By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To improve your skills in boundary setting, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app
Boundaries are such a buzzword in our current culture. In my work as a therapist, this is one of the most recurring areas of focus. Boundaries are also exceedingly complex to develop and carry out in healthy ways, serving as a key skill area for being able to live out your values and move towards your goals. In my therapy practice, a lot of energy and attention is focused on the “why” and the “how to” in developing boundaries.
- Why: what motivates and drives the courage to set boundaries proactively?
- How: what are the skills involved in setting them?
Boundaries protect your relationships, time, energy, and resources. They can be set in ways that are values-aligned. Developing the skills to establish boundaries in healthy ways involves the articulation of your reasons or motives for the boundaries.
Without taking the time to articulate why boundaries are important, we run two risks. First, we run the risk of behaving in ways that violate our own values and hurt the people with whom boundaries are needed. For example, unless I boundary my time and depth of commitment in my friendships or work, my ability to live up to my roles in my household may be compromised. And vice versa, if I don’t develop healthy boundaries in my marriage and family, critical friendships, work, and personal health goals may be compromised.
Second, if we don’t learn to articulate and set boundaries in healthy and proactive ways, we run the risk of having our time and lives slip away, for waking up 30 years from now saying, “What the hell happened. I didn’t spend my time with the people I wanted to spend my time with or doing the things that brought me the most meaning and joy. I didn’t do the things that I wanted to do with my life.”
What are boundaries, and why do we set them? Boundaries are defined as the limits that we set for ourselves and others in relationships. There are various types of boundaries, such as physical, emotional, mental, sexual, financial, or time-related. Setting limits or boundaries is critical for building trust, honesty, respect, and safety in relationships. We need to be able to set boundaries across the full spectrum of our relationships– within our closest relationships with our immediate family and closest friends, as well as in our more secondary (yet critically important) relationships in work, school, churches, hobbies, and communities.
Setting boundaries involves short term discomfort and cost. There is a cost to setting boundaries, to saying no or drawing new limits. You can expect some push back from people when you set them or attempt to redefine the limits of a relationship. In relationships, we teach people what they can expect from us, and renegotiating limits with a parent, child, co-worker, boss, or friend involves changing the expectations or pattern that you have established with that person.
When you change the algorithm or pattern for a relationship, unpleasant emotions for both you and the person receiving the boundaries (fear, anger, hurt, disappointment) can occur (see previous content on pattern breaking; https://rewirerx.com/2024/05/14/breaking-patterns-in-your-relationships/).
The main source of difficulty in learning to set boundaries occurs when people organize themselves around goals to avoid friction, discomfort, and conflict. In my work as a therapist, I see many self-ascribed “people pleasers.” People pleasing is actually a boundary problem. On one hand, it’s lovely and important to think about and care for others’ needs. On the other hand, navigating the world to please others runs the risk of being deeply motivated by a goal to avoid friction, conflict, and negative evaluation from others. It ends up costing a lot in the end to be organized around goals to please and avoid conflict.
- Cost 1: Your health and meaning. Your ability and time to pursue an inner life, skills, and hobbies that bring your life color and presence. Your ability to live up to your values and goals based on fulfilling your multitude of roles and commitments.
- Cost 2: Depth-of and health-of relationships with the people you care about the most. For example, saying yes to a request that keeps you at work too late costs you dinner with your family.
The friction and anxiety that accompanies boundary setting is no doubt uncomfortable. Instead of letting your anxiety and discomfort avoidance drive your choice not to set a boundary, you could start to re-organize around using your mindfulness or awareness of that discomfort to cue or signal that a choice point is in front of you. “Aha! I’m feeling overwhelmed by this request, and also anxious about saying no. This is an opportunity to practice setting a boundary.”
Believe it or not, stepping into this difficult emotional process of setting a boundary is part of deepening honesty and trust in a relationship. You are giving others the opportunity to understand you with compassion and empathy, whether they choose to or not. Setting a boundary is a way to express hope and trust that the person receiving it will understand the need for the boundary, at least eventually (even if their gut reaction is one of hurt and pain). In this way, you align with values and roles in the world around leading relationships and work environments towards healthy patterns.
Because you are finite in your time, energy, and resources, if you don’t set boundaries with the people in places like work, the people closest to you with whom you desire the most depth and time and connection are the ones who pay the price. Being a people-pleaser, and not being willing to disappoint others with boundary setting– this prevents the growth of the muscle of boundary setting, preventing you from developing the musculature you need to protect your life and goals. It will cost you and the people who matter most in your life dearly.
