I generally try, when eavesdropping, to take my cues from George Michael, patron saint of unsolicited advice that’s also generally correct. Which is why I was recently attempting to listen without prejudice to a conversation about boundaries that would have made me apoplectic if it required my participation. One person accused another person of having “boundary issues.” That person then explained that the first person did not seem to understand boundaries. Each person was both a little bit correct and entirely too condescending. There were accusations of bad faith on both sides. This clearly wasn’t the first frustrating conversation; after some pointed sighing, eventually there was silence.
I grew up in the pre-internet Dark Ages, among a cohort for whom “interpersonal communication” generally meant being passive-aggressive at other people until one of you disappeared or died.
This all took place in line at the pharmacy and was absolutely none of my business. But I also found myself hoping that they would eventually resolve things one way or another, if only because now seems like an especially important time to be aware of whose boundaries are respected and whose are not, and why it matters. Boundary confusion and concerns about weaponized boundaries have, it seems, been running rampant — in real life and all over the internet. Boundaries are supposed to be healthy, but what if they’re making me sick? They say they’re setting a boundary, but can you trust that they mean it? What if boundaries do more harm than good? Oh my god: Are my own boundaries being used to gaslight me?
I probably think about boundaries a lot for someone who isn’t a psychiatrist or other mental-health professional. But like many people who are terminally online, extremely nosy, or both, I’m routinely fascinated by the mainstreaming of therapy jargon by way of social media and other online discourse. This is probably in part because I grew up in the pre-internet Dark Ages, among a cohort for whom “interpersonal communication” generally meant being passive-aggressive at other people until one of you disappeared or died. Just normalizing awareness of mental health is an Olympics-level leap forward, but it’s possible to get much more granular with very little effort. Social media loves nothing more than a good diagnosis, and on platforms like Reddit, TikTok and Meta, you’re never more than a post or two away from people busily classifying someone they’ve never met as a Cluster B disordered personality or coaching someone else they don’t know on what buzzwords to use when they present a family member with an overdue ultimatum.
But also, boundaries just make sense to me as a framework. I’ve been setting boundaries since childhood out of necessity, and any life, work or relationship advice I’m capable of dispensing is most likely boundary-related. That said, if you don’t ask, I won’t offer, because . . . boundaries. They’re not a magic bullet but a useful tool. And like any other tool, they can be misused, wielded recklessly, or used as an attempt to manipulate. Boundaries, in other words, have boundaries.
What’s your line?
Years of lurking at the edges of boundary discourse have brought me to the conclusion that the all-time number-one misconception about boundaries is that they are something you establish for other people. They aren’t. Setting a boundary is showing someone else how to treat you. For instance: You’ve been sober for a decade and have made it clear that you don’t want to date someone who isn’t. That’s your line in the sand. You’ll probably run into someone who treats it as a challenge, but that doesn’t make it one.
They’re not a magic bullet but a useful tool. And like any other tool, they can be misused, wielded recklessly, or used as an attempt to manipulate. Boundaries, in other words, have boundaries.
When I asked one of my oldest friends, a social worker, what other misconceptions people have about boundaries, she said that people who have a hard time setting boundaries with others are likely to think that the only valid boundary is one that is written in stone and preserved for all time. But in actuality, boundary setting is “more of a journey than a destination in most relationships, a process that helps you gather information about it.” Often, the other party’s reaction to a boundary you set answers the question implicit within it. Do they try to laugh it off? Do they assume it’s an opening for negotiation? Are they angry because you’ve never set this boundary before? Those are all indications of whether they will respect it.
Boundaries are a form of communication that, in an ideal world, we learn from people who understand and value them. But there are a lot of spaces, families, religions and other institutions that discourage and disdain boundaries precisely because they are statements of autonomy. Some are subtle or insidious. Others roll up with all the subtlety of a clown car. People who are disinclined to respect the boundaries of others will try to argue against and invalidate them, and that can lead to the boundary-setter feeling like anything they lay down needs to be airtight and written in stone. It doesn’t. It just needs to be clear. There’s no better justification for boundaries than people who have an issue with someone else setting one.
