaries are a clear and convenient way to assert that your body isn’t simply available to everyone—the protective bubble of law and morality does not yield because someone has power over you. This use has a long history: boundaries show up in 1980s court cases and legal literature about domestic violence. In these pamphlets, which have titles like “Wife Abuse,” anonymous experts describe how abuse decays a woman’s boundaries, leaving her unable to enforce her limits. But even these uses seem to devolve into patronizing and victim blaming in the writing of people like VanVonderen: “I’ve counseled women who have been victims of rape,” he wrote in 1989. “None of them say, ‘I’m important, and I don’t deserve to be treated that way.’ More often they say, ‘I should have known better than to have been there at that time or to have dressed that way.’ They have no sense of their right to boundaries.” As my friend Natasha Laskyput it, “boundaries promote a comforting fiction that if you use the right words, you can control whether or not you get exploited by others, and protect yourself against it.” But you just can’t, and what’s worse, feeling like you can makes you more likely to blame other people for being exploited.
This kind of victim blaming is an especially appalling contortion of ego psychology. Ego psychologists aimed to churn out powerful, individuated agents with intact self-esteem. This seems like a natural birthplace for boundaries, and yet the word rarely appears: canonical ego psychologists like Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson prefer to discuss the self’s “defenses.” “Ego weakness” was one hallmark of mental pathology; such weakness risked “identity diffusion,” as if selfhood were an aerosol spray that might dissolve into the atmosphere if not kept under pressure.
Boundaries escape criticism because to criticize them is to suggest you are the kind of person who asks others to scratch an itch beyond their reach. I know the itch cannot be scratched.
What I’m calling the first wave of boundaries rhetoric—in contrast to the second wave of the ’90s—shows up on the periphery of ego psychology. Between 1964 and 1967, three people on the fringes of the discipline published work valorizing the “boundaries” of the self, seemingly arriving to it independently of one another. It came to psychoanalysis from the outside, as if slipping in through the service entrance. This seems like a coincidence until you spot the Cold War looming in the background.
The word “boundaries” first appeared in psychoanalysis in 1964, in the English translation of Edith Jacobson’s The Self and the Object World. Jacobson was an iconoclastic German ego psychologist who moved to the United States in the 1930s after escaping Nazi Berlin. In Jacobson’s work, separation is the primary telos of development. Jacobson emphasized individuation against “fantasies of reunion between self and love object” so emphatically that reviewers complained the book was “condescending” and “not responsive” to colleagues. In Jacobson’s view, you would want to draw a thick sharpie line around your ego: “firm,” “sharply defined” boundaries are the pinnacle of personal development; “weak boundaries” characterize psychosis.
Meanwhile, quite a few therapists were purchasing additional furniture for their offices to accommodate entire families at once. The individual was too decontextualized, too insulated, these therapists complained, for real clinical insight. You needed to see and interrupt interpersonal dynamics in action. Boundaries materialized in the work of two prominent family therapists: Murray Bowen and Salvador Minuchin. The two men have oddly parallel careers, though they may or may not have approved of one another—Bowen developed family systems therapy; Minuchin developed structural family therapy. Their respective publications featuring boundaries were published in 1966 and 1967, at which time both were preoccupied with the interdisciplinary science of systems theory, which had vague associations with the U.S. military.
No one seems to quite agree on what systems theory is, when it emerged, or which thinkers and fields to associate with its founding (though biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy and sociologist Talcott Parsons are usually mentioned). Systems theory, in short, sees the world as a set of systems, be they ecological, biological, sociological, linguistic, technological, and so on. All of these systems can be understood from a single set of abstracted, general principles of how systems work. For Bowen and Minuchin, a family is a system that “follows the laws of natural systems,” and is thus directly analogous to everything from the solar system to a molecule to Darwinian evolution. Systems theory has a nebulous and ambiguous association with the intimately related field of cybernetics, the science of “control and communication in the animal and machine,” which was directly applied to build predictive missiles during World War II.
In cybernetics, the principles of systems are used to control things without knowing much about those specific things. These principles are used to predict the activity of objects with opaque inner workings, motives, and mechanisms—to manage black boxes. In this way, you can reduce the mind to its boundaries, across which flow outputs and inputs, clump them together with other things if need be, and draw a line of best fit. In early applications in the 1950s, as U.S. medical institutions rushed to positivize psychoanalysis, psychiatrists redefined a person as a “behavior system.” A family was also a behavior system; so was a neighborhood, a city, a nation. A behavior system was in turn defined as a “boundary-maintaining unit”: something contained by a semipermeable membrane that takes some things in and keeps others out. Maintaining a boundary, in systems theory, is an precondition for existing: the dissolution of this boundary is an existential threat—just like the dehiscence of communism into capitalism.
