Boundaries aren't real
"Self-help" is pointless if it doesn't include critical thinking
Good morning everyone, happy Friday.
I hope you are enjoying the summer. I’m down in SoCal at my sister’s house, having fled the fog for some sunshine. I didn’t waste any time getting the most EPIC sunburn I’ve had in many years. I’d be proud if it weren’t so stupid;)
Summer can be confusing for me—just like the holiday season, it’s often a period of melancholy made worse by the fact that I’m “supposed” to be happier. I hope you are experiencing pockets of joy and connection, and that you are wiser with your sunscreen reapplication than I.
Writing workshop is a week from this Sunday. Italy is drawing near! I just bought my ticket 🤓
Read on for a post inspired by the critique of “therapy-speak” and the recent Jonah Hill/ Sarah Brady situation…I’ll be curious to hear what you think.
Last: I have TWO 1:1 coaching openings for an early August start. You can sign up for an Alignment call if you’re curious.
With love,
Dani
💥 Events 💥
VIRTUAL EVENT: July Writing Workshop is live! Join us Sunday, 7/30, from 10am-12pm PST. Workshops feature two writing prompts, and a (zero-obligation) option to read aloud and receive non-critical feedback. This workshop is appropriate for all levels. For more information and to register, click here.
INTERNATIONAL EVENT: SELF MADE presents With Pleasure! —a seven-day alcohol-free retreat in Tuscany happening this October 7-14. I’ve partnered with Carol Sicbaldi, founder of Carol’s Moveable Feast, with the intention that you reclaim joy and pleasure, relish in your five senses, and soak in the richness of your surroundings. To learn more and make a deposit, click here.
❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
In 2021, the concept of boundaries hit critical cultural mass and settled permanently in our “self-help” lexicon. That was the year Nedra Glover Tawwab released “Set Boundaries, Find Peace,”—an instant New York Times bestseller—and Terri Cole released “Boundary Boss.” Since then, Melissa Urban released “The Book Of Boundaries,” and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard that having boundaries is now an urgent requirement if any of us have a chance at healthy relationships with our partners, kids, parents, friends, coworkers, bosses. These experts have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media (Glover-Tawwab has 1.8 million followers on Instagram alone), and they regularly go live for their audiences, answering questions and offering scripts to deal with nosy mother-in-laws, difficult bosses, gaslighting partners, and everything in between. The extraordinary explosion of boundaries as a popular framework for relational awareness pointed to an unmet need many people didn’t know they had, offering language and structure to interpersonal issues that otherwise might remain unnecessarily murky and confusing.
I don’t take issue with boundaries as a concept or people making a living off teaching about boundaries. I have learned so much from the above mentioned women. I appreciate developing clear speech, and enough self-respect that I view my needs as equally important to anyone else’s. There are many ways to increase emotional maturity and expand our coping strategy wheelhouse, and “having boundaries” is one tool we can employ to support ourselves in relationship to others.
What I question is when we take something neutral—in this case, a concept, but it could also be a teacher, a practice, a belief, or a fill-in-the-blank, “self-help,” whatever—and elevate it so much that we hide behind it as the end-all-be-all panacea for all our problems, instead of putting it in its proper place as simply one tool of (hopefully) many. This week boundaries made the news, but it could be a diet, a workout routine, the “dharma,” a guru, a supplement, etc. When we lean too heavily on one tool, our efforts go sideways. The thing that was supposed to support us, or help us grow, becomes skewed. We look around and we’re just as out of balance as ever.
What I question is when we throw all critical thinking out the window because we so desperately want a quick fix.
Boundaries come up in conversation in my client sessions all the time. If you’re curious about my thinking when it comes to this concept, you can check out these two prior posts (which, blessedly, I still stand by 100%):
Part 1: How to Have Boundaries With Yourself
Part 2: How to Have Boundaries With Other People
Enter the Jonah Hill debacle from last week.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is language. I know that definitions for boundaries exist. But ultimately we all get to make our own definition, just like we witnessed with Jonah Hill. Jonah has a very different definition for boundaries than I do. And although I believe he is confused, ultimately, none of the definitions are laws, and there are no boundaries police running around disabusing people of what I would consider faulty notions (I would be great at this job but sadly it does not yet exist).
