Over the last 200 years, the use of the word “boundaries” has tripled according to Google Dictionary. Well into the 21st century, it remains a highly used word, especially so in the world of mental health. Surely, some of this fascination with boundaries has followed from the book Boundaries and its many sequels by Henry Cloud and John Townsend.

So what’s the deal with boundaries? Why do we love them so much? Despite the title of this article, which I will bring up soon, boundaries are an extremely good and needed concept in every relationship. Boundaries determine where I end and you begin, and that extends to our personal space, our emotions, our finances, and everything else. If we don’t have any boundaries, we’ll have no sense of self or personal autonomy which would be very detrimental to our mental well-being.

If you believe that every person is equally valuable and deserving of care, then you’ll see that boundaries are needed to protect every person from being taken advantage of. We need boundaries for ourselves to be sure that we aren’t giving up our own needs in order to meet the wants or expectations of others.

Boundaries are an especially crucial concept for servant-hearted and empathetic people to understand. Those of us who are gifted in serving others needed to hear that we are allowed to say no. Maybe it took a few books or blog posts to get the message through, but for many clients I work with, they’re exhausted from giving up everything they have to people around them. And unless the people around them are in crisis situations, that’s probably doing more harm than good by doing things that those people could be doing for themselves.

So, I’m so thankful that we have the language to say what we all know to be true: People are of equal, intrinsic worth, so we shouldn’t find our value in our usefulness to others.

But I said I would get back to the title of this article, so here’s my controversial point: Sometimes we take things too far and use the word “boundaries” to justify selfishness. If we have the capacity to be generous to others with our time, energy, or money, but we don’t want to, then we can say “I need to have my personal boundaries and protect myself.” And because we’ve used the magic buzzword “boundaries” so nobody can disagree with us.

The mistake we’re making is an overcorrection. Oftentimes, servant-hearted people have weak boundaries and they don’t protect their own needs and emotions, and then once they discover the concept of boundaries, they don’t want to do anything for other people because they’re so exhausted from the years of ignoring their own needs.

Then, in an ironic twist, the servant-hearted become the selfish, the very people who the servant-hearted used to resent. We throw the baby out with the bathwater, trading our weak, porous boundaries for iron-clad, inflexible ones. And here’s why I really, really don’t want that for you: Having overly protective boundaries is no better than having weak boundaries, both are their own type of prison. I know it might sound great to not have to worry about other people, but that mentality leads to us becoming cold, anxious people.

My hope for all of us is that we find a middle ground between having no boundaries and desperately self-protective ones, because our boundaries should change as our own needs and others’ needs change. When we do that, we’ll find that we are free to love others and ourselves as equals, and give a little bit of ourselves to those around us, not because we have to, but because we want to.

Thank you for reading my practice’s blog, my library of all the random thoughts that would make a terrible book but make a halfway-decent blog. To request a session or contact me, head to my Scheduling page to get in touch with me today!