The first-wave family therapists watered this down, making boundaries a little less technical and a little more moral. Minuchin compared his clinical style to samurai training; tactics included direct confrontation (“You act very dependent on your spouse. What does she do to keep you incompetent?”) and musical chairs: “In families that are too close,” he writes, “I artificially create boundaries between members by gestures, body postures, movement of chairs.” Pyrotechnics aside, Minuchin had a tempered view: rather than simply strengthening boundaries, the therapist should map and modulate them, imposing new delineations while smudging old ones. Bowen spent his life combatting the problem of the “undifferentiated family ego mass.” The American family was a sad bag of marshmallows left in the sun, plagued by “emotional ‘stuck togetherness.’” The most developed among us “keep emotional functioning contained within the boundaries of self.” Such people are “always sure of their beliefs and convictions but are never dogmatic”; they “respect the self and the identity of another without becoming critical”; they can feel intense love while wholly comfortable with the fact that at any moment a lover could “proceed on a self-directed course at will,” leaving them behind. I have never met a person this well-adjusted.
Politically, undifferentiated ego masses were having a moment. During World War II, many saw individualism as the best inoculation against fascism. The grinning crowds of blond Germans in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films were seen as the ultimate bad outcome of a society full of people with no fucking boundaries, as we would put it now. Edith Jacobson’s calls for radical individuation make a lot more sense once you learn she was imprisoned by the Nazis in the ’30s. When communism became the national enemy, ego psychology started to feel like a winning geopolitical strategy. Personal boundaries were an unofficial component of the Cold War arsenal. It makes sense, then, that therapists adapted the term from a field associated with missile engineering. It also makes sense that the New Left’s philosophers vehemently opposed boundaries, instantly clocking the rhetoric as an implement of social control. Norman O. Brown took it a little far: “the proper outcome of psychoanalysis is the abolition of the boundary,” he argues, citing both Freud and Klein. True to its moment, Brown’s book, Love’s Body (1966), reads like an erudite trip log on a psychedelics forum: demolish the threshold between real and unreal, good and bad, mine and yours, love and hate.
I don’t really want to return the world to soup; I’m more interested in troubling how “boundaries” rhetoric structures our relationships than in how literal boundaries structure the universe. But as I dug deeper, I was surprised by how cleanly opinions about boundaries seem to track with shifts in political consciousness. If boundaries appear in the mid-1960s amid the building and maintaining of geopolitical walls (Berlin, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba), maybe the 1990s resurgence has to do with their sudden mass demolition: the many boundaries books of 1991 were presumably conceived around 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sudden dissolution of several sovereign regimes. National borders melted into air, so people mapped their craving for lines onto their personal lives.
It feels slick and too easy to analogize in this way. But it also feels absurd not to, because even in the present, this whole way of thinking is built on literal analogies to property and national security. In her 2022 boundaries bestseller, Melissa Urban, who is known for developing the notoriously restrictive “wellness program” Whole30 (which she claims is emphatically not a diet), offers a helpful shorthand for measuring a risk to your boundaries: the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s levels of threat. Green, yellow, and red threat levels all merit different conversational scripts; she also includes “Threat Level Fuchsia,” which “Homeland Security does not recognize but anyone who’s been in front of their ex’s current girlfriend after multiple tequila shots surely does.” Our bodies and minds are little nation-states, populations of cells and thoughts and feelings in need of defense. This is still systems-theory thinking: every system is analogous to every other system. This is the legacy boundaries will never shake: they keep a whole host of other metaphors in place; they keep us seeing our political-economic systems as modeled on ourselves, and vice versa.
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In 1904, a cosmologist named Herbert Nichols published a treatise about how the physical universe was like the mind. For him, celestial bodies were “personalities,” each with “personal boundaries.” I like to imagine a universe that runs on this principle: planets and meteors and stars set boundaries with one another, communicate those boundaries, and exit the orbit of celestial bodies that violate them.
Pop psychology relentlessly appeals to the natural world for legitimacy. From the beginning, boundaries were understood not just as a psychological tool, but also as a metaphysical truth, a core logic of the natural universe. Like all life forms, “we are surrounded by an invisible circle,” Katherine wrote in 1991. “Amoebae, orange trees, frogs, leopards, bacteria, tulips, turtles, salmon all have physical limits that delineate them as unique from other organisms. [...] An intact physical boundary preserves life. [...] The physical world abounds with boundaries. Were it not so, when we sat down, we’d pass right through the chair (and the chair through us) and be sprawled on the floor. Except then we’d pass through the floor, too.” Boundaries are even a quality of God, who “defines himself as a distinct, separate being, and he is responsible for himself,” as Cloud and Townsend put it.
