Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life

by Henry Cloud

Any confusion of responsibility and ownership in our lives is a problem of boundaries.

Just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn’t.

the inability to set appropriate boundaries at appropriate times with the appropriate peop...

many clinical psychological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, addictions, impulsive disorders, guilt problems, shame issues, panic disorders, and marital and relational struggles, find their roots in conflicts with boundaries.

Our point for now is that boundaries are not built in a vacuum; creating boundaries always involves a support network.

Feelings come from your heart and can tell you the state of your relationships. They can tell you if things are going well or if there is a problem. If you feel close and loving, things are probably going well. If you feel angry, you have a problem that needs to be addressed. But the point is, your feelings are your responsibility and you must own them and see them as your problem so you can begin to find an answer to whatever issue they are pointing to.

Attitudes have to do with your orientation toward something, the stance you take toward others, God, life, work, and relationships. Beliefs are anything that you accept as true.

We need to own our attitudes and convictions because they fall within our property line. We are the ones who feel their effect, and the only ones who can change them.

Parenting with love and limits, with warmth and consequences, produces confident children who have a sense of control over their lives.

Making decisions based on others’ approval or on guilt breeds resentment, a product of our sinful nature. We have been so trained by others on what we “should” do that we think we are being loving when we do things out of compulsion. Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices. You are the one who makes them. You are the one who must live with their consequences. And you are the one who may be keeping yourself from making the choices you could be happy with.

What we can do is set limits on our own exposure to people who are behaving poorly; we can’t change them or make them behave right.

This type of boundary conflict is called compliance. Compliant people have fuzzy and indistinct boundaries; they “melt” into the demands and needs of other people.

This boundary problem is called avoidance: saying no to the good. It’s the inability to ask for help, to recognize one’s own needs, to let others in. Avoidants withdraw when they are in need; they do not ask for the support of others.

Controllers can’t respect others’ limits. They resist taking responsibility for their own lives, so they need to control others.

we are responsible to care about and help, within certain limits, others whom God places in our lives. To refuse to do so when we have the appropriate resources can be a boundary conflict.

Our deepest need is to belong, to be in a relationship, to have a spiritual and emotional “home.” The very nature of God is to be in relationship: “God is love,” says 1 John 4:16. Love means relationship—the caring, committed connection of one individual to another.

God’s grace covers failure, but it cannot make up for passivity. We need to do our part.

Will some people abandon or attack us for having boundaries? Yes. Better to learn about their character and take steps to fix the problem than never to know.

We all need more than God and a best friend. We need a group of supportive relationships. The reason is simple: Having more than one person in our lives allows our friends to be human. To be busy. To be unavailable at times. To hurt and have problems of their own. To have time alone.

The old saying “Don’t get mad. Just get even” isn’t accurate. It’s far better to say, “Don’t get mad. Set a limit!”

Our families can tear down our best built fences because they are “family.”

Establishing boundaries with families of origin is a tough task but one with great reward.

The best boundaries are loving ones. The person who has to remain forever in a protective mode is losing out on love and freedom. Boundaries in no way mean to stop loving. They mean the opposite: you are gaining freedom to love.

a hurt heart takes time to heal. You cannot rush back into a position of trust with too much unresolved hurt. That hurt needs to be exposed and communicated. If you are hurting, you need to own that hurt.

Discipline is an external boundary, designed to develop internal boundaries in our children. It provides a structure of safety until children have enough structure in their character not to need it. Good discipline always moves children toward more internal structure and more responsibility.

discipline and punishment have a different relationship to time. Punishment looks back. It focuses on making payment for wrongs done in the past. Christ’s suffering was payment, for example, for our sin. Discipline, however, looks forward. The lessons we learn from discipline help us not to make the same mistakes again: “God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness” (Heb. 12:10).

“Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Say no to the unimportant, and say no to the inclination to do less than your best. If you are doing your best work on the most important things, you will reach your goals.

Say yes to the best, and sometimes you may need to say no to the good.

Limits on good things keep them good.

You only have the power to change yourself. You can’t change another person.

Many people have found immense relief in the thought that they have no control over another person and that they must focus on changing their reactions to that person. They must refuse to allow that person to affect them. This idea is life changing, the beginning of true self-control.

many people are never able to find a true work identity. They stumble from job to job, never really finding anything that is “them.” More often than not, this is a boundary problem. They have not been able to own their own gifts, talents, wants, desires, and dreams because they are unable to set boundaries on others’ definitions and expectations of them.

Others’ expectations can be very strong influences. You must make sure that your boundaries are strong enough that you do not let others define you. Instead, work with God to find out who you really are and what kind of work you are made for.

Stand up against others’ expectations of you.

You are free, and your boundaries are meant to protect that freedom. But do not use your freedom to hurt yourself or anyone else. Use your freedom to love.

Whether our boundary issue is food, money, time, task completion, words, sexuality, or substance abuse, we can’t solve it in a vacuum. If we could, we would. But the more we isolate ourselves, the harder our struggle becomes.

The behavior pattern may be directly traceable to family problems, neglect, abuse, or trauma. In other words, our boundary conflicts may not be all our fault. They are, however, our responsibility.

Connecting with people is a time-consuming, risky, and painful process.

We need to embrace failure instead of trying to avoid it. Those people who spend their lives trying to avoid failure are also eluding maturity.

People who are growing up are also drawn to individuals who bear battle scars, worry furrows, and tear marks on their faces. Their lessons can be trusted, much more than the unlined faces of those who have never failed—and so have never truly lived.

Rescuing someone is not loving them. God’s love lets people experience consequences.

We often fear being honest because it was not safe to express honesty in our earthly relationships. Like Job, we fear both abandonment and retaliation. People abandoned us or attacked us when we told them how we really felt. Rest assured, however, that God desires truth in our “innermost being”

When we own what is within our boundaries, when we bring it into the light, God can transform it with his love.

God is a good model. When we are hurting, we need to take responsibility for the hurt and make some appropriate moves to make things better. This may mean letting go of someone and finding new friends. It may mean forgiving someone and letting them off the hook so we can feel better.

Boundaries help us to be the best we can be—in God’s image. They let us see God as he really is. They enable us to negotiate life, fulfilling our responsibilities and requirements. If we are trying to do God’s work for him, we will fail. If we are wishing for him to do our work for us, he will refuse. But if we do our work, and God does his, we will find strength in a real relationship with our Creator.

The first thing you need to learn is that the person who is angry at you for setting boundaries is the one with the problem. If you do not realize this, you may think you have a problem. Maintaining your boundaries is good for other people; it will help them learn what their families of origin did not teach them: to respect other people.

(1) We always need to forgive, but (2) we don’t always achieve reconciliation. Forgiveness is something that we do in our hearts; we release someone from a debt they owe us.

As eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope said, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” And not to forgive is the most self-destructive thing we can do.

Our basic sense of ourselves, of what is real and true about us, comes from our significant, primary relationships. That’s why many people who were unloved in childhood can be inundated by caring people in their adult years, yet not be able to shake a deep sense of being worthless and unlovable, no matter how much people try to show them their lovability.