We are obsessed with invisible circles.
“Personal boundaries” – or often just “boundaries” – are nowadays seen as the hallmark of emotional maturity. Wellness influencers promise that if you clarify the line dividing you from those around you, your boyfriend will stop envying your career and start doing the dishes. Children will stay out of your home office. Friends and lovers will stop using you as a screen for their projections. As you are released from everyone else’s psychodrama, your racing thoughts will quiet, and your ability to concentrate will return. You will learn to say the word “no”, protect your time, and double your salary.
This is how the concept is sold to us by an army of life coaches and content producers. But boundaries have a moral authority that’s easy to abuse, and actor Jonah Hill’s text messages to his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady are an especially drastic example. “These are my boundaries for romantic partnership,” he announced, trying to turn a list of jealous, misogynistic prohibitions – no “surfing with men”, no swimsuit selfies, no friendships with “women who are in unstable places” – into a rap sheet of ethical violations. Hill drops “boundaries” into the conversation with self-satisfied finality, transforming it from a therapeutic tool into an implement of emotional abuse. Most actual boundaries experts would agree that telling your partner who to spend time with is a symptom of terrible boundaries.
Even so, the basic concept has received shockingly little critical attention. Where did “boundaries” even come from?
A slew of recent books, podcasts, articles, social media posts and talkshows are all sharing the message of boundaries: set them, communicate them, enforce them, respect them. The past two years alone have produced Melissa Urban’s The Book of Boundaries; Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace; Terri Cole’s Boundary Boss; and finally Michelle Elman’s The Joy of Being Selfish: Why You Need Boundaries and How to Set Them. They are featured on CNN, Forbes, Oprah Daily, the New York Times, the Goop podcast. Tawwab’s book had an advance of six figures and grew out of a viral social media post. In other words, boundaries sell.
For these authors, boundaries are invisible to the naked eye, requiring the special techniques sold in self-help bestsellers or by self-care influencers for you to learn to perceive or implement them. Or you can learn by trial and error, like a dog wearing a shock collar who learns the location of the electric fence. It’s like everyone in the world is mindlessly wandering toward your vulnerable core, and if you don’t tell them where to turn back, you might get trampled.
As it turns out, everything can be explained as a matter of boundaries, which slip and slide into conversations where they don’t belong. Take this recent story on NPR’s Marketplace, in which a reporter discusses a woman who accused her friend of not respecting her boundaries. The offending friend was guilty of getting an unappealing haircut just before the accuser’s wedding.
We can roll our eyes and say she’s abusing the term, but “boundaries” chronically slip out of bounds: experts have wildly different accounts of what boundaries partition. They divide what’s you from what’s me, but also designate appropriate and inappropriate behavior, and/or compartmentalize different realms of life.
For many therapists, every hard feeling might be a “boundary issue” in disguise. Tawwab sees through her clients’ stories to the “real” issues beneath: bad boundaries. If you peel back all the layers of someone’s self-narrative, she argues, you find a deeper level of the psyche where everything boils down to boundaries.
I am not anti-boundaries, but they are so rarely questioned because they have a seductive moral authority as the dominant metaphor for how human relationships should work.
Attempting to dig up how “personal boundaries” got so popular is not easy. When contemporary psychologists write about boundaries in venues like Psychology Today, they discuss them in the present tense with no citations. For these writers, boundaries don’t need a history. They simply exist, and therefore require management. I found this highly suspicious. The story of boundaries, which I’ll retrace here, took me back to the early 1990s, when boundaries erupted suddenly into the self-help mass market, and then to the mid-1960s, when they cropped up on the fringes of ego psychology.
First, we should talk about where I did not find “boundaries”: most major schools of psychoanalysis. I think a lot of readers imagine that the self-care industry is simply bending Melanie Klein or Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan slightly out of shape, when in fact many analysts seem to agree that psychoanalysis is more or less designed to muck up people’s boundaries, to trouble their placement, their firmness, their brittleness.
Instead, boundaries materialized seemingly out of nowhere in 1989, when the motivational speaker and “interventionist” Jeff VanVonderen dedicated one page to personal boundaries in a book called Tired of Trying to Measure Up. “Boundaries are those invisible barriers that tell others where they stop and where you begin,” he wrote. “Personal boundaries notify others that you have the right to have your own opinion, feel your own feelings, and protect the privacy of your own physical being.”
And then the floodgates opened: in 1991, a therapist named Anne Katherine published Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin, proclaiming the value of divvying up your emotional life. The next two years saw a parade of titles like Boundaries and Relationships: Knowing, Protecting, and Enjoying the Self; and Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life.
All this quickly spawned a subgenre of HR discourse: boundaries flourished in the professional literature of social workers, healthcare providers, clergy members, therapists and lawyers. People across the workforce were encouraged to store their work stress in a Tupperware container that lives permanently in the office kitchenette fridge. According to these early authors, boundaries “empower us to determine how we’ll be treated by others”. Like the mind was for some, boundaries are a muscle you strengthen or let atrophy. And, like any good liberal idea, they amplify choice, letting us “choose what to let in and what to keep out”.
