Common Myths About Personal Boundaries
Discussions among psychologists about personal boundaries often boil down to advice to fence off your personality like a country cottage, then patrol the perimeter day and night with a shotgun, guarding your red currant bushes from thieving neighbors. While this advice sounds good in theory, it almost never works in practice: the “enemy troops” launch ever more cunning and insidious attacks, and the makeshift fence keeps getting crooked and collapsing. This happens because the topic of boundaries is much more complex and multifaceted than it’s usually portrayed. Instead of building a fence, it’s more accurate to compare the process to assembling the Large Hadron Collider over many years—by hand, at home, with a hammer and some strong language.
Analyzing all the common misconceptions about building and protecting personal boundaries could fill an entire book. But five of them stand out for their universality—even advanced psychology enthusiasts, including many psychologists themselves, fall for them. At the same time, these five distortions often prevent people from seeing the problem from the right angle.
Myth #1: Good Boundaries Are Rigid Boundaries
People who are naturally timid often envy those with extremely rigid boundaries: “I wish I could be like that!” What they don’t realize is that extreme rigidity is just another form of weakness, turned inside out. Building healthy boundaries sometimes does start with rigidity: if you’ve let people walk all over you for years, you’ll inevitably swing to the other extreme at first, overwhelmed by aggression. But rigid boundaries are just temporary crutches—a way to escape chronic abuse, heal your wounds, and get your bearings. Living inside such a bulky structure all the time means dooming yourself to perpetual weakness and immaturity.
Healthy, mature boundaries are, above all, flexible. They allow you to remain friendly and open most of the time, but also to defend yourself from aggression with one or two quick, precise responses when absolutely necessary.
Myth #2: The Main Thing Is Learning to Say “No”
The ability to say no is a valuable skill, but it’s just one of many tools—and not the most important one. Equally important is the opposite skill: calmly, directly, and without resentment, threats, or moralizing, asking someone to stop behavior that makes you uncomfortable. And since people don’t always comply with your requests or demands, you need at least two more skills: the ability to accept refusal calmly and respectfully, and the ability to take responsibility for your decision to continue or end relationships where your boundaries are likely to be violated.
Myth #3: Other People’s Boundaries Aren’t Your Concern
In real life, boundary violations are almost never one-sided. Wherever there’s a prolonged conflict, there’s almost always chronic, unconscious boundary violations by both parties. The logic is simple: you violated mine, so I’ll violate yours even more, and so on—until someone explodes, and then it all resets and starts over.
The simple conclusion: if you don’t want your boundaries violated, the first and most effective thing you can do is to carefully examine and stop violating other people’s boundaries. Learn not to take the bait and not to dig up the hatchet of war without good reason.
Myth #4: Others Should Sense Your Boundaries
This is a common situation: someone is unfairly mistreated for years by family, friends, and colleagues—and can’t do anything about it. They get upset, offended, snap back (in other words, show passive aggression), but this only makes things worse. What’s most infuriating is that these “hypocrites” behave perfectly politely with others!
In reality, this person, without realizing it, has shifted responsibility for their personal boundaries onto others. They’ve chosen not to tell people how they want to be treated, so by default, people treat them however is most convenient for themselves. When, after years of suffering, this person finally realizes that they’ve been allowing and even provoking this behavior all along, they find themselves in a ridiculous and frustrating situation—like the joke about the girl and the goldfish: “Wait, you mean I could have?”
Myth #5: You Can Set Boundaries However You Want
Personal boundaries, by their nature and function, are much more like living, nerve-filled skin than a wooden fence. Skin is a complex and sensitive organ; you can’t “build” it or arbitrarily decide where it should be—on top of your muscles or half a yard away from your body. You can study it carefully and respectfully, find wounds and scratches, and protect them from further trauma. Attempts to set boundaries in relationships arbitrarily, without regard to real needs, always run up against others’ complete unwillingness to play along with demands pulled out of thin air.
Is It Ever Finished?
Is it even possible to finish the work of building personal boundaries? Yes and no. No—because, like proper skin care, these efforts can last a lifetime: social pressures never stop. Yes—because eventually, this work, like any complex skill, becomes second nature and moves to the unconscious level, like walking or playing the piano. The main thing is that with the right approach, sooner or later, your concern about personal boundaries fades away, and you find yourself in the middle of a well-tended, blooming garden, surrounded by pleasant and friendly neighbors.