First Things: 5 Tips for Setting Boundaries

Today we’re going to talk about one of the most important interpersonal skills you will ever learn: boundaries!

Here is my general disclaimer that I am not a therapist, just a person with a blog who has done a lot of therapy.

What is a boundary? A boundary is a limit or a rule that you set for your life to keep yourself healthy and happy.

Here are the Eternity of Cats rules for setting boundaries. In other words, these are not all things counselors have taught me, but they are things I’ve discovered and learned while trying to make boundaries work for me. I hope these tips will help you too.

1. Focus boundaries on your actions and reactions

When I first started trying to set boundaries, I did not realize that an effective boundary needs to be enforceable and, therefore, whenever possible, focused on what you will do, not what others will do.

Let’s say that you’ve decided that a healthy boundary for you with your Mormon family members is that you don’t want them to try to rekindle your testimony. You tell them that you don’t want to discuss Church stuff with them. But they keep emailing you conference talks and texting you their testimony.

Why aren’t boundaries working for you?

Because you need to enforce the boundary. You’ve made a request, and they’re ignoring it. For this boundary to work, you need to decide what you will do when they cross a line. Theoretically, you don’t need to explain this to your family for it to work, but doing so may be helpful to the relationship. Clarity is key to good communication, and communication is essential to relationships.

So what are your options in this scenario, short of blocking their number or cutting them off entirely? You can tell your family members that since you don’t want to hear or discuss Church stuff with them, any email or text they send you that pushes Church stuff will be immediately deleted. If they want you to see any personal messages, then they shouldn’t interweave them with apostle quotes.

If they try to discuss Church things with you in-person, you could leave the room. If you’re trapped in a car with them, you could ignore them and sing a song you like so you can’t hear them well. (This is a bit ruder, but if they’re trapping you in a gospel discussion you’ve explicitly told them you don’t want to have, it’s fair enough. You may also want to reexamine whether you’re willing to be with them in a situation you can’t leave whenever you like.) Over time, these measures could help convince “the Spirit” to stop telling them to proselyte to you.

Another option is to engage your family in the discussion they started (if you can do so calmly and respectfully and are open to doing so). Explain to them in great detail where you do and don’t agree with the conference speaker and why. You might want to give Church history background when it’s relevant. Basically, the idea is to shift the discomfort back onto your overstepping family members just enough that they learn to back off.

If the relationship is toxic and unhealthy, and the other person is unwilling to change, you also have the option to go no-contact. This isn’t a decision to take lightly, but I doubt you will, so I’ll leave it at that.

As you might have noticed, the ability to set these sorts of boundaries requires some privilege and independence. That brings us to step two.

2. Assess and work toward the conditions you need to set effective boundaries

Boundaries are often a skill taught to abuse survivors to help them avoid future abuse. This is good and essential—we need boundaries, and to set them, we have to be educated about them!

But discussion around boundaries can sometimes get victim-blamey. Sometimes boundaries are cast as The Way to keep abuse out of your life, with an implication that victims could have avoided the abuse had they just been more assertive. And that’s not fair. Absolutely, learning about boundaries helps us value and protect ourselves. But abuse also involves a power differential and often isolation from help, meaning that victims often are not able to set boundaries for survival reasons.

If you live with parents or a spouse upon whom you are financially dependent and who will throw you out in the street if you assert yourself, then your ability to set boundaries might not be as expansive as necessary right now.

If this is your situation, then you need to make a plan. Figure out what you will need to get into a better situation where you can set the boundaries you’d like to set. Build a support network, pursue financial independence, finish your education, treat your medical conditions—whatever you need to do bridge the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be.

If you are in an abusive scenario with little ability to improve your situation, then victim advocacy organizations and helplines (some are listed on this page) may be able to connect you with services. Local services may be able to do more than national ones to provide you with concrete resources, so if you can safely do so, you could also Google services in your area. Another, less traceable option is to go to a public library and use a library computer and/or phone to connect with services.

3. Watch out for weaponized boundaries

With the rise of therapy-speak and talk of boundaries, we also have people who weaponize this language. You want to avoid those people and not be one of them.

What are “weaponized boundaries”? This is where people use therapy-speak to justify manipulation and control over others. One way we see this is when people make outrageous requests but phrase them as boundaries to make them seem more legitimate.

For example, surfer and law student Sarah Brady had this problem with her (now ex-) boyfriend Jonah Hill, an actor and producer. After they’d been dating for about a year, he apparently told her that his boundaries were for her to not surf with men, post pictures of herself in a swimsuit, meet with friends he hadn’t approved, and so forth.

In other words, he decided to date a surfer and then tried to use therapy-speak to guilt her into sabotaging her career and becoming isolated from her friends and support network. These are red flags of emotional abuse, not reasonable requests.

