everyone is wrong about boundaries (except for me)
everyone has crosses to bear and mine is the way my dizzying intellect forces me to be correct about everything all the time
Boundaries are things we are supposed to have. We know other people have them, though we don’t always know what they are until we cross them. We know that crossing a boundary is bad — embarrassing at best, and tantamount to abuse at worst. But what even is a boundary?
As any culture changes and progresses, we leave behind old problems and develop new ones. I think this is inevitable. Our cultural landscape regarding mental health has shifted radically in the last decade or so, and one of our new problems is that more people have access to therapy language than can use it effectively. I think that there are a whole bunch of people out there who are using the word boundaries without having any idea what it means. I don’t even think that most mental health practitioners know what they mean when they say it. If they did, they’d explain it better.
Online, definitions are a veritable clusterfuck: boundaries are “imaginary lines,” which seems to indicate they’re about some kind of mental space with borders, but they’re also “rules” about the “flow” of consequence to behaviour. Boundaries are about how other people treat us, but they are not rules for other people. They are not controlling or coercive, says one source. Good! Nobody wants to be controlling or coercive, or at least they don’t want to be thought of as controlling or coercive. But then there are about a million examples, on Reddit or whatever, of people complaining about the boundaries of others — describing those boundaries with words like controlling or coercive. And also, there are still more people saying that sometimes people interpret your boundaries as controlling and coercive, even when they’re not.
This is all very confusing. But I think I can fix it.
ANNOYING PHILOSOPHY LANGUAGE ACTUALLY MAKES STUFF MORE CLEAR
I think that “boundaries” is a word about the outer reaches of an internally coherent sense of self. One of the theories of what makes a person crazy is that they have low internal coherence — there is no consistent way they react to circumstances or environment or stimuli, because there is no consistent way their mind makes sense of things, which is wildly disorienting for the crazy person and also for everyone around them. A lack of internal coherence feels like being lost, all the time — mistrustful and easily influenced and helpless and pissed off. I think that a person with weak or poorly-defined boundaries doesn’t have them because they basically don’t know who they are.
I think that boundaries are poorly explained because people are trying to explain them from the perspective of how they are experienced in real time, in the real world, every day. This makes sense. If my car breaks down, I don’t need a lecture in engine mechanics. I need someone to change the doo-hickey.
Since boundaries are something I’m supposed to have, right now, and they’re also something that other people have, I need some kind of layman’s understanding of them immediately so I can have successful interpersonal relationships — preferably, as soon as I leave this office, or this zoom call, or when I finish reading this article.
I personally think that the very unfortunate truth is that boundaries only make any sense at all if they are understood starting from the least practical application, from the ground up, from the philosophical foundations. Eventually, after a lot of time and many mistakes, we work our way from there to how to apply those things to the mundane minutae of life. I think boundaries are about being able to differentiate between you and the Other — capital O — an ominous, esoteric-sounding philosophy word that basically just means “not-you.”
YES, YES, THE TRANSCENDENTAL ONE-NESS OF ALL BEING-IN-EXISTENCE. WE HAVE ALL EXPERIENCED IT. DO YOUR DISHES.
When I was getting an education, a lot of the really cool stuff I learned that blew my mind had to do with problematizing the barrier between self and Other. Ideas about how connected we all are — our fundamental one-ness, what we owe to each other, our obligations toward care and our interdependence — are coded-Left, politically, and popular for a reason. They feel good to read about. There’s an almost psychedelic quality to them: this kind of exploding-outwards, this sudden capacity for intimacy and connection, the Eureka! of understanding, the firing of that nerve that makes our eyes tear up and our stomach feel warm. I personally think that they’re also popular because they are true: we are all made of the same star-stuff. We are all stuck here together, connected to each other, inter-dependent with each other.
But here is the thing: also, you live in the world. No mud, no lotus is mostly about the mud, I think. I don’t think the work is the lotus. I think the work is the mud.
I have alterity tattooed to one of my arms. Alterity is what is described by the word differentiation: the state of being Other, of being different. I think that our fundamental belonging, our One-ness, the you-are-me-and-we-are-we-ness of it all, is exactly half of all of this. One half of all of this is not the truth. The truth is the tension between one half and its fundamentally irreconcilable opposite. The irreconcilable opposite of the fundamental connectedness of Being is alterity.
A human life is a life of spiritual locked-in syndrome. We all experience the world by way of projecting, at least a little. Connection is real, and possible, and love matters, and also all of that is an illusory grasping across the uncrossable divide that defines the fundamental alone-ness of a human life. We can never truly know another person. We can’t ever inhabit their consciousness. When it feels like we can, we are wrong. We will be proven wrong in a way that will hurt.
We are bound to our physical bodies and those bodies fail and die. We experience our one-ness in gorgeous, ecstatic bursts, which are always available, even as we are body-slammed into the mundane reality of desire and attachment and the irreconcilable maw between ourselves and the rest of the world.
