Intuitively, we understand that a boundary is a marker where something ends and something else begins. The word itself traces back to the Medieval Latin ‘bodina’, a concrete, physical border. And when we talk about psychological boundaries, we become aware of our autonomy to think as we like and feel as we please, at least so long as we don’t cause harm to others. In a broad sense, a boundary contains who we are. It protects our identity. For example, most people have a natural tendency to resist influence and to hold on to their own opinions. Influence often carries a negative connotation, precisely because it can feel like an attempt to violate our psychological boundaries. When it is unwanted, to influence is to shift, shape, or sway another, and that can make a person feel small. The reassertion is simple: I can make my own decisions, I can make my own mistakes. Even a wrong turn that is freely chosen can feel better than the right one taken on someone else’s orders.
The Romans even had a god of boundary markers, Terminus, and shifting a boundary stone was a punishable transgression. In Latin, terminus meant both boundary and end at once, and words like term, terminate, and determine all descend from it. So, in a way, changing our mind about something is also a small change of identity, the end of an older self. But others have their own thoughts, feelings, and needs too, sometimes very different from ours. Around the age of four or five, children develop a theory of mind: they begin to grasp that other people can hold false beliefs. A five-year-old can understand that someone else might wrongly believe an object is somewhere it no longer is. Later, some teenagers learn to plant false beliefs in their peers and parents to get their way. And this is why a violation of trust is a boundary transgression, not only because a person may be led to act against their own interest, but because, at a deeper level, they are induced to believe things that aren’t true. Being made to feel that our judgement can’t be trusted takes from us something beyond the tangible. We lose a little of ourselves, a little of our confidence, our sense of our own competence, our self-reliance.
Everyday English has already baked in more than enough wisdom about boundaries. We’ve all heard the advice to ‘draw a line in the sand’ or to ‘put your foot down’, and the warning that if you ‘give an inch, they’ll take a mile’. Even a small boundary transgression can cost you more than you foresaw. Freedman and Fraser (1966) showed how a small concession can be followed by much larger ones, because once people have agreed to something, they dislike appearing to change their minds. So, often, when someone takes a mile, we have handed it over ourselves, one small concession at a time. Often the wiser course is to stay firm, to keep someone at arm’s length, or to nip it in the bud. Ultimately, boundaries exist to preserve relationships, not to create distance, because good fences make good neighbours. A boundary is not coldness, and it is not distance. You can still visit your neighbour, but with a fence between you, their energetic dog won’t roll around in your flower bed or chew your garden table.
References
- Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of personality and social psychology, 4(2), 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0023552
- Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5