Boundaries in relationships
Limit setting or coercive control?
This week a certain, famous Hollywood actor’s ex-girlfriend released details of text messages he’d allegedly sent her when they were together. In the text messages he set out his ‘boundaries’ for the relationship and guess what? They were all about her behaviour – what she should or should not be doing, to maintain a romantic relationship with him. The woman in question was a surfing teacher and one of the boundaries was that she should not at any point go surfing with other men..
Now as a therapist, boundaries are very important. They define what we deem acceptable or unacceptable behaviour and help protect our physical, emotional and mental well-being. They involve setting limits on how others treat us, establish our personal space and define our values and priorities.
Most relationships work better when we know what the boundaries are and often people need to get a better sense of how to have boundaries to stop getting into unhealthy, repetitive relationships in the first place. In fact, lot of the work of therapy is implementing healthy boundaries where there are none. Yet the text messages do not read as ‘boundaries’ they read as requests, if not demands from a place of insecurity from the man, moulding the woman in a way that feels less threatening to him.
The relationship in question points to a relationship gone very wrong, with unprocessed hurt and pain from the ex – why did she post the screen shots in the first place? Yet also points to the danger of using ‘therapy talk’ outside of the therapy room to excuse bad, or controlling behaviour.
When you set a boundary, it’s important to make it about yourself, your own limits, make it come from an ‘I’ not ‘you’ place.
