Boundaries, property, and other words I don't love using about my heart
A nuanced take on a national obsession, plus a whole lot of pull-quotes
So I’m a therapist. I’m also a longtime practitioner of both kink and polyamory. All of this, plus the fact that I exist on the internet, means I find myself talking about boundaries. A lot. Who needs to set clearer boundaries with their boss? Whose parents crossed their boundaries one too many times and led to an estrangement? Who really needs to talk to their partner about their boundaries around their other partner? And who in this particular scene is a boundary-crosser?
Even if none of the stuff about me above — aside from existing on the internet — describes you, you have no doubt also been immersed in this discourse.
Much like with trauma, everybody seems to be talking about boundaries. The trifecta here is of course “attachment,” about which more another time, because surprise, I have stuff to say about that too, and a lot of it! But for right now:
Whence this obsession with boundaries?
It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about it until a few…months ago, maybe? (What is time, truly?) I read this enormous and splendid piece in Parapraxis about the ubiquity of the term and the history of how it took hold in therapeutic circles. It was only upon reading it that I recognized the insidious ways that this idea had entered into my daily lexicon. Only then did I start to ask what seems to be the article’s central question: How did the way we talk about hurts, social missteps, apologies and repair turn into an exercise in legislating the land rights of our bodies?
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.
-Lily Scherlis, “Boundary Issues”
The snark of that first paragraph notwithstanding, it is true that the obsession with “boundaries” has reached critical proportions. That is to say: the way people talk about them online has diluted the term to near-meaninglessness.
I laugh-winced the other night when (several years late, I know) I was watching an episode of The Good Place, in which one of the demons is lauded for his innovations in “performative wokeness.” The demon, who looks like a white man and is named Phil, stands up to leave, muttering, “Wow. Way to mansplain my own department to me. And I'm triggered.” It’s a joke that works itself back and forth across a cultural line — a boundary, if you will — making those of us who see the value of such language grimace in recognition. First of the horrible man-baby appropriating it to his own needs (he is a demon, after all, though we see it plenty in life). But also of our own preciousness, at times, as we struggle to talk about the ways marginalized people suffer from the behavior of people in power. The only thing missing was for the demon to have said, “You violated my boundaries.”
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.
As Scherlis argues, it’s a seductive schema, to be sure. A clever linguistic trick that allows us to risk less, shut down vulnerability, usually after we’ve already been hurt. Which admittedly, in some cases, is exactly the necessary thing. When a person you don’t know well, or who is in a power-up position relative to you, tramples all over your psychic and emotional space, it makes sense to close up shop and say, “hey, this is the line: if you cross it again (or don’t acknowledge you did it the first time), there are going to be consequences.” It’s much more vulnerable to say “That thing you did hurt my feelings.” And the talk around it is potentially much messier and prone to further hurt.
Still, I’ve been talking about boundaries plenty, myself: hell, I wrote a series of posts about it earlier this year. “Nobody owes anybody anything” was the theme of one of them, and deconstructed the idea that we are all somehow indebted to one another. I ran into the idea again when I followed queer Black theatre artist Velvet Wells after Fringe this year. “Contentious thought,” they wrote on their wall. “If ‘nobody owes you anything in life’ is true, why do you ‘owe it to yourself’ to live with something that opposes your existence?” I pondered this for a bit and responded, telling them about my post above, about how the language of indebtedness quickly becomes poisonous. “Owing and owning people is a very colonial perspective,” they responded. “As we work to decolonize through questioning, reflecting, and how we treat ourselves and others, we start to see how firmly language shapes and restricts engagement.”
I chewed on that one for a while. If the language of owing and owning (in Shakespeare’s day, they were the same word) is colonizing, then what was I doing countering it with even more language that describes ownership? Can we truly talk about boundaries, lines, enmeshment, codependency — without reinscribing these deeply white notions of Self versus Other, Owner versus Owned?
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.
It’s not that the language of “boundaries” should be thrown out. It’s frightfully useful, as proven by its persistence. As metaphors go, Scherlis says, it’s “remarkably tensile,” doing a great deal of work for us as we attempt to describe the messy and unequal and interdependent ways we attempt to relate to one another. She even talks about the term “boundaries” being hard to critique, lest, as she at first half-jokes, she be accused of not having any. Worse to her (and to me), though, is the idea that such a critique “implies you condone abuse, or are blind to power.” The language has become so immured in the way we talk about these things that even suggesting that the framework is flawed suggests that you’re taking the “wrong side,” to use yet another territorial phrase.
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?
The trouble, of course, is the same trouble I went over in another article that engaged with a piece of brilliant writing: Rayne Fisher-Quann’s “no good alone.”
That trouble, simply put, is the fact that we are sloshy, sloppy, interdependent beings with fuzzy edges and social needs, and the way our current societies are organized are forcing us to behave otherwise or die. (Or perhaps more aptly, behave otherwise and die.) Which is to say (as usual, ad nauseam, forever and forever amen) that the demands of capitalism force us not to care for each other but to compete, not to share but to hoard, not to be in community but to stand strong, alone, independent, pulling on your bootstraps as hard as you can.
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.
But we are not alone. We are not fully formed, completely separate, autonomous beings. My partner is fond of saying both that every human being is a vastness, an unknowable universe unto themselves, and that everyone has a sovereign separateness. I happen to agree with this seeming paradox, while also noting that maintaining the balance between honoring one another’s separateness and engaging in intimate closeness with other humans as we all so desperately long to is one of the key conflicts of life on Earth.
We may understand, early in life, that we are separate from everything, and everyone, else, particularly in this culture. (Many indigenous cultures raise kids with a different idea of how they relate to the rest of the world, and indeed accord personhood to most every natural thing and being.)
