Examples Of Healthy Boundaries In Real Life

Excerpt From The Boundaries Handbook

In my book that I’m sharing here The Boundaries Handbook, I make the distinction between Boundaries 1.0 (one-sided boundaries) and Boundaries 2.0 (negotiations between two or more individuals that consider everyone’s “parts” and needs. In the essay The “How” Of Basic Boundaries 1.0, I spelled out the most simple kind of boundary setting, and I promised to make it less abstract by sharing some concrete examples. So here’s what I promised!

The Boundaryless Therapist

I had to practice Boundaries 1.0 with a boundary wounded friend who is a therapist. I knew enough about his resistance to IFS to know Boundaries 2.0 was not a likely option. I started by using a simple NVC kind of boundary because he kept jumping in and trying to play therapist on me whenever I was having even the most benign trigger about something like feeling sad about growing apart from a friend or feeling angry about social injustice in an unjust world.

I said, “When I see that you try to treat me like your client whenever I’m having an emotion, I feel angry because my need to be allowed to have a legitimate emotion around you is not met. Would you be willing to just let me have my emotions without interfering or playing therapist with me? I have my own therapist, so my request is that you trust me to do my work in therapy so we can have a boundary between our friendship and my therapeutic work with my own therapist.”

Instead of agreeing to my boundary, he argued with it. He felt entitled to jump in and try to “fix” me because I was “ruining his good vibe.” I felt judged because he perceived some emotions as “spiritual” and other emotions as “unspiritual,” so I felt shut down if I so much as shed a tear of grief or felt a flush of righteous anger when I saw something tragic or unjust happening in the world.

Even after I asked him, this friend would not stop therapizing me, no matter how many times I asked him to stop. I warned him that if he could not control his behavior and respect my boundary, I might have to dial the intimacy dial down and withdraw some of the privileges of being close to me. Even when I got fierce with my “No,” he said he felt like I was a “minefield” he had to tread lightly around, yet he continued to violate my boundary. When I finally set a very firm but respectful boundary to make him stop doing his therapy shtick on me, he got big and intimidating and started screaming at me at the top of his lungs, saying, “Lissa! The world does not need you to fall apart and have a meltdown right now!” (I was just shedding a tear or two in the middle of a global pandemic. Who was falling apart, him or me?)

After my last warning, the next time he crossed my boundary, I had to do what I had promised I would do- enforce the boundary. I had forewarned him that if he broke the boundary again, I would get right up and leave if I was at his house. If we were at my house, I would ask him to leave.  If we were out in public, I would either separate myself or ask if he’d be willing to be the one to go. We were at his house, so I packed up my bags and walked out. He was pissed. And his wife told me afterwards he felt confused, hurt, and insulted. I told her I had warned him beforehand that I did not want him as my therapist; I wanted him as my friend. 

He got somewhat better about not therapizing me when I was having an emotion, but not enough that I feel safe with him. As a result, I stopped sharing anything vulnerable with him, stopped sleeping over, stopped traveling with him, and limited our contact to safer, more distant activities. I felt sad to have to dial the intimacy dial down, but he proved not to be capable of respecting boundaries, and people like that aren’t safe enough to keep too intimately close.

If you’re dealing with relatively unreasonable, controlling, intimidating, manipulative, or abusive boundary wounded people who are not in therapy and not particularly interested in respecting your boundaries, Boundaries 1.0 are probably as good as you’re going to get. However, Boundaries 1.0 only protect the one setting the boundary. Yes, I had a right to set a unilateral boundary to protect myself from my therapizing friend. But in that case, my boundary wasn’t considering his needs at all. 

Assuming there was a reason he kept jumping in to do therapy on me, I could have done a better job of considering his needs if I had been better at boundaries back then. Perhaps my emotions distressed him too much and he needed to set a boundary around my emotional expression. Perhaps rather than therapizing me, he might have been able to say, “When I see that you’re crying or angry, my nervous system gets dysregulated and I feel anxious, scared, and unsettled because my need for peaceful equanimity and a conflict-free space is not met. Would you be willing to go outside or call a friend if you are feeling strong emotions when you’re around me?” I might or might not have been able to agree to his request, but at least then we might have been in the territory of a Boundaries 2.0 conversation.