A Boundary is not a border

Therapy-speak has broken out of the therapist’s office and into our everyday lives. In searching for comfort, are we unwittingly making those around us uncomfortable?

Does anyone know what a boundary is? At some point in the post-lockdown fugue state, I feel as if a certain genre of clever-sounding psychology- and therapy-speak – started to infiltrate the idiolects of people around me. And it always had to do with asserting boundaries. Boundaries were and are powerful, unassailable things in the minds of those who evoke them, uncrossable lines, carving relationships into territory, making islands of people. To cross a boundary was to violate the sovereignty of another, to make the terms of your platonic contract void. Surely this can’t be healthy? Surely boundaries aren’t actually defined like this by the qualified therapists and psychologists who deal with the motivations behind these terms?

On the one hand, of course they aren’t. A boundary is asserted by one healthy party in some interpersonal relationship not to define an uncrossable point but to outline the shape of one’s needs, and most importantly one’s own behaviours. No genuine therapeutic concept is predicated on the idea that it is possible to control the behaviour of others, or to attempt to. A boundary helps someone say, if this happens to me, this is what I will need or what I will do. It demands nothing of the other party. And yet I worry increasingly that the control is what people want. 

Therapy-speak seeks to hem in the limits of the self and puts its users on constant guard against threat. I don’t use the border metaphor lightly, but it is striking that, in a moment where national sovereignty and the sanctity of the nation-state are being invoked to justify such cruelty, the dominant narrative amongst people trying to be healthy is: cut people off, cut people out, define yourself in opposition to others. Some even go so far as to divide the self itself, make more borders within the individual. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapy that to me echoes, or is perhaps even a source for, a lot of the strange ideas nascent to therapy-speak. It suggests that the individual is split into parts, some of which may become maladaptive when dealing with traumas. “Your Self couldn’t protect your parts, so your parts lost trust in your Self as the inner leader,” says founding IFS therapist Richard Schwartz. IFS therapists also have a strange reputation for attempting to perform literal exorcisms on patients who have named one of their trauma-related parts as a demon. Not that I actually think the deployment of therapy-speak endorses the literal existence of demons, but is it unsurprising that Christian patients would draw on analogous, and familiar, mythology when encouraged to view themselves, and by extension other people, as under attack from sinful influence? And what else is the purpose of the border of a country, but to define the limits of good and bad influence, good and bad violence? Borders, and their maintenance, are the hot new thing in pop psychology. 

In a Waterstones’ self-help section I found a series of books written by a business consultant detailing, amongst other pop-psych tropes, advice on enduring the narcissists in your life. People I know have been called covert narcissists for choosing not to be friends with someone. “Main-character syndrome”, as much as it pains me to say, seems to have captured the minds of therapy-conscious individuals, twisting their in-group out-group instincts into something I find genuinely nefarious. These diagnoses of narcissism are only ever applied, I find, to the outward-going and enthusiastic, when in reality ‘thinking too much about oneself’ is just as applicable to a depressed person as to the kind of shadowy, ill-intentioned manipulator that people want to believe is out there, causing all the problems they don’t want to admit responsibility for. Not that depression makes you a narcissist. Most people aren’t out to get you. You don’t need to lock your hotel room doors in 27 different ways, and your coworkers aren’t manipulative masterminds. 

But the control that a twisted narrative of the boundary offers is even more abominable to me, because boundaries are good – when employed deftly. Knowing oneself through an understanding of one’s boundaries is healthy when approaching relationships of any consequence. It’s just that therapy has and likely always will be a for-profit enterprise when not managing the genuinely unwell – an experience that a fairly small percentage of the people reading this will ever have. Therapy has immense benefits even for those who consider themselves healthy but under current management, the NHS won’t stretch that far. The ugly truth is that right now, even qualified therapists have a vested monetary interest both in retaining current clients and appealing to the therapeutic desires of potential first-timers. Take BetterHelp. Perhaps best known for running adverts on podcasts, BetterHelp is late-stage capitalism’s answer to therapy market forces, promoting itself with pop theories like self care is a muscle, you have to exercise it constantly. The constant validation industrial complex – propped up by companies like BetterHelp – is a matrix of customers with a TikTok-hewn need to organise the blame of the various small miseries in their life and a set of service providers with the technical language to approve, or validate, the customers’ approaches and card transactions ad infinitum. Feeling sad about how your Tinder date went? They probably didn’t speak your avoidant-attachment love language to your inner child. 

Perhaps that’s not even the point I want to make. There’s value in therapy, in speaking to someone in a position to offer good advice. Perhaps the point I want to make is that this is no one’s fault but that there is a nasty feedback loop between social media misinformation; attempts to use the surgical language of a therapy session to operate on the mess of social reality; and the needs of a mentally uncertain generation being validated, rather than challenged by the demands of for-profit ulterior motives. In other words, some of these words need to stay within a therapy session. No one gets possessed by trauma demons. And if you’re going to tell someone what your boundaries are, don’t try to control them in the process.