That uncrossable gap is not a problem. It is a feature, not a bug. It’s how we come to understand ourselves.
That gap is what boundaries are.
PSYCHOANALYSIS IS A KIND OF PHILOSOPHY: THE KIND THAT IS FOR SEX PERVERTS.
When a baby is born, the theory is that they basically don’t conceptualize any meaningful distinction between their own body and the body of their primary attachment figure (usually their mother, but not always). To the baby, mom (or whatever) is me, and I am mom. This comes with a sense of entitlement which is not unreasonable — the baby is completely helpless, and the caregiver provides the things the baby needs to survive: food, help moving around, hygienic care, and so on.
Eventually, the baby learns that its parents actually do have lives and needs that are independent from the child, and by extension that the child has a physical and psychological identity that is distinct from their parents. This is the origin of differentiation. Eventually, if the course of psychological development goes on in a way that’s basically healthy and complete, they will learn that while they are part of their family, and community, and group of friends, and nation and ideological set and so on, they also have distinct needs, preferences, feelings, and desires that don’t look exactly like everyone else’s. They will also learn that everyone else has these, too, and that they are all the same level of important. The result is an independent person with a fully-functioning theory of mind.
Differentiation is the capacity to maintain one’s independent identity in a social context — in intimate relationships, as well as in broader civil society. A properly-differentiated person knows who they are, even when they’re in a group or in an intimate relationship. They might get overwhelmed, temporarily give in to baser instincts, or make mistakes, but they generally know how to feel strong emotions and make rational choices at the same time. They can cognitively understand where other people are coming from, and they can feel and demonstrate compassion for others. I think that a natural byproduct of this is wanting to do stuff to make other people happy, or reduce their suffering. I think another natural byproduct is a sense that there are things one can and should do for others, and things that one cannot and should not. I think that responsibility is basically a statement about material reality — there are things I’m responsible for, practically, and things that I am not.
SO WHAT IS A BOUNDARY
Boundaries are the permeable dividing lines between self and other that we have when we are properly differentiated. It’s a psychological concept, so there’s no absolutely perfect physical analogue, but you can think of them generally as a kind of psychological skin. My skin is porous. It lets things in and out. It keeps some stuff in, and some stuff out, and it marks a line between me and not me. When it is ruptured by force, there’d better be a good reason (think surgery.) When there is not a good reason I have a big problem.
Inside my boundaries are: what I like, what I can tolerate, what my standards are, what I believe, and that for which I am responsible. Outside is everything else: the things I don’t like, even if I know they’re normal things to like, to which I limit exposure or avoid completely. The behaviours to which I cannot expose myself even if I don’t necessarily think they’re evil or bad. The things I do no believe, even if I think that the people who believe them do so for good reasons. The things I cannot be responsible for even if I wanted to be.
When I have a sense of what my boundaries are, I know where this line is, and why it’s there. I am not constantly re-negotiating my selfhood in an attempt to merge with the Other — and hurting myself, and my internal coherence, in the process.
My boundaries are not all rational, and they are informed at least partially by things like the traditions of my family of origin, the ambient culture of my society, standards in my peer group, and my ethical or moral codes. My boundaries also not simply a one-to-one reflection of these things.
My boundaries change over time: I may become more tolerant of a broader range of stimuli as I develop new competencies or learn new things. Therapy can help with this — I think specifically about things like exposure-response therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder, which focuses specifically on increasing tolerance to stimuli that, without therapy, causes the anxiety response that triggers a ritualistic control strategy. We also might find our window of tolerance shrinking over time and our boundaries actually becoming more discriminating and rigid, and this is not necessarily a bad thing — as we collect experiences that teach us clear lessons about things that simply don’t work for us, or we simply get older and run out of patience for things.
We also don’t maintain our boundaries the exact same way with everyone. I have very different emotional boundaries at work than I do in romantic relationships, for example.
I also think that boundaries are time-bound: they don’t necessarily reflect my past, or my aspirations. I may aspire to be more tolerant, but know what my tolerance level actually is right now — and I do think it’s much more responsible to let people know what I’m like based on the facts of things currently, and not what I’d like to be like in the future.
A CASE STUDY
There was a high-profile celebrity gossip story about boundaries that broke a little while ago. I won’t mention the names of the people involved, because everyone’s moved on, but to summarize, there was a couple — a man and a woman — and this couple broke up. When they did, the woman of the couple came forward online with evidence of what she described as controlling behaviour by her boyfriend. Her boyfriend had used the language of boundaries.
His boundaries included her not wearing the revealing, industry-standard outfit associated with the job he knew she had when they started dating (and probably thought was hot and cool at the time.) They also included her not taking pictures with male colleagues, and her not spending time with female friends of whom he disapproved. He told her that if those things were not negotiable for her, then he supported her right to do them, but that he wouldn’t be able to be in a relationship with her.
