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.

Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom. If I know where my yard begins and ends, I am free to do with it what I like. Taking responsibility for my life opens up many different options. However, if I do not “own” my life, my choices and options become very limited.

Often, when people are abused while growing up, they reverse the function of boundaries and keep the bad in and the good out. When Mary was growing up, she suffered abuse from her father. She was not encouraged to develop good boundaries. As a result, she would close herself off, holding the pain inside; she would not open up to express her hurt and get it out of her soul. She also would not open up to let support from the outside in to heal her. In addition, she would continually allow others to “dump” more pain into her soul. Consequently, when she came in for help, she was carrying a lot of pain, was still being abused, and was “walled off” from support from the outside. She had to reverse the ways her boundaries worked. She needed fences that were strong enough to keep the bad out and gates in those fences to let out the bad already in her soul and let in the good she desperately needed.

No is a confrontational word. The Bible says that we are to confront people we love, saying, “No, that behavior is not okay. I will not participate in that.” The word no is also important in setting limits on abuse. Many passages of Scripture urge us to say no to others’ sinful treatment of us (Matt. 18:15–20).

Sometimes a person is pressuring you to do something; other times the pressure comes from your own sense of what you “should” do. If you cannot say no to this external or internal pressure, you have lost control of your property and are not enjoying the fruit of “self-control.”

Proverbs 22:3 says that “the prudent see danger and take refuge.” Sometimes physically removing yourself from a situation will help maintain boundaries. You can do this to replenish yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually after you have given to your limit, as Jesus often did.

Taking time off from a person or a project can be a way of regaining ownership over some out-of-control aspect of your life where boundaries need to be set. Adult children who have never spiritually and emotionally separated from their parents often need time away. They have spent their whole lives embracing and keeping (Eccl. 3:5–6) and have been afraid to refrain from embracing and to throw away some of their outgrown ways of relating. They need to spend some time building boundaries against the old ways and creating new ways of relating that for a while may feel alienating to their parents. This time apart usually improves their relationship with their parents.

If you have been in an abusive relationship, you should wait until it is safe and until real patterns of change have been demonstrated before you go back. Many people are too quick to trust someone in the name of forgiveness and not make sure that the other is producing “fruit in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:8). To continue to open yourself up emotionally to an abusive or addicted person without seeing true change is foolish. Forgive, but guard your heart until you see sustained change.

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

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.

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

We need to be able to say no to ourselves. This includes both our destructive desires and some good ones that are not wise to pursue at a given time. Internal structure is a very important component of boundaries and identity, as well as ownership, responsibility, and self-control.

Many people do not take ownership for how they resist love. They have a lot of love around them but do not realize that their loneliness is a result of their own lack of responsiveness. Often they will say, “Others’ love cannot ‘get in.’” This statement negates their responsibility to respond. We maneuver subtly to avoid responsibility in love; we need to claim our hearts as our property and work on our weaknesses in that area. It will open up life to us.

To feel safe in such an evil world, children need to have the power to say things like these: • “No.” • “I disagree.” • “I will not.” • “I choose not to.” • “Stop that.” • “It hurts.” • “It’s wrong.” • “That’s bad.” • “I don’t like it when you touch me there.” Blocking a child’s ability to say no handicaps that child for life. Adults with handicaps like Robert’s have this first boundary injury: they say yes to bad things.

Boundary construction is most evident in three-year-olds. By this time they should have mastered the following tasks: 1. The ability to be emotionally attached to others, yet without giving up a sense of self and one’s freedom to be apart. 2. The ability to say appropriate nos to others without fear of loss of love. 3. The ability to take appropriate nos from others without withdrawing emotionally.

A parent’s emotional withdrawal can be subtle: A hurt tone of voice. Long silences for no reason. Or it can be overt: Crying spells. Illness. Yelling. Children of parents like these grow up to be adults who are terrified that setting boundaries will cause severe isolation and abandonment.

Up until now, we’ve dealt with characteristics of family relating. Withdrawal, hostility, and setting inappropriate limits are ways parents act toward their children. Over time these become ingrained in the soul of the child. In addition, specific traumas can injure boundary development. A trauma is an intensely painful emotional experience rather than a character pattern. Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse are traumatic. Accidents and debilitating illnesses are traumatic. Severe losses such as the death of a parent, divorce, or extreme financial hardship are also traumatic. A good way to look at the difference between character-relating patterns, such as withdrawal and hostility, and trauma, is to look at how a tree in a forest can be hurt. It can be fed inappropriately, through bad ingredients in the soil, or it can be given too much or too little sun or water. That’s an illustration of character-pattern problems. Trauma is like lightning hitting the tree. A trauma can affect boundary development because it shakes up two necessary foundations to children’s growth: 1. The world is reasonably safe. 2. They have control over their lives. Children who undergo trauma feel these foundations shaken up. They become unsure that they are safe and protected in the world, and they become frightened that they have no say-so in any danger that approaches them.

It isn’t wise to immediately alienate yourself from everyone important to you. Remember that you are made for relationship. You need people. You must have places where you are connected, where you are loved unconditionally. It’s only from that place of being “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph. 3:17 NASB) that you can safely begin learning to tell the truth. This is how you can prepare yourself for the resistance of others to your setting of biblical boundaries.

The problem is that sometimes you see boundaries as an offensive weapon. Nothing could be further from the truth. Boundaries are a defensive tool. Appropriate boundaries don’t control, attack, or hurt anyone. They simply prevent your treasures from being taken at the wrong time. Saying no to adults, who are responsible for getting their own needs met, may cause some discomfort. They may have to look elsewhere. But it doesn’t cause injury.

The Hebrew word for “leave” comes from a root word that means to “loosen,” or to relinquish or forsake. For marriage to work, the spouse needs to loosen her ties with her family of origin and forge new ones with the new family she is creating through marriage.

In the perpetual child syndrome, a person may be financially on his own, but he allows his family of origin to perform certain life management functions. This adult child often hangs out at Mom and Dad’s house, vacations with them, drops off laundry, and eats many meals there. He is Mom or Dad’s closest confidant, sharing “everything” with them. At thirty-something, he hasn’t found his career niche, and he has no savings, no retirement plan, and no health insurance. On the surface these things may not appear to be serious problems. But often Mom and Dad are symbolically keeping their adult child from emotionally leaving home.

Here’s the point. Adhering to structures, boundaries, or rules can be very beneficial. But rules in and of themselves should not be your master, robbing you of the freedom to do good for others or yourself. That is why I like to say it this way: Find the misery and make a rule.1 If there is an area of life in which you are suffering, make a personal rule to keep it from hurting you. If you get a stomachache and break out in a rash every time you eat a certain food, then make a rule that you will stay away from that food. Just as an alcoholic cannot ever have even a sip of wine, you just can’t eat that food. And the same thing applies to setting boundaries on technology and social media. If it’s intruding on your life and relationships, make a rule to protect yourself.