Everyone has a lot of needs right now. This is partly because capitalism leaves many people’s basic needs unmet, and partly because being a person involves wanting a level of intimacy and security you can never have, and trying to get it through other people. Too many of us – the boundaryless – are tangled up in each other’s endless needs and desires. But we are teachable, and if we learn to manage boundaries correctly, they can unhook us from obligation, protecting us from dissolving into someone else’s demands.
Boundaries do this by teaching us to relate to other people as if they are the one thing social systems are most determined to protect: property. Most boundaries books of the early 1990s unselfconsciously steal imagery from land ownership. As Henry Cloud and John Townsend, the authors of a very popular, distinctly Christian boundaries book, put it: “just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn’t.”
The 1990s fetish for the suburban lawn is also everywhere: “Like any fence, boundaries require maintenance,” writes Anne Katherine. “Some people are like ivy … It’s tiresome, but if we let these people stay in our lives, we must keep pruning them and throwing the behavior weeds out of our yards.” “Good fences make good neighbors,” said Robert Frost, though his neighbor may or may not have hated him.
To put all this in context, Cloud and Townsend wrote their book in a place – the western US – that had been sliced and diced into ownable plots by the government in the past two centuries; many of the settlers who bought them built fences, which killed many bison thanks to the invention of barbed wire. They also published the book in 1992, when the US was trying to become an Ayn Rand novel. If liberalism is about having the freedom to own things and having your ownership protected by the state, neoliberalism is about having more freedom to own more things, and being held responsible for how much you do or do not own. As they write, “to rescue people from the natural consequences of their behavior is to render them powerless.” Boundaries are all about holding individuals responsible for their lots in life.
The problem with this opinion is that the world is designed to force us into financial and emotional dependence upon one another. Boundaries make dependence look like misplaced possessiveness. To survive and thrive, we are encouraged to unhook from one another, sealing ourselves off as individual cells rising the ranks of society: your time and energy are something you own and lease out to others. Having good boundaries is enforcing the terms of your lease, and abiding by the leases of others. Having bad boundaries is demanding squatters’ rights.
A lot of us – me and my friends among them – try to live by models of intimacy pitted against possessiveness. Other people aren’t objects to be controlled, many of us feel, refusing to apply property logics to our friends and lovers. To be possessive of another person, for instance, by controlling their sex life, is to fail to accept their separateness. We try to acknowledge and then nudge away jealousy as a relic of a violent, expropriative regime; “boundaries” make this easier to talk about. But boundaries themselves are based around relating to yourself like a plot of land you own.
If boundaries are seductive even to those of us who do not like property logic, perhaps it’s because social structures are constantly trying to take things away from us: it doesn’t feel like the right time to ask your neighbor to take down their picket fence when a Swat team is surrounding their house.
This is a sticky topic to write about: I worry that critiquing boundaries implies that you expect people to keep you emotionally afloat in an often brutal world – something no one can do on your behalf. Boundaries escape criticism because to criticize them is to suggest you are the kind of person who asks others to scratch an itch beyond their reach. I know the itch cannot be scratched. But why do we have to tell a person that they violated a sacred line in order to let them know they hurt us?
Worse, I worry that picking a bone with boundaries suggests I condone abuse, or am blind to power. Boundaries are, for example, a clear and convenient way to assert that your body isn’t simply available to everyone – the protective bubble of law and morality does not yield because someone has power over you.
This use has a long history: boundaries show up in 1980s court cases and legal literature about domestic violence. In these pamphlets, with titles like “Wife Abuse”, experts describe how abuse decays a woman’s boundaries, leaving her unable to enforce her limits. But even these uses seem to devolve into victim blaming. “I’ve counseled women who have been victims of rape,” wrote VanVonderen in 1989. “None of them say, ‘I’m important, and I don’t deserve to be treated that way.’ More often they say, ‘I should have known better than to have been there at that time or to have dressed that way.’ They have no sense of their right to boundaries.”
As my friend Natasha Lasky put it, “boundaries promote a comforting fiction that if you use the right words, you can control whether or not you get exploited by others, and protect yourself against it.” But you just can’t, and what’s worse, feeling like you can makes you more likely to blame other people for being exploited.
This kind of victim blaming is an especially appalling contortion of what’s called ego psychology, a school of thought that aimed to churn out powerful, individuated people with ample self-esteem. This seems like a natural birthplace for boundaries, but the word rarely appears: most ego psychologists prefer to discuss the self’s “defenses”. The exception is Edith Jacobson, whose iconoclastic 1964 book implores readers to draw a thick Sharpie line around their egos: “firm”, “sharply defined” boundaries are the pinnacle of personal development.
But generally, boundaries came to psychoanalysis from the outside, as if slipping in through the service entrance. Two early family therapists, Murray Bowen and Salvador Minuchin, borrowed the term from the interdisciplinary science of “systems theory” in the 1960s, which has vague associations with the US military. It sees the world as a set of systems which share the same principles, whether they are families, solar systems or molecules. Systems must maintain their “boundaries”, taking some things in and keeping others out, to continue to exist.