But that first separation, that understanding, however it is learned or taught, doesn’t stop us from the eternal yearning and reaching that gets us so tangled up in one another. It’s in our myths, our stories, our religions; it’s even in psychoanalysis, many decades before “boundaries” became the dominant paradigm. We spend our lives working out the gray areas between us, trying to put ourselves back together.
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.
In a violently imperfect world, where horrors happen daily too numerous to count, the “boundaries” framework feels like the best we have, the last, best hope for any of us to feel a sense of agency over our lives. It is, or it at least can be, a good way to protect ourselves from true invaders, at least after the fact if not before they come inside the lines and try and take everything we have. It can be a really helpful construct for rebuilding a fractured sense of self after trauma. For those whose sense of self has been undermined, it can be a triumph of true healing to finally have a sense of one’s own edges, to have installed the fences and lasers and dogs that will (hopefully) keep such a thing from happening again.
But it also neatly saves us from the riskiest of intimacies, absolves us of the sin of obligation, and allows us to perceive ourselves as whole and complete, even in isolation. There’s more than one reason why many people with complex PTSD have a hard time cultivating close relationships. We’ve been massively hurt, yes, and don’t have models built from childhood that tell us what healthy close relationships look like. But some of us have also built walls — for extremely good reasons. Getting onto the other side of those walls takes a different feat of imagination.
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.
As usual in this screwy capitalist world, the ideas that take on the most currency (another wonderfully capitalist word) are those that reify the habits and social behaviors that best befit a society of independent, self-sufficient consumers, whose dependence on one another ought never go further than borrowing a cup of sugar, or perhaps being part of a workplace carpool. Funerals, in some cases, merit casseroles. But so often, where there’s divorce, or abuse, or invisible chronic illness, or a disabled child, or sudden homelessness, or even just the simple boring, despairing slog that day to day life can be for some — you’re on your own. The vocabulary of caring for one another is increasingly weakened; the grammar of property remains. “That’s on you,” might well be the cry of a dying republic.
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.
-quoting Murray Bowen, from the late 1960s
When I was in grad school for creative writing, my thesis reader, the brilliant Maria Koundoura, went over a story I’d written about an obsessive relationship. They’re kind of codependent, I explained, secretly describing my own mess of a relationship I was in the thick of escaping in my late 20s. She scoffed, lightly. “Back in my day we used to call that ‘romance.’”
Some years later, in my Somatic Therapy training, I had the opportunity to be a demo client to the founder of the method herself, the late Ilana Rubenfeld. With her extraordinary powers of listening and presence (so hard to teach others, it turns out!), she found a hedge of thorns in my body, and asked me what it did. “It keeps people out,” I said, my voice as I remember it sad, tense, on the edge of tears. “Yeah,” she said. “And what else does it do?” The dam broke as my breath hitched and I practically howled, “It keeps me in!”
The lessons I learned in these moments are ones I still look to today. An over-emphasis on boundaries fosters rigidity. Never letting anyone close for fear of getting hurt again means nobody ever gets close. Nobody ever getting close means you’re on your own. These were hard-earned for me, coming from a family where the motto on the crest might as well have read “Trust No One.”
Because also: needing someone too much is bad. In fact, having needs at all is sort of annoying; avoid it if you can. Watch out for people who are “too nice” to you. And, per my family’s ceaseless dictate: never, ever be dependent on a man.
But these calls aren’t only coming from inside the house; they’re coming from the popular culture, too. The trouble is, as any discourse enters the mainstream and blows up into ubiquitousness through social media, the message is smoothed of its edges, diluted, moved toward the bland middle where no one truly lives.
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.
So where does that leave us? Schleris, in a splendid rhetorical flourish, sews up her article with the idea that boundaries have been sold to us as a quick fix for our messy, emotionally immature lives, a means by which we can become separate and self-sufficient and avoid ever being exploited again, but also wall ourselves off from others. And of course they are not that, and if they were, she more than hints, ought that really to be the goal?
For my part, I deeply appreciate the thought process this article has engendered in me. Largely, I still think the discourse around boundaries is an important one, especially for people — me very much included — who have historically had trouble differentiating themselves from others. I’ve found the idea invaluable for people establishing healthier relationships with their parents as adults, and for parents and other caregivers dealing with kids, especially at certain ages. And as my own writing about it attests, I’ve found it really useful in my close relationships too, especially when something goes sour and requires repair.
But I also clearly feel Scherlis’ critique deeply, and have been writing my way throughout this piece to where it truly resonates for me. And what it is, I think, is a recognition that in the times when I’ve had to repair relationship ruptures with the people closest to me, the solution hasn’t been line-drawing, pushing us further apart, creating new spaces into which the other may not trespass. At least, that hasn’t been the solution for growing or enduring closeness. Instead, it usually comes up as a final attempt to fix something rather than simply end it.
What has cultivated deeper relationship for me is a letting down of certain boundaries, a recognition that one or both us has trod upon a sensitive place we maybe didn’t even know was there until we let them into our walled garden, our inner self. As we grope in the darkness of each other’s vastnesses, we’re gonna trip over things. Sometimes the answer is “don’t go in that room.” But other times it’s more like, “please take extra care with the things in there?” And the preciousness and closeness has a chance to deepen. The other side of closeness is that we’re going to feel things, sometimes things we’ve never felt before and didn’t know we were missing. Other times things we’d hoped never to feel again, but which this encounter begins to reframe and heal. In other words, we risk pain for intimacy.
In my experience, it’s nearly always worth it.
Read Lily Scherlis’ whole piece, with much more about the history of boundaries in psychotherapy in the context of 20th century global politics (really!), here: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/boundary-issues And if you liked this meandering conversation, please share!