Hill is free to decide he does not want to date a surfer. He had the option to break up with Brady on the grounds that he’d realized they weren’t compatible or, better yet, not date her in the first place, since, you know, he knew from the beginning that she was a surfer who surfed with men and posted pictures of herself in a swimsuit online. Instead, he used therapy-speak to make her feel like she was a bad person if she wasn’t willing to give up core aspects of her life and self to stay with him. That’s not a boundary. That’s manipulation.

4. Make joint decisions collaboratively

This leads us into the topic of issues that involve joint decisions. A lot of decisions about money and childrearing come up in marriages, and you can’t make those decisions unilaterally. If you’re in a mixed-faith marriage, then you’ll probably have some particularly testy issues to navigate. Parents in general may also grapple with some issues as kids get older.

Joint Decisions in Marriage

If you’re ex-Mormon, then it’s likely that you’d prefer to set a boundary that your young kids do not attend LDS church. On the other hand, your believing spouse may insist that your kids attend church weekly. If you and your spouse are going to stay together, then you’re going to have to come to some sort of compromise.

And even if you get divorced, the effect will probably still be a compromise if one parent takes the kids to church and the other doesn’t. Either way, you’ll need to collaborate on an approach to convey to your children that their parents have different beliefs while still providing them with stability.

Since women are labeled by the Church as the nurturers and teachers of children, women are especially prone to wanting to make this decision for their children unilaterally. Don’t do this. Both parents have rights.

Men are more prone to insisting on their way when it comes to tithing. Don’t do this either. This comes from an outdated-even-for-Mormons, patriarchal view that the men are the heads of the household and thus get to make the big decisions.

You don’t have to search the ex-Mormon subreddit long to find stories of men insisting that they get to decide unilaterally that no tithing will be paid from their household, or of women saying that their believing husbands insist that they pay tithing. This is more likely to be an issue in a case where one parent is employed and the other is a stay-at-home parent. In Mormonism, the man is usually the employed one.

A man who wants to decide about tithing unilaterally because he earns it also usually has said that his wife doesn’t need her own income because the money the husband earns is both of their money. But somehow that declaration goes out the window the second the wife disagrees on something important.

Either spouse unilaterally controlling the money in a marriage is financial abuse, by the way. I sympathize with the desire and morality of never giving another cent to the LDS Church. And I understand that believers see giving a full tithe as a moral issue and that it is a prerequisite for entering the temple.

But in a marriage, you have to collaborate on these kinds of decisions. You can’t just say “it’s my boundary that our children will be raised x way” or “it’s my boundary that we do/don’t pay tithing.” If either of those issues is a deal breaker for you, then that’s a discussion to have with your spouse and probably a counselor and/or lawyer.

For marriage issues, you might want to try out the Marriage on a Tightrope communities, which I’ve heard good things about (though have not tried out myself).

Joint Decisions with Children

With children, keep in mind that you as a parent will increasingly lose control as your children get older. When children are young, you’ll have to decide for them whether they go to some sort of church, LDS or otherwise. But teenagers should increasingly be allowed to set and manage their own boundaries.

By the time your kids are 18, you want them to be able to manage their own boundaries and lives, with the option to come to you for advice. So you want to scaffold decision-making accordingly rather than trying to retain control as long as possible.

The older your kids get, the less you’ll probably want to make decisions about religion and spirituality for them. Parents are unlikely to gain anything by forcing their teens to go to church or banning it entirely. (You do want to make sure your kids know about consent and boundaries, though.)

5. Adjust boundaries judiciously

Boundaries are policies you set about your own life, so you can change them. But you should be careful in doing so. I wouldn’t recommend changing your boundaries without giving yourself a chance to take a beat and think about the issue when you’re not under pressure.

If the people around you aren’t used to your setting boundaries, then you’re likely to get some pushback. The moment of pushback is probably not the moment to make that decision.

Pushback doesn’t mean that your boundaries are wrong or unreasonable. It’s fine for things to be a little inconvenient to people who aren’t used to you standing up for yourself. It’s okay if it makes them sad, so long as your actions are focused on you managing your life, not you controlling theirs. Consult an uninvolved third party for advice if you’re not sure whether your boundaries are reasonable.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a policy to not attend sacrament meeting, but your family really wants you to go today, perhaps for a Christmas service or a baby blessing. There’s not right or wrong answer about what you decide to do here; it just depends on what is comfortable and advisable for you.

Maybe you don’t want to go to an LDS church for any reason. Maybe you’re comfortable making an exception for special occasions. Maybe you’re willing to try going on special occasions, with the option to leave if you feel too anxious. It’s up to you. But probably don’t decide right before it’s time to go. If an event is sprung on you, it’s fine for your answer to be an automatic no.

Those are my top five tips for setting boundaries. Let me know if these are helpful for you or what tips you have!