The family therapists borrowed boundaries from systems theory and watered them down to be a little less technical and a little more moral. Minuchin compared his clinical style to samurai training; tactics included direct confrontation and musical chairs. Pyrotechnics aside, Minuchin had a tempered view: the therapist should map and modulate them, not just strengthen them. Bowen spent his life combating the problem of the “undifferentiated family ego mass”. The American family was a sad bag of marshmallows left in the sun, plagued by “emotional ‘stuck togetherness’”. The most developed among us “keep emotional functioning contained within the boundaries of self”. Such people are “always sure of their beliefs and convictions but are never dogmatic”; they can feel intense love while wholly comfortable with the fact that at any moment a lover could leave them behind. (I have never met a person this well-adjusted.)
Politically, undifferentiated ego masses were having a moment. During the second world war, many saw individualism as the best inoculation against fascism. It makes sense that “boundaries” arrive through Jacobson, who escaped Berlin after being imprisoned by the Nazis. The grinning crowds of blond Germans in propaganda films were seen as the ultimate bad outcome of a society full of people with no fucking boundaries, as we would put it now.
When communism became the national enemy, this kind of ego psychology started to feel like a winning geopolitical strategy. Personal boundaries were an unofficial component of the cold war arsenal. It also makes sense, then, that therapists adapted the term from a field associated with missile engineering. It also makes sense that some philosophers on the left vehemently opposed boundaries, instantly clocking the rhetoric as an implement of social control. (Norman O Brown took it a little far: “the proper outcome of psychoanalysis is the abolition of the boundary,” he argued in 1966. True to its moment, Brown’s book reads like an erudite trip log on a psychedelics forum: demolish the threshold between real and unreal, good and bad, mine and yours, love and hate.)
As I dug deeper, I was surprised by how cleanly opinions about boundaries seem to track with shifts in political consciousness. If boundaries appear in the mid-1960s amid the building and maintaining of geopolitical walls (Berlin, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba), maybe the 1990s resurgence has to do with their sudden mass demolition: the many boundaries books of 1991 were presumably conceived around 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sudden dissolution of several sovereign regimes. National borders melted into air, so people mapped their craving for lines onto their relationships.
Meanwhile, due to the Aids crisis, other people’s bodies seemed dangerous in a new way. People without close knowledge of the disease were confused about the actual logistics of transmission, worrying HIV might leap from skin to skin. It’s hard not to feel that the popularity of boundaries reflected a nonconscious demand to contain gay sex, to cordon off queerness from the general population.
It feels slick and too easy to analogize like this. But it also feels absurd not to, because even now, this whole way of thinking is built on literal analogies to property and national security. In her 2022 bestseller, Melissa Urban, who is known for developing the notoriously restrictive “wellness program” Whole30 (which she claims is not a diet), offers a helpful shorthand for measuring risk to your boundaries: the US Department of Homeland Security’s levels of threat. Green, yellow and red threat levels all merit different conversational scripts; she also includes “Threat Level Fuchsia”, which “Homeland Security does not recognize but anyone who’s been in front of their ex’s current girlfriend after multiple tequila shots surely does”.
From this perspective, our bodies and minds are little nation-states, populations of cells and thoughts and feelings in need of defense. Boundaries will never shake this legacy: they keep us seeing our political-economic systems as modeled on ourselves, and vice versa.
Having good boundaries means living a series of contradictions. Don’t be difficult; don’t bottle up your emotions. Have friends you can lean on; only lean on them in ways that are convenient for them. Definitely do not lean on them financially. Be vulnerable in front of people you love; don’t cry too hard or for too long. Many people are unmarked landmines of explosive need: avoid them.
Boundaries are a Band-Aid in a bad world: if you can’t expect people to care for you and treat you well and protect you from violence or scarcity, you can at least protect yourself from their needs. There isn’t anything straightforwardly wrong with doing this: negotiating other people’s needs, which are often unreasonable and unfulfillable and intolerable, is fraught, baffling and overwhelming. It demands a good strong metaphor, and the image of boundaries is unusually potent.
But the term takes on its own momentum, overrunning intimacy with alienation. In its most extreme forms, boundary-speak makes it feel like some of us have given up on each other: the only effective social strategy left is to lock yourself in, fortify your defenses. If your emotional defense budget isn’t big enough to hold the line and you get trampled by other people’s greed, that’s on you.
One thing I have learned from psychoanalysis is that everyone is always kicking and screaming against separateness. Boundaries arrive to rescue us from this hurt, not by eliminating this separateness but by accelerating it. They provide guidelines for living separateness without having to feel it.
Bad boundaries, you see, can be fixed. You can be fixed. Good boundaries are an achievement that promises to protect you from existential lack and also exploitation. This will fix you, these books implore. You can leave the great boundaryless masses behind for emotional maturity.
A version of this piece was first published in Parapraxis magazine, a publication devoted to psychoanalysis
English (US)