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.

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.

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.

common boundary problem is disowning our choices and trying to lay the responsibility for them on someone else. Think for a moment of how often we use the phrases “I had to” or “She (he) made me” when explaining why we did or did not do something. These phrases betray our basic illusion that we are not active agents in many of our dealings. We think someone else is in control, thus relieving us of our basic responsibility.

need to realize that we are in control of our choices, no matter how we feel.

Making decisions based on others’ approval or on guilt breeds resentment,

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.

setting limits on others is a misnomer. We can’t do that. 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.

Steve has a problem hearing and accepting others boundaries. To Steve, “no” is simply a challenge to change the other person’s mind. This boundary problem is called control.

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

Aggressive controllers. These people clearly don’t listen to others’ boundaries. They run over other people’s fences like a tank. They are sometimes verbally abusive, sometimes physically abusive. But most of the time they simply aren’t aware that others even have boundaries. It’s as if they live in a world of yes. There’s no place for someone else’s no. They attempt to get others to change, to make the world fit their idea of the way life should be. They neglect their own responsibility to accept others as they are.

Manipulative controllers. Less honest than the aggressive controllers, manipulators try to persuade people out of their boundaries. They talk others into yes. They indirectly manipulate circumstances to get their way. They seduce others into carrying their burdens. They use guilt messages.

Controllers also are limited in their ability to take responsibility for owning their lives. Having relied on bullying or indirectness, they can’t function on their own in the world. The only remedy is to let controllers experience the consequences of their irresponsibility.

controllers are isolated. People stay with them out of fear, guilt, or dependency. If they’re honest, controllers rarely feel loved. Why? Because in their heart of hearts, they know that the only reason people spend time with them is because they are pulling the strings. If they stopped threatening or manipulating, they would be abandoned. And at some deep level, they are aware of their isolation.

People who set limits exhibit self-control and show responsibility for themselves. They act responsible to their partner by confronting him or her. Setting limits is an act of love in the marriage; by binding and limiting the evil, they protect the good.

In a marriage, as in no other relationship, the need for revealing your boundaries is important. Passive boundaries, such as withdrawal, triangulation, pouting, affairs, and passive-aggressive behavior, are extremely destructive to a relationship.

Boundaries need to be communicated first verbally and then with actions. They need to be clear and unapologetic.

Your words need to be clear and spoken in love. Confront your spouse directly. Say no. Don’t use passive resistance. Don’t pout or withdraw. Say things like, “I do not feel comfortable with that. I do not want to. I won’t.”

When you need time away, tell your spouse. Sometimes you need space for nourishment; other times you need space for limit setting. In either instance, your spouse should not have to guess why you do not want him around for a while. Communicate clearly so your spouse does not feel as though he is being punished, but knows he is experiencing the consequences of his out-of-control behavior

Communicate consequences clearly and enforce them firmly as you have said you would. Spelling out consequences in advance and enforcing them gives your spouse a choice about whether or not he or she wants the consequences to happen. Because people have control over their own behavior, they have control over the consequences of that behavior.

The family is the social unit God invented to fill up the world with representatives of his loving character. It’s a place for nurturing and developing babies until they’re mature enough to go out of the family as adults and to multiply his image in other surroundings.

most important thing parents can give children is a sense of responsibility—knowing what they are responsible for and knowing what they aren’t responsible for, knowing how to say no and knowing how to accept no. Responsibility is a gift of enormous value.

If we teach responsibility, limit setting, and delay of gratification early on, the smoother our children’s later years of life will be. The later we start, the harder we and they have to work.

Discipline is not payment for a wrong. It’s the natural law of God: our actions reap consequences.

Discipline, however, looks forward. The lessons we learn from discipline help us not to make the same mistakes again:

Children need to have a sense of control and choice in their lives. They need to see themselves not as the dependent, helpless pawns of parents but as choosing, willing, initiative-taking agents of their own lives.

Godly parenting, however, seeks to help children learn to think, make decisions, and master their environment in all aspects of life. This runs the gamut of deciding what to wear in the morning to what courses to take in school. Learning to make age-appropriate decisions helps children have a sense of security and control in their lives.

From an early age, children need to be able to accept the limits of parents, siblings, and friends. They need to know that others don’t always want to play with them, that others may not want to watch the same TV shows they watch, and that others may want to eat dinner at a different restaurant than they do. They need to know that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

At its heart, the idea of respecting others’ boundaries is the basis for empathy, or loving others as we’d like to be loved. Children need to be given the grace of having their no respected, and they need to learn to give that same grace to others. As they feel empathy for the needs of others, they mature and deepen in their love for God and others:

help their children develop good boundaries during this stage, parents need to encourage attempts at separateness, while still being the anchors the child clings to. Allow your child to be fascinated with people and objects other than you. Make your home a safe place for your baby to explore.

At eighteen to thirty-six months, the child needs to learn to be autonomous. She wants to be free of parental rule, but this desire is conflicted by her deep dependence on her parents. The wise parent will help her gain a sense of individualism and accept her loss of omnipotence, but without losing attachment.

Many parents, observing these problems, react with either too many boundaries or too few. The too-strict parent runs the risk of alienating the almost-adult from the home connection. The too-lenient parent wants to be the child’s best friend at a time the teen needs someone to respect.

Successful parenting means that our kids want to get out of bed and go to school, be responsible, be empathic, and be caring because that’s important to them, not because it’s important to us. It’s only when love and limits are a genuine part of the child’s character that true maturity can occur. Otherwise, we are raising compliant parrots who will, in time, self-destruct.

You owe no one an explanation about why you will not do something that is not your responsibility.

You also need to set limits on yourself. You need to realize how much time and energy you have and manage your work accordingly. Know what you can do and when you can do it, and say no to everything else.

Effective workers do two things: they strive to do excellent work, and they spend their time on the most important things.

you need to make a plan to accomplish the important things and erect some fences around your tasks. Realize your limits, and make sure you do not allow work to control your life. Having limits will force you to prioritize.

You only have the power to change yourself. You can’t change another person. You must see yourself, not the other person, as the problem. To see another person as the problem to be fixed is to give that person power over you and your well-being. Because you cannot change another person, you are out of control. The real problem lies in how you are relating to the problem person. You are the one in pain, and only you have the power to fix it.

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.

full life is one in which you are investing your time and energy in relationships and activities that are meaningful, enjoyable, and worth engaging in.

The problem is that many people with self-boundary struggles are also quite isolated from deep relationships. They have no “rootedness” in God or others (Eph. 3:17). Thus, they have to take what they think are steps backward to learn to connect with others.

Evil can take over the empty house of our souls. Even when our lives seem to be in order, isolation guarantees spiritual vulnerability. It’s only when our house is full of the love of God and others that we can resist the wiles of the devil.

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.

Surround yourself with people who are loving and supportive. As you hear feedback and suffer consequences, maintain close contact with your support network. Your difficulties are too much to bear alone. You need others who will be loving and supportive, but who will not rescue.

It’s far better to be empathic but at the same time refuse to be a safety net:

People who get angry at others for setting boundaries have a character problem. Self-centered, they think the world exists for them and their comfort. They see others as extensions of themselves.

Angry people have a character problem. If you reinforce this character problem, it will return tomorrow and the next day in other situations. It is not the situation that’s making them angry, but the feeling that they are entitled to things from others. They want to control others, and as a result, they have no control over themselves. So when they lose their wished-for control over someone, they “lose it.” They get angry.

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.

There is great power in inactivity. Do not let an out-of-control person be the cue for you to change your course. Just allow him to be angry, and decide for yourself what you need to do.