This puts us in hella slippery territory because boundaries are neither measurable nor observable. If I look at it that way, I can say that boundaries don’t actually exist. They’re a concept. They don’t exist in anyone else’s reality, only the “reality” of my thoughts. I can’t point to a boundary. I can feel it, but I can’t point to it. I might make decisions for myself based on these feelings. These feelings might guide me to move toward things that make me feel better rather than worse.
But I can’t hold a boundary in my hand.
This is another reason why boundaries, in my understanding, are PERSONAL and have nothing to do with another person. I could swap out the word boundary for gut feeling, another felt, un-point-to-able sense. My gut feelings are different from yours and if I listen to them I will probably make different choices than you. But I wouldn’t expect you to change your behavior based on my gut feeling. I would interact with that sense within myself.
Wielding self-help concepts as rules I expect the people in my life to abide by in order for me to be OK—and if they don’t comply, I bounce—is not the path to growth. It’s not agency. It’s not power. It’s not healing. Hiding behind therapy-speak (a simple Google search reveals a BONKERS amount of articles about this phenomenon) instead of being responsible for not perpetuating the same patterns that led me to a “self-help” journey in the first place is nothing more than me staying self-absorbed, small, and stuck, and I don’t want to live there anymore.
I’m not saying don’t have boundaries, lest anyone get it twisted. This is not me saying that we should put up with bad behavior or allow harm to be done to us if we can help it. Sometimes there are motherfuckers we should most definitely bounce from our lives! Boundaries are great. I have them. I practice them. I’m grateful for them, I appreciate having language for a quiet, subtle, internal experience. But can we own the fact that THAT’S ALL THEY ARE. A private, inner tending, a signal for yes and no, a way for us to stay whole and not lose ourselves in someone else, or some substance, or our own bullshit narratives for why we are the way we are. What I am saying is this is one tool we can turn to on our path. But boundaries are not the end-all-be-all for loving, healthy relationships and authentic intimacy.
I personally do not want to hide behind therapy-speak as a way to justify why I am stuck in shitty patterns. I want to be free of patterns. And this is why when I see a trend blowing up, my antenna start buzzing.
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For a period of time that lasted about a decade, I flirted at the outskirts of three sort-of cults.
First was yoga—specifically, a “school” of yoga called Anusara, which flared out in spectacular fashion in 2012 after the founder was found to be, well, no different from any other creepy “spiritual” leader who lets power go to his head (my whole sad story is here if you’re interested).
The second was Landmark Worldwide, an evolution of EST, where I took multiple personal development courses between the years of 2010-2013. I was already getting increasingly uncomfortable with the pressure put on participants to recruit our friends and family into taking courses, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was in 2013 when my mom got cancer. I told them that I had to drop out of a course I was taking to support my mom, and without a shred of kindness or compassion I was told that I was “out of integrity.” I’m still mad about that one.
At the time, these were the things I’d been pouring my primary efforts into. Yoga had saved my life, and I was utterly convinced that teaching the practice would be my life’s work. Landmark leadership was truly charismatic, and I fantasized about what it would be like to be the type of person I viewed as so free, so self-expressed; imagined myself at the front of those big conference rooms, leading transformational experiences for hundreds of participants. Between 2012-2013, the ground I’d been standing on as a source of guidance and community and, well, self-help, dropped out from under me. I was reeling, and in my confusion, started studying nutrition, thinking I’d be a health coach. After a year of pursuing this path, I realized that the nutrition world (I’m not talking about people who study nutrition science; this is in reference to the unregulated world of “health coaching”) was just as attached to their dogma as the yoga and Landmark worlds. And though I went on to teach yoga part time for almost another decade, it was in 2013 that I put a whole bunch of dreams to bed for good and went back into the world to figure out how to get a real job.
This was also when I decided that I’d never be punked again. I began a concerted effort at developing my own critical thinking skills, and I haven’t looked back since.
I share this bit of context because this is personal for me. I still feel grief almost every time I go to a public yoga class—I’m still nursing a broken heart from learning the hard way how awful it is when the thing you believe in most in the world turns out to be an illusion.
Boundaries are great. Self-help is awesome. I’m a personal development coach, for Pete’s sake! I believe in all of this stuff. I see its value. I’m practicing along with you! I want you to keep all your tools, I want you to continue to stock your tool kit until you have enough resources at your disposal to fill a whole tool shed. What I’m suggesting is that we be more discerning when we catch ourselves putting so much stock in one extraordinarily amorphous and hard to define concept that we filter everything else through it. What I’m suggesting is that the second you notice something in the self-help world being hyped up, that you follow your curiosity, for sure, but that you also remember to also attune to your own antennae. To remember: If it seems to good to be true IT IS.