Boundaries play out no matter what– they are inevitable. As a child, our lives are contained and limited to parents and immediate family. As we age and develop, our social networks rapidly expand to friends, teachers, co-workers, community members– in fact, the average adult is embedded in networks comprised of >200 people!1
Pretty quickly, we all come into contact with the limits of our time, energy, financial and emotional bandwidth to maintain our relationships. And as your own family grows, whatever that looks like, each person in that family has a complex set of commitments to their own social networks, in addition to their relationships and commitments to you.
Because you have finite time, multiple networks competing for time and resources, boundaries become absolutely necessary to start to thinking through. Why? Because without intentionally thinking them through and establishing them, your finite capacity will cause them to play out in unhealthy ways that do harm to your own values and goals, and by proxy, the people in your life.
- That friendship that meant so much to you in college but that you don’t seem to have time to maintain anymore– how are you going to communicate about that in a way that honors your one-time deep commitment that now has to shift into a different level of depth?
- Your relationship with your own parents as you move into the prime of raising your own children. How are you going to include them in ways that honor your relationship while also creating the space needed for your family to grow independent of them?
- The many hats you wear at work. How are you going to communicate the limits of your time and investment in the projects and people that you were committed to in intentional ways? How are you going to avoid workaholism and deal with disappointing the people in your work life so as not to let people in your household down chronically?
- For your family and friends, how are you going to communicate the demands of work that are taking you away from your relationships with them?
- For a relationship that is not going well (marriage, friendship), are you going to (a) let big blow-ups determine your self-worth in a toxic co-dependence, or (b) intentionally start to draw some lines that allow you to function in a healthy way in that relationship and actually give it a chance to improve?
Boundaries can save a relationship, or they can move a relationship towards ending in situations where that might be needed. Further, boundaries play out no matter whether you set them intentionally or whether you let things fester until they establish themselves. You can intentionally set them out of unhealthy motives as well. Sometimes I see patients setting up boundaries out of emotionally driven positions of fear or desire to establish position or power in a family. In this case, boundaries are not being set using goals, values, or qualities of leadership in a family or social network (which, I posit, is the healthy foundation for boundary setting which I lay out below). Rather, boundaries are being set out of motives that ultimately cause you to develop mistrust and hurtful distance.
A quick note specifically on workplace boundaries. Without acknowledging and drawing lines around your time and availability at work, especially in the recent evolutions of virtual remote work that can be done at any hour of the day or night or weekend, boundaries begin to form in unhealthy ways. Resentment, bitterness, and anger begin to seep into the ways that we consider and think about our coworkers, leaders, and organizations. Boundary setting is actually a necessary and protective skill that allows you to form a healthy relationship with the work that you are doing, to promote longevity, motivation, and feelings of reward associated with work. Some significant position of burnout is preventable through thoughtful, skillful boundary setting initiated by you. No one else can do it for you.
One quick caveat about burnout, an area in which I’ve studied and published extensively: Some environments are so toxic that they simply disallow healthy boundaries and become unsustainable…that’s another topic altogether. In these cases, boundary setting that is ultimately rejected gives you the information that you need to initiate moving on from that work environment.
How to set boundaries in a healthy way. Setting boundaries by using your values and goals is a critical foundation for how they can play out. Knowing yourself, the limits of your time and attention, and the deepest commitments in your life that you need or want to center around, are critically important. Boundaries allow you to prioritize the commitments that matter most to you, and as you age this becomes even more critical to wellbeing to reduce acquaintances and grow depth in your deepest relationships. You can intentionally communicate boundaries from a position of values (honesty, humility) and goals (e.g., to live up to my role as son, by setting limits that allow me to maintain a relationship with my parents that is possible within the limits of my time and other commitments).
When you set boundaries based on healthy goals and values, you can experience inner peace (emotionally regulated) even if there are negative reactions from the person who receives the boundary. You may disappoint someone, lose an opportunity, or experience anger from the other person. But if you’ve clarified your reasons within yourself, and your priorities/goals, then leaving an opportunity on the table or closing a door may be a good thing. Because you are clear-headed about why you have set the boundary, you can experience congruence or peace within yourself despite these consequences from others. And eventually, that relationship can reform around a new set of expectations.
We are talking here about you leading in your relationships towards healthy destinations that are doable, honest, and trusting. Prioritizing your time and energy for the places and people and hobbies that are of deepest value to you. Communicating your limits and the limits you need from others is a humble leadership challenge, and one that you need values and goals to live up to (rather than being guided by desire to avoid emotional turmoil that comes from communicating these boundaries).
Boundaries are honest about your limitations and protect and improve relationships. Grounding our boundary setting in values and goals allows us to think them through, establish them, and reinforce them when necessary. People in our lives will eventually come around to a reformed, new pattern. Sometimes, others decide to accept a reformation of the relationship, and sometimes they do not. When we don’t think boundaries through, establish them, and reinforce them, insidious harms begin to emerge in relationships that inflict unnecessary wounds in relationships that we carry forward.
