Personal boundaries

Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave towards them and how they will respond when someone passes those limits. They are built out of a mix of conclusions, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning. This concept or life skill has been widely referenced in self-help books and used in the counseling profession since the mid-1980s.

According to some counselors, personal boundaries help to define an individual by outlining likes and dislikes, and setting the distances one allows others to approach. They include physical, mental, psychological and spiritual boundaries, involving beliefs, emotions, intuitions and self-esteem.Jacques Lacan considered such boundaries to be layered in a hierarchy, reflecting "all the successive envelopes of the biological and social status of the person". Personal boundaries operate in two directions, affecting both the incoming and outgoing interactions between people. These are sometimes referred to as the "protection" and "containment" functions.

The three most commonly mentioned categories of values and boundaries are:

Some authors have expanded this list with additional or specialized categories such as "spirituality", "truth", and "time/punctuality".

Nina Brown proposed four boundary types:

The personal boundaries concept is particularly pertinent in environments with controlling people or people not taking responsibility for their own life.

Co-Dependents Anonymous recommends setting limits on what members will do to and for people and on what members will allow people to do to and for them, as part of their efforts to establish autonomy from being controlled by other people’s thoughts, feelings and problems.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness tells its members that establishing and maintaining values and boundaries will improve the sense of security, stability, predictability and order, in a family even when some members of the family resist. NAMI contends that boundaries encourage a more relaxed, nonjudgmental atmosphere and that the presence of boundaries need not conflict with the need for maintaining an understanding atmosphere.

In Families and How to Survive Them, Robin Skynner MD explains methods for how family therapists can effectively help family members to develop clearer values and boundaries by when treating them, drawing lines, and treating different generations in different compartment – something especially pertinent in families where unhealthy enmeshment overrides normal personal values. However, the establishment of personal values and boundaries in such instances may produce a negative fall-out, if the pathological state of enmeshment had been a central attraction or element of the relationship. This is especially true if the establishment of healthy boundaries results in unilateral limit setting which did not occur previously. It is important to distinguish between unilateral limits and collaborative solutions in these settings.

...
Wikipedia