The Clean Way To Avoid Unnecessary Boundary Confusion In Relationships

A Nuance About How To Protect Our Boundaries In Relationships That Cross Categories

I’m writing to you from a small inn across the street from Shakespeare’s family home in Stratford Upon Avon, and while this isn’t exactly anything like the iambic pentameter genius of the man who made this town famous, it still strikes me how lucky I am to get to make a living as a writer- and I have you all, dear readers, to thank for caring about what I write. So THANK YOU! I’m here with my partner Jeff, who is also a writer, and it’s impressive to me how absorbed we can become in our writing, clicking away with our fingers while our minds remember stories or try to capture what we’re experiencing and learning in therapy and beyond.

We’ve also been talking a lot lately about boundaries and how we still struggle with them, even after all this fabulous therapy we’ve been privileged enough to learn from. As two doctors who have both studied spontaneous remission for over a decade each, and as two trauma survivors interested in cutting edge trauma therapies, the interests in our work lives overlap in vast swaths in ways that predated us ever meeting one another, first as friends, and then as romantic partners. So one boundary issue we struggle with is the area of dual relationships.

He wants me to start the Center For Trauma-Informed Medicine & Spirituality with him at Harvard and teach medical students and residents about what we should have learned in medical school but didn’t. But I say “You should do that without me.” I want him to do a “Dear Sugars”-inspired advice column podcast with me, just because it would be so fun. But then we realize that could be a recipe for disaster if we wind up breaking up. My agent wants us to write a book together, but what would happen if we got a book deal and were half way through our book when one of us broke the other’s heart?

And so we mostly fantasize about these kinds of collaborations, but we don’t do much together professionally beyond having him appear as a guest every now and then in online classes I teach. But those fantasies do inspire countless conversations about dual relationships, those relationships that cross categories, like doing business with your romantic partner.

Most people with any kind of reasonable ethics know that certain dual relationships are an absolute “no no”- like therapists, doctors, healers, bodyworkers, coaches, transformational workshop leaders, academic professors, or anyone in the helping professions who takes advantage of transference and counter-transference and abuses that power by coming onto clients or patients or students romantically or sexually. Those kinds of dual relationships are a set up for traumatizing people and are best avoided under all circumstances.

But there are other kinds of dual relationships that are trickier. My therapist had warned me about more nuanced dual relationships- like becoming friends with your client or letting your friends take a workshop you run or joining the family business. She told me that dual relationships weren’t impossible or always problematic. They just require one skill set I didn’t have and she suspected (rightfully so) that I would not acquire for quite some time. She went on to explain a nuance that it would take me years to fully understand, which I want to share with you here.