And this is the most annoying thing of all. This is why I have such a chaotic time marketing what I do (ha): Self-development sucks more often than not. Sure, there are lanterns on the path, gorgeous a-ha moments and unexpected illuminations, but for the most part, it’s arduous, and sloggy; it takes as long as it takes (would that there were a timeline for transformation!); it’s boring and a grind and can even feel pointless at times. There is no trap door, no one thing that will save us. We have to save ourselves. This is a difficult level of responsibility to face and I deeply understand why people turn to gurus and formulas and diets etc etc etc. But if we can own this responsibility—awkward and fumbling and frustrating as it will certainly be—it puts us on unshakeable footing that no one can tear away.
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When you experience moments of crisis—when the proverbial rug is ripped out from under you—you have to swim parallel to shore for a while. You have to tend to your bewilderment, and discomfort, and grief, shore up your supports, slow down and reflect. You have to float on your back, connect to your breath, remember the big sky that’s always above, no matter what weather systems are passing through.
These moments are often doorways to your next level development as a human being.
⌇What has this loss, disillusionment, betrayal, taught me?
⌇Who, or how, do I want to be on the other side of this?
⌇ How might I digest this experience enough so that it becomes compost for the seeds I’m planting in its wake?
⌇How do I begin to live into the shape of who I’m becoming, even if where I’m headed isn’t quite clear?
⌇How do I fortify myself from the inside, strengthen my foundation enough that I can move and bend with life, and not get knocked down?
So many of us have lives that look good on paper, but feel a little “off” or not-right. Or maybe we know that a substance, or a person, or an environment, is more depleting than nurturing, but imagining life without it/them feels impossible. Or maybe we feel at the mercy of external forces encouraging us to live a certain way, or believe a certain thing, and we’re curious about strengthening our own authority.
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
―George Bernard Shaw
If I’ve learned anything over the past decade—and in particular in the past six years since I stopped drinking—it’s knowing that any efforts toward “self-help” and “healing” are working when I feel an expanded sense of possibility, aliveness, joy, and purpose infusing my days. The ceiling opens up. I am increasingly less confined and limited.
This isn’t to say that life isn’t still so super hard. I too have lived through the chaos of recent years. I still have dark moments. But in general, my life feels good more than any other way. And this did not use to be the case.
Maybe you’re curious about what else is possible for you and your life, your people, your community, the whole wide world, the universe, the aliens, and beyond. Maybe you have your own questions rolling around your skull, the answers to which you suspect might have you make some significant life changes. Maybe that voice that knocks on the door of your heart, urging you to let go of the banks and surrender to the river, is becoming unignorably loud. Maybe you wonder what it would be like to create some structure to explore these deeper longings, in which case I invite you to book an Alignment Session with me.
Working together is definitely about getting into action—collaborating on a step-by-step, genuinely-doable process to discover what you want, and then move you in that direction. But it doesn’t stop there. Along the way, we step into the world of human development, living into questions like:
⌇What does it mean to be a human being?
⌇What are my values, and how do I live into them?
⌇Who am I, free from the patterns and conditioning of my family and culture?
⌇How do I integrate the various parts of myself, so that what I say and how I behave line up?
If any of this calls to you, book a session. It’s free. No hard sell, no big pitch. We can chat and you can see if it feels right.
Life has gotten so much bigger, so much more full of friendship, love, and presence since I got curious about what would happen if I were to be responsible for all of it. Since owning the fact that nobody knows better than me what I need. I still have plenty of support. But instead of adhering to the rules of some specific tradition or authority, I continue to step into my own authority, and to bring awareness to anything that would keep me questioning or disconnected from my power.
You too can burn bright, and “rejoice in life for its own sake.” It would be my honor to support you.
I have two 1:1 coaching spots available for an August start.
SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, integral coach and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
This is really helpful piece, Dani, and beautifully articulates many of the boundary/therapy speak concepts I have been wrestling with as I engage in my own therapy journey. “When we lean too heavily on one tool, our efforts go sideways.” Yes, yes, yes. Thank you as always for seeing and sharing these nuances.