Boundaries

When to say Yes. When to say No. To Take Control of Your Life.

Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend

ISBN 13: 0-310-24745-4

Read 2007 May 24 and days following.

Reviewed 2007 October 26

The next book was Boundaries, following A Mind at a Time. Both were part of the curriculum for the parents working to get John out of High School.

The book starts with a day in the life of a woman who doesn’t own herself. Everything is chaos, people don’t do what they’re supposed to, including her. She doesn’t have control over her schedule, over her priorities, over her relationships, over anything. She can’t make anyone happy. No one is happy. Trouble is brewing. What is the problem? She doesn’t understand and exercise boundaries.

The basic idea is that, as the finite human beings that we are, we are each responsible for ourselves and others are responsible for themselves. Knowing where the limits are and staying within them is the proper knowledge and exercise of boundaries. This is a book intended for a Christian audience, but, the flame of my suspicion that the Bible is often misused in the interest of manipulation and crowd control if not just downright masochism, is fanned considerably by these authors. I see their readings of the Bible as remarkably and unusually sane. Indeed, at one point, I wrote this comment in the margin: “People’s distorted, second or third hand knowledge of scripture leads to innumerable problems. Christianity isn’t only about being “nice.” Was Jesus?”

Throughout the chapters, various angles of the problem are worked with examples. Respect and injury are involved. The authors go through boundaries at various stages of people’s growing and maturing (from infant) and discuss many places where people get stuck and what those situations look like. They discuss overdoing, consequences, old family patterns, how to handle difficult conversations, parenting issues, the roles of children, even boundaries with God and boundaries of God. Excluding evil, for example, is a boundary of God and he doesn’t worry about his boundaries hurting anyone, as we often do.

The bottom line throughout is, don’t shirk your own responsibility for yourself and your work and don’t embrace the responsibility for that of others. You do not have control or capacity to do what is not yours. We own our own bodies, our own minds, and our own hearts and owe them only to God, not anyone else. Inappropriate violations of boundaries are often illegal, but there is much subtlety that escapes jurisprudence but leads to misery in lives. Of course, setting boundaries doesn’t change the other person anymore than any other action changes someone else. Sometimes having boundaries means suffering real loss. Dealing with that is our own responsibility but it is better than trying to have what you cannot by not having the boundary, failing, and then also suffering from the boundary problem as well.

I found myself several places, “… compliant on the outside, resentful on the inside” or “Overidentification with the other’s loss.” “Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

The last chapter is a day in the life of the same woman who has now learned boundaries and exercised them, with family, with church, with work, everywhere. Her life is now remarkably livable. Some of the people, including her, are approaching happiness. All are appropriately constrained, at least with respect to this practitioner.

Reviewing this now, it seems like I ought to re-read the whole book. Lack of boundaries is one of my foremost personality flaws. This is one of those things, like diet, where I would just like a coach to tell me what to do and I would do it and not worry about the detail. That inclination is an internal laziness, a boundary problem right there.