Here are a few examples to think about this.
Example 1:
Jeff and Cara have been married 12 years, with 3 children ages 6 through 13, with a busy life. Jeff’s parents recently relocated to a house down the street, to be closer and do life together. But, the honeymoon period (year 1) is over, and the grandparents are around A LOT, increasingly seeing Jeff and Cara and grandkids as the center of their social world. Jeff and his wife and the kids love having this new deeper dimension in their lives, and yet, it is starting to wear everyone thin from a time and network diversity standpoint (i.e., taking away the time that Jeff and family spend with their own network outside of the immediate family). Jeff and Cara start arguing regularly about whether and how to communicate a boundary. starting to get frustrated, and act out of that, understandably so. They are both feeling pressure to say yes, and Cara is starting to resent Jeff’s unwillingness to set boundaries.
- Option 1: do nothing, continue to build pressure and frustration. Someone blows up or resentment sets in, and real hurt and distance starts to emerge naturally without saying much about it.
- Option 2: approach a conversation with Jeff’s parents grounded in carefully articulated values and goals. That is, to communicate with values towards a goal to create more structure and space.
On one hand, it is well within the goal set of Jeff and his family to have the grandparents quite involved. But it is also not healthy for that involvement to be boundaryless, and not healthy for the grandparents to fail to develop their own social network outside of Jeff and his family.
- Boundary 1: Jeff and Cara do the work to get on the same page and understand one another’s positions with empathy. They don’t make this about “winning” or “who is right and who is wrong” but rather make it about a nuanced understanding of each other’s perspectives.
- Boundary 2: Discuss a new boundary with Jeff’s parents. Use values to guide the “how” to discuss (for example- compassion, honesty, empathy, directness), and goals to guide the “what” or literal form of the boundary.
The conversation happens, and Jeff’s parents are hurt initially. However, everyone comes around after a month of “cold shouldering” for a once-per-month Sunday dinner that rotates between their two houses, and an afternoon per week that Jeff and Cara can get some one on one time while grandparents do something fun with the grandkids. The possibility of a weekly happy hour is broached as well, depending on how phase 1 boundaries. Jeff and Cara also communicate about how important it is for Jeff’s folks to get involved in their own relationship building separate from Jeff and Cara, and suggest options.
Example 2:
Sarah is a 20-year-old junior at a university a few hours away from her hometown. Since starting college, her parents have become increasingly overbearing and intrusive in her life. They call or text her multiple times a day, want to know every detail of her schedule and social activities, and frequently show up unannounced on campus to take her out to meals or run errands with her. Sarah loves her parents but is feeling suffocated and unable to establish her independence as a young adult. She has tried gently telling them she needs more space, but they brush it off as her “just being a typical college kid.” Sarah and her parents are now butting heads regularly, and she’s starting to resent their constant presence in her life.
- Option 1: Do nothing and let the strain and resentment build. Sarah could avoid the difficult confrontation, but it will likely lead to emotional blowups, hurt feelings, and an increasingly strained relationship with her parents down the road.
- Option 2: Initiate a thoughtful conversation grounded in her values and goals for healthy boundaries. Sarah could explain that while she deeply values her relationship with her parents, she needs respect for her autonomy and appropriate space to grow into an independent adult.
- Boundary 1: Sarah reflects deeply on her own perspectives and catalogs the specific behaviors from her parents that are hindering her ability to develop as a young adult. She makes it a point to understand her parents’ good intentions as well, acknowledging their desire to remain close and support her.
- Boundary 2: Sarah sits down with her parents, expressing her love and gratitude for their involvement, but firmly communicating that their constant presence is impeding her growth. Using compassion, she outlines reasonable limits, such as only one check-in call per day and no more unannounced visits without an invite. She makes it clear this is about respecting her emerging adulthood, not rejecting their relationship.
Sarah’s parents are initially hurt, accusing her of pushing them away. However, after some cooling-off time, they come to understand Sarah’s perspective. The new boundaries allow Sarah to feel her independence is intact, while her parents make efforts to find social fulfillment outside of just depending on time with her. Regular scheduled video calls help them stay connected in a healthy way. Sarah’s courage to set respectful boundaries strengthens her self-efficacy and improves the long-term family dynamics.
Example 3:
Alex is a senior marketing manager at a growing tech company. He’s been with the company for 5 years and is highly dedicated to his job. However, over the last year, the company’s culture has shifted to an unhealthy state of overwork driven by a new executive team. There is an unspoken expectation that employees should be available around the clock on nights, weekends, and even vacations to churn on projects with very tight deadlines. Alex frequently finds himself working 60-70 hour weeks, constantly stressed, and pulling his kids from activities to keep up with work demands. His work-life balance is non-existent, and he’s beginning to feel resentful toward his colleagues and employer.