These claims sound like an adulterated interpretation of an ancient debate in classical philosophy: Parmenides wanted to see the universe as a set of cutouts thumbtacked to a bulletin board: stable, discrete entities—secure objects that remain what they are. Heraclitus, meanwhile, saw everything flowing into everything else, skin becoming dust, dust becoming earth, air becoming food for cells, wrinkles forming, hair growing, life forms rubbing off on each other. In a world where Heraclitus won, everything would look like it does on shrooms: all the surfaces slipping into one another in a mudslide of texture, recalling Freud’s blended-paint analogy. Maybe in this alternate universe shrooms would make everything seem to stand still, as if holding its breath. I’m not a philosopher by any means, but it seems to me that for this property regime to work, Parmenides had to win. You carve up the prairie with fences so you know which livestock are yours. Things need to be discrete to be ownable.
After someone told me about the Heraclitus/Parmenides debate, I started thinking about boundaries a more abstract level, as they appear in the physical universe, I realized I had overlooked a much more obvious unconscious motive for the early ’90s boundaries craze than communism. Because of AIDS, other people’s bodies seemed dangerous in a new way. In the presumably conservative, presumably homophobic communities of writers like Cloud and Townsend and VanVonderen, people were confused about the actual logistics of transmission, worrying HIV might leap from skin to skin. “Many people have become paranoid about it to the extent that they won’t shake hands or use the same cutlery in a restaurant as everyone else does,” one peer-reviewed study claimed. It’s hard not to feel that boundaries rhetoric at that moment reflected a nonconscious demand to contain gay sex, to cordon off queerness from the general population.
Boundaries are a Band-Aid in a bad world: if you can’t expect people to care for you and treat you well and protect you from violence or scarcity, you can at least protect yourself from their needs.
If you become immunocompromised, “boundaries” become incredibly urgent. Recently a friend’s dad had to get all his bone marrow replaced. They explained that in the process they kill nearly all of your marrow, and your blood cells die off. While the new marrow takes root, your veins are filled with transfusion: you are an empty set of tunnels for fluids made by other bodies. During this time, you have barely any immune cells. If a cold virus particle gets into your body, your body won’t respond at all. There is nothing you can do to maintain this “boundary,” which isn’t a line, but a mechanism: a whole set of activities designed to get bad things out. If your body cannot perform these activities, you have to live in a special room with positive air pressure, where air particles are so tightly packed that when someone opens the door, they rush out so forcefully that no viruses can get in.
Living in a bubble like this costs a lot of money. You probably cannot afford it without health insurance paying for most of it, maybe not even with health insurance paying for most of it. In other words, it is probably not within your personal means to independently enforce this most basic, most urgent, least linear “boundary.” It requires some basic sense of collective responsibility for care, economically and emotionally.
Boundaries are a Band-Aid in a bad world: if you can’t expect people to care for you and treat you well and protect you from violence or scarcity, you can at least protect yourself from their needs. They aren’t straightforwardly wrong to do this: negotiating other people’s needs, which are often unreasonable and unfulfillable and intolerable, is fraught, baffling, and overwhelming. It demands a good strong metaphor, and the image of boundaries is unusually tensile. But the term takes on its own momentum, overrunning intimacy with alienation. In its most extreme forms, boundary-speak makes it feel like some of us have given up on each other: the only effective social strategy left is to lock yourself in, fortify your defenses. If your emotional defense budget isn’t big enough to hold the line and you get trampled by other people’s greed, that’s on you.
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You are standing in a field along with every single person you know. You’re holding a paint roller like the ones they use to mark boundaries on Astroturf. It is time to paint a circle around yourself. After some painstaking thought about where this circle should go, you draw a messy circle with a diameter just bigger than your wingspan. Everyone else, in this game, is supposed to stay on the other side of your line. If someone approaches and tries to cross it, you should tell them to stop. If they cross it anyway, the referee will hold up a yellow card, and play will reset. You might then repaint the line in a brighter color at a slightly larger radius. If someone crosses it again, they will have to leave the field. If it gets crossed again and again, you might become one of those people whose boundaries are a moat with a hundred-foot radius, who sit cross-legged in the synthetic grass with a rifle in their lap.
The rules of this boundaries game are a series of contradictions. Don’t be difficult; don’t bottle up your emotions. Have friends you can lean on; only lean on them in ways that are convenient for them. Definitely do not lean on them financially. Be vulnerable in front of people you love; don’t cry too hard or for too long. Many people are unmarked landmines of explosive need: avoid them.
One thing I have learned from psychoanalysis is that everyone is always kicking and screaming against separateness. This separateness is constitutive of being a person in the world, and it hurts. Boundaries arrive to rescue us from this hurt, not by eliminating this separateness but by accelerating it. They provide guidelines for living separateness without having to feel it. They imply the possibility of transcending the basic ickiness of being in relationship to others, as well as the strain of day-in, day-out labor. Bad boundaries, you see, can be fixed. You can be fixed. Good boundaries are a psychic achievement that promises to insulate you from existential lack and also exploitation. You are fixable, these books implore. You can fill in the big hole in the middle of yourself, plug the drain, and leave the great boundaryless masses behind for emotional maturity.