The internet was divided, but what I saw was mostly people being mad at the boyfriend: people assessing that these boundaries were misogynistic, that they were controlling, that they were coercive, and so on. This was all described as an example of his weaponizing therapy language to be abusive to his partner.
I think this comes back to a fundamental misunderstanding about therapy, generally: therapy does not train you to be a good person. Therapy is about learning about yourself, working out what your goals are, and working out how to go after your goals in a way that is basically interpersonally effective. If one of your goals is being a good person, I’m sure a very exceptionally good therapist could help orient you in the right direction. It’s up to the person getting therapy to apply the skills they learn to their own understanding of what it means to be a good person.
WHAT DO I THINK ABOUT THIS? THANK YOU FOR ASKING.
Were this specific boyfriend’s boundaries misogynistic? I think they were, actually, yes. I think that these boundaries indicate that misogyny is a problem this person has. I think that misogyny is bad, tantamount to a character defect, and that if you notice it’s a problem for you you should work on it. I don’t think this makes the reality of the misogynist’s boundaries any different. If I were a man, and I noticed that I was feeling a lot of misogynistic stuff about my girlfriend and her life, I don’t think that it would be realistic of me to believe I could just become not misogynistic at that exact moment. The smart thing to do, in fact, would be to bring it up — and end the relationship if it became clear this was going to be a problem that negatively impacted her while I worked on it. Boundaries are about knowing what you’re actually like, not what you aspire to be like. I think it’s possible for people to recognize, express, and maintain boundaries that are misogynistic without accepting or endorsing misogyny.
Are this person’s boundaries controlling? Kind of, but I also think that “control” gets a bad rap. Everyone tries to control stuff at least a little bit. A person who exerted zero control would lie naked in a heap until they died, not eating or drinking or bathing or moving. We need some control over what we do and what happens to us or we will die — and we cannot pursue a goal or actualize a desire without at least trying to exert some control over our environment, including our human environment. Making a request someone can reject is a bid for control over something — and it’s only abusive when I don’t accept their “no.”
It’s inevitable that we are eventually going to attempt to exert some kind of control over other people, and that we will also be controlled be others. I don’t think that “control,” in its most basic sense, is abusive by definition.
One of the things therapy has been really useful for, personally, is learning how to notice when other people are trying to control me — not so I can stop this from ever happening, because I don’t think that’s realistic, but so I can assess the character of these people and make rational and conscious decisions about whether or not the benefits (material or emotional) of associating with them are worth it for me.
Control in relationships is abusive when it’s maintained by force or manipulation (as opposed to providing additional information, or even advocacy, which are different) and against the wishes of the person being controlled. It’s abusive if they can’t leave, or change, or tell me no without violence or punishment. This boyfriend was not punishing his girlfriend with violence if she couldn’t give him what he wanted. He was telling her how he felt in a normal, imperfect, human way.
FEELING BAD IS NOT COERCION
I think that the “threat” being identified by people who think this is abusively controlling is the threat of the relationship ending. When a relationship ends, this is very sad — but ending a relationship is also normal, and not abusive.
This leads into the idea of coercion. I think that there’s a huge problem in our public discourse about concepts like abuse in relationships which looks, to me, like there may in fact be a lot of people who believe that when they feel any emotion at all, they are being coerced. This is obviously not true. Coercion is when I am persuaded to do something by way of force or threats. Where this gets kind of muddy, admittedly, is that emotional manipulation is a kind of force — but manipulation is an intentional, slow process, with the intent to wear down someone’s capacity to make independent choices. It’s always intentional on some level, and it happens over time. A single instance of emotionality is not manipulation, it’s just a person being emotional. And it’s not force or a threat when I experience the normal emotions that come along with a decision or a set of circumstances.
When someone offers me information about themselves in good faith, I have an obligation to respond to that information truthfully, even if doing so will make me feel something negative. This is not coercion. The normal emotional consequences of being myself in the world, and telling the truth, is not a force put upon me by others or a threat of another person hurting me if I don’t do what they want. It is simply me experiencing the emotions associated with the facts of my life. If I don’t tell the truth, because I don’t want to feel something, I am not absolved from responsibility by claiming I was coerced. I am responsible for lying in a normal way and for the normal reasons.
I can imagine it would really suck if my boyfriend was like, hey I just found out I’m kind of misogynist, and I don’t want to be, and I’m working on it, but also I can’t responsibly be your boyfriend until I have worked on my shit a little. It sucks when a relationship I want to be in ends for reasons that are not my fault. But it’s not abusive. It’s just a true thing that sucks in the normal way.
Most of the things that will suck in my life will suck simply because they are normal things that don’t feel good: I have to experience things I don’t like, or engage with belief systems that aren’t mine, or encounter problems I can’t be responsible for even when I want to. I think that’s the gift of a real felt sense of our own boundaries — I know what’s mine, and what’s not mine. I know when it’s time to move on.