- Option 1: Do nothing and allow the unsustainable overwork to continue. This will likely lead to burnout, plummeting engagement and productivity, strained family relationships, and potential health issues for Alex.
- Option 2: Initiate a respectful conversation with his manager about setting some reasonable boundaries around his time and availability. This protects his interests while demonstrating leadership.
- Boundary 1: Alex reflects carefully on his core values – being a present parent, maintaining his health and well-being, and modeling work-life balance. He also considers the goals he wants to uphold as an experienced leader.
- Boundary 2: Alex schedules a meeting with his manager. Using a solutions-focused attitude, he explains that the current overwork expectations are at odds with his values and goals for sustainable excellence. He proposes some firm boundaries, such as no work past 7pm, no emails/Slacks over the weekend, and protected vacation time. However, he gains buy-in by positioning it as a way to avoid burnout and retain top talent.
Alex’s manager is positive in response. But immediately, within the first few days after their conversation, pushes on Alex’s boundaries as has been the norm with after hours requests and a scheduled work call to occur on a Saturday afternoon. Alex declines, and holds his line. After a few weeks of Alex modeling the boundaries, others on the team follow suit. While projects still require intense efforts at times, the boundaries help preserve team morale and engagement long-term. Alex has shown leadership in preserving a more sustainable path through a solution-minded approach tied to his principles.
On internal boundaries in your closest relationships. In our closest relationships, I like to use the cell biology concept of semi-permeability. It’s actually critically important to cultivate a small number of people (probably between 2 and 5) who have the power and influence in your life to imbue you with courage, a sense of deep acceptance, deep respect and love.
However, even in our closest relationships, too much reliance on others for your sense of wellbeing and self worth in the world can easily turn into co-dependence in times when those relationships are struggling. For example, for 95% of my married life, I am able to rely upon my spouse for the courage and respectful lense through which she sees me and communicates with me. She knows me deeply, sees my strengths and weaknesses, and knows how to encourage and build me up. However, there are seasons of my marriage, like all marriages, in which we struggle. During those times, being able to step back from the struggle and shift my perspective is crucial. Having other sources of feedback from which I can draw upon for my courage is critical, otherwise, I run the risk of being dependent upon her for my self-worth. When I am dependent upon others for my self-worth, I run the risk of not being able to live out my roles and goals and values in a healthy way.
Boundaries are even important in your closest relationships. From an identity standpoint, being a whole, secure person who is not solely defined by the evaluations, moods, or opinions of your spouse or parents or children is critical. To avoid dependency on those close relationships for your self-worth. Without enough emotional distance, we can be shattered by the opinions and feedback of other people.
Through my practice as a therapist and human, this is the counterintuitive truth: In order to have healthy, intimate, and deeply meaningful relationships, we need create limits and boundaries on relationships even with the people we love the most. It is ideal to be able to absorb and observe the feedback of someone who you trust so that you can turn it over, think about it, and chew on it in objective ways. To not be so dismayed or distressed or destroyed by a critique or negative evaluation from someone that you cannot exist. To be able to sift the truth or “salt” out of difficult interactions, so that you can learn and grow…without being feeling destroyed by their feedback. In this way, you become able to interact in relationships in ways that feel secure, honest, and growth oriented. This internal boundary allows relationships to be a real superpower in your life, if you can set your aspirational sites on developing it.
When I am overlapping too much- my self worth and value are wrapped up in the evaluation and words of someone else (parent, spouse, friend), I can’t see myself or my relationship in objective terms. I live and die by the influence and words of another person.
Boundaries on Phone Use.
A final note on boundaries: if you are having personal boundary problems with phone use and/or social media use, or work place communications or contact, then none of what I am talking about in this essay will matter. You have to start by doing business with yourself on your addiction to your phone. It is important to build the self-compassion and self-respect into your life to set significant limits on your phone and social media use. Without that, your time and capacity and bandwidth to do anything else will be a mirage. If this is a problem in your life, try a simple experiment, aimed at seeing how good your presence can be over the next three weeks.
(1) Commit a 3 week period of time to time based boundaries and purging of the most used forms of social media from your phone.
(2) select replacement behaviors that are rewarding and healthy (walking, in person connection, cooking, yoga, bikes, house project, drawing, sleeping, reading on a kindle or real book, and on and on).
(3) Keep track in an excel sheet or google doc the extra activities, people, and engagements with people that you have time to fit in.
Without phone boundaries, you won’t be ready to set realtime, in-real-life boundaries with others.
1 McCarty, C., Killworth, P. D., Bernard, H. R., Johnsen, E. C., & Shelley, G. A. (2001). Comparing two methods for estimating network size. Human organization, 60(1), 28-39.