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Our boundaries, ourselves
There doesn’t seem to be a definitive origin story for boundaries, but the term emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of a full-tilt upheaval within the psychiatric establishment. Many sources credit the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–III), published in 1980, with catalyzing the shift. The new edition moved the field beyond a psychoanalytic tradition (“the talking cure”); its focus on establishing uniform diagnostic standards was a tacit rejection of vague, squishy labels like “neurosis” that had prioritized the subjective judgment of individual clinicians over research-informed diagnostic criteria. Previous decades had seen the establishment of mental-health research and funding sources, as well as efforts to deinstitutionalize and destigmatize mental illness. The DSM-III was where the rubber hit the road, leaving Freudian mother-blaming and penis envy in the dust and establishing modern psychiatry as medicine. Boundaries, alongside relational concepts like codependency and enabling, also had a role to play in the ongoing Cold War, reifying individuality as a patriotic, Communism-repelling American value. Self-help literature, with its emphasis on self-actualization and personal fulfillment, was a burgeoning commercial market and the foundation of the Me Decade. Even if the phrase “setting boundaries” was unfamiliar, it was recognizable as individualist praxis.
The activist origins of “self-care” were lopped off so the term could be co-opted to market a new iteration of marketplace feminism. Why admit to holding petty grudges when labeling someone “toxic” offered dramatic weight and validation?
Since then, the language of psychiatry and self-help has spread expansively and continuously. But with the start of COVID in 2020, boundaries were suddenly extremely literal and indelibly politicized. At the forefront of everything, suddenly, were questions about who had the right to occupy physical space and who was entitled to monitor and police how others did so. One person’s boundary became another person’s barrier, and in a very short span of time factual consensus on anything and everything seemed to vanish. Things that were visibly, demonstrably happening in hospitals, communities and power centers were treated as matters of opinion. Context, intention and specificity were hijacked in the service of partisanship. Agreed-upon history went blurry. There was no truth; there were only vibes.
Online and offline, the boundaries of language itself shifted, and terms originating from specific cultural and professional lexicons grew chronically porous enough to be whatever you needed them to be. “Emotional labor” was dislodged from its intended sociological context so people on social media could complain about having to hang out with a friend who’s having a rough time. The activist origins of “self-care” were lopped off so the term could be co-opted to market a new iteration of marketplace feminism. Why admit to holding petty grudges when labeling someone “toxic” offered dramatic weight and validation? No one on social media could stop someone else from using “gaslighting” as a jumped-up synonym for “lying”; no one in traditional media could bring themselves to attach the word “lies” to extravagant patterns of untruth.
Our once and future boundaries
Well. Here we are now, living in circumstances that are hard to describe without a trauma-informed vocabulary. It makes no sense to complain about whether people on the internet are using sufficiently accurate therapy-speak when the bigger problem is that increasing numbers of people now require a whole lexicon of psychiatric terminology to accurately describe living in the world. Hypernormalization. Cognitive dissonance. Hypervigilance. Election Stress Disorder. As things are going off the rails, boundaries are a small promise of control; no wonder people seem extra-zealous about them.
Being overzealous about boundary-setting in the face of overwhelming chaos is understandable, but is it useful? Social-media boundary mavens tend to gravitate toward absolutes that might be necessary for challenging relationships but that can imperil ones that really don’t require a heavy hand. If the phrase “I’m at capacity right now” sends a shiver down your spine, you’re probably aware that addressing every conflict in your life with a tidy script of clinically accurate, personally alienating language is not the move.
Boundaries are about agency, but they’re also about trust and understanding and a willingness to be vulnerable. They give us the gift of recognizing our autonomy and realizing that we don’t need permission to exist. That can be revelatory and transformative; more prosaically, it can be a reminder that living in the world means living alongside other autonomous people. As Olga Khazan put it in her exploration of boundaries in a 2023 issue of The Atlantic, “If hell is other people, boundaries seem like a rope ladder back to purgatory.”
