Let's Practice Healthy Boundaries

Real Life Examples To Put Healthy Limit Setting Into Practice

It can feel quite abstract to talk about healthy boundaries, so let’s look at some key examples of how to negotiate boundaries. For example, I once had a client who asked me to be careful about the use of two words she found very activating- “mature” and “immatue. She wasn’t sure why, but whenever I used those words in my online courses, (like this one- Heal Your Wounded Boundaries), she felt a contraction in her system. I tried to understand why, but she wasn’t sure. She set a Boundaries 1.0 limit. “Please don’t use the words mature or immature. They always make me feel icky.” I agreed to try to respect her boundary.

The next time I taught an online class, I wasn’t sure whether she was there or not, but I caught myself when I was about to use the word “mature.” I stopped myself and then outed myself, laughing when I realized how frequently I had the impulse to use those words in some of my classes. My client was, in fact, in the class, and she messaged me to say she appreciated that I was trying to respect the boundary.

I asked if I could swap out “responsible” and “irresponsible,” but those were trigger words too. She finally realized that she was working on some young parts in her therapy, and those parts felt insulted whenever I used words that made them feel like I was judging or shaming them. She asked me to use the language of “inadequately parented parts,” in order to shift the blame back where it belonged, on her parents. In my next few classes, I found work-around words and did my best to tread lightly around any languaging that might feel insulting to her young parts. 

A few months later, she messaged me and said she was no longer triggered by those words. She had completed that part of her therapy and her internal family system was no longer insulted. In fact, she found herself using them too. She thanked me for all the effort I had made to be careful around those trigger words. She expressed how trust-building it felt for her to know that, as a teacher of IFS, I cared about her boundary, was willing to comply with it, and that I hadn’t made her wrong for asking for that boundary. I felt grateful she had communicated what was okay and not okay for her. Otherwise, I might have kept hurting her inadequately parented parts, without knowing I was causing her pain, and it would have been tragic if I had lost a friend without understanding why.

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.