Where to Draw the Line_How to Set Healthy Boundaries Every Day

by Anne Katherine

  • Notice when you are risking more or less than the other person, and decide what fits the level of relationship you want to have with them.

  • Treat instant messages with the same courtesy as phone calls, asking if the other person is available for conversation.

  Chapter 27

  THERAPIST BOUNDARIES

  Sylvia urged Maurice to come to therapy with her. He went, grateful to have discovered a woman who was so willing to put effort into their relationship. He entered the experience prepared to trust and respect the therapist.

  Sometimes, though, he felt he was being pushed subtly in the direction of Sylvia’s preferences. It was a flavor rather than any clear action that he could put his finger on—except that he sometimes left the sessions feeling that no one was on his side.

  Finally he asked Samantha, the therapist, “Do you have any kind of relationship with Sylvia outside this office?”

  Samantha laughed and directed the question back to Maurice. “Do you often have the feeling that women are ganging up on you?”

  Maurice laughed too, and admitted that at times it did seem as if women belonged to an exclusive club that he could not enter.

  Their therapy proceeded for another few months. Then, in the middle of an argument with Sylvia, she suddenly flung these words at him: “You’re jumpy. Even Samantha said that you’re like a flea on a griddle.”

  “I disagree. I know I sometimes get anxious, but it’s in reaction to not knowing if I can count on—” He stopped mid-sentence. “What do you mean, Samantha said that? When did she say that?”

  “After our book club meeting the other night.”

  “You and Samantha are in a book club together?”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Few years at least.”

  “You discuss me?”

  “Well, we don’t really discuss you,” Sylvia said. “But you come up once in a while. Listen, I’m hungry. Let’s get some dinner.”

  Maurice was angry and didn’t want to go back to therapy with Samantha. His trust of their therapist had been shaken, but he realized Sylvia could have misrepresented something Samantha had said just to fortify her own position.

  At the next session, he confronted them both. He found out they had been in a book club together for years, and that Samantha had indeed made some comments about him to Sylvia.

  What therapist boundary violations can you spot in the above incident? Mark the acts that were trust violations committed by Samantha.

  1. Samantha has a social relationship with Sylvia.

  2. Samantha concealed this social relationship from Maurice.

  3. Samantha talked about Maurice outside of their therapeutic relationship.

  4. Samantha didn’t reveal that she had discussed him with Sylvia—or the content of their conversation.

  All four acts were therapist boundary violations.

  I keep thinking there’s no need for me to talk about therapist boundaries—then I hear another story about some therapist who grossly violates client boundaries.

  So, to set the record straight, the following events are considered “off limits” for a therapist—including a psychotherapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, psychiatric social worker, counselor, doctor, and psychiatric nurse—and a client who are in a therapeutic relationship:

  • Socializing

  • Going out to dinner

  • Having lunch

  • Meeting for breakfast

  • Going to a dance together

  • Touching sexually

  • Sexual innuendo

  • Flirting

  • Sharing the same weekly sports activity on the same team

  • Repeatedly sharing a leisure activity together

  • Taking a trip together, just the two of them

  • Spending the weekend together, just the two of them

  • Nourishing a friendship

  • Going to parties together

  • Having regular long talks on the phone in the evening

  • The therapist being good friends with the client’s spouse or partner

  • The client being a good friend with the therapist’s spouse or partner

  • The client mowing the therapist’s lawn

  • The client cleaning the therapist’s house

  • The client providing a personal service to the therapist

  • The client attending to the therapist’s aging parents

  • The client being the therapist’s massage therapist

  • The therapist becoming lovers with one of the clients in couples counseling

  Why are these boundaries so strict? Because clients need the safety and scope of knowing that in the therapeutic relationship there exists a nested, private preserve all their own.

  The therapeutic relationship is like a tunnel into the innermost tenderness of being. Here are found the ancient wounds that direct one’s life. Here, at the fountainhead of fear or grief that influences choice and action, is therapeutic territory.

  The therapist’s office becomes the anteroom to that sacred tunnel, and the therapist becomes the guide. Over time, if the therapist is trustworthy, skilled, and aware (and if the client is willing), the client gains access to their soft inner self. The therapist teaches the client, through modeling and skilled interaction, how to receive buried and potent truths, and how to coddle their soul.

  The focus of the client-therapist relationship is the client’s inner self. It would be a rare client indeed—and a rare therapist, too—who could add any other kind of relationship to this delicate process and not (wittingly or unwittingly) sabotage it.

  Adding a second role to the therapeutic one—sports buddy, friend, employer, or employee—inserts an interactional dimension that switches the focus of the relationship. The delicate internal journey that is therapy is challenge enough, without adding such complications to it.

  The therapist can also suffer negative results by mixing relationships. The therapist may lose privacy, flexibility, or freedom of response. What if your client, whom you’ve hired to cut the grass, pulls as a weed the fifty-year-old clematis that your grandmother planted? What if, on the golf course, your client makes a smart-ass remark about your drive that pisses you off (and costs you three strokes)? What if your client botches a throw that loses the championship ball game? What if, at a party you are enjoying with your spouse, your client suddenly begins sobbing?

  All sorts of sticky wickets are raised when a therapist and a client add some other type of association to an already complex, subtle, and potentially life-changing relationship. It is simply not comparable to being friends with your pediatrician, minister, or car mechanic (although even in these other professional relationships, mixing friendships can sometimes create some issues).

  The most obvious boundary violation is anything sexual with a client. Why is this wrong? Because clients are vulnerable in a therapeutic relationship. They invest the therapist with trust. They are open at a deeper level than in ordinary social situations. A therapist who exploits this trust for sexual gratification is creating harm at a deep level. It’s the same sort of violation as a parent using a child sexually. The person in the power position is stealing safety, ease, and trust from someone who is vulnerable. It is wrong.

  So, if you have a therapist who puts the make on you, get away from that person quickly. Don’t linger to teach the therapist proper conduct. Don’t wait until you have enough evidence to sue. It’s not worth the detour from your own progress. Leave that relationship immediately at the very first sexual action, and find someone else.

  A good therapist has three attributes: ethically based boundaries, knowledgeable skill, and empathy. If any one of these is missing, you may get utilitarian sessions, but you’ll miss out on the true potential of quality therapy. If it’s the ethical aspect that the therapist is missing, you can be endangered. I know of no state board or educati
onal program that prevents licensure due to moral emptiness, so it’s up to you to protect yourself.

  PASTORAL BOUNDARIES

  People who have been trained as pastoral counselors are closely related to ministers. Their perspective is that of shepherds guiding their flocks. They consider their territory a person’s whole life—family, home, work, social life. They are used to a context where people worship, break bread, raise children, play, pray, and learn together.

  Even in this type of counseling, however, certain boundaries must be respected. In fact, because of the blended nature of pastoral relationships, boundaried behavior is even more important.

  A pastoral counselor must be careful never to reveal secrets from one parishioner to another. Furthermore, since a pastoral counselor is in a far more extensive parental role than even a private therapist, sexual overtures toward a parishioner are completely out of bounds. (An exception would need to meet all the following conditions: the counselor and parishioner are both unmarried or unpartnered; the two have first established themselves as peers; the counselor is not involved in any sort of direct counseling with the parishioner or the parishioner’s family; mutual consent.)

  Psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and pastoral counselors enter into a covenant when they accept a client. They agree to use their best resources on behalf of the client, keeping their personal needs out of it. These boundaries with the client help preserve the integrity of a vital, life-giving relationship.

  The therapist-client relationship mirrors other relationships where one person is in the position of mentor, steward, authority, employer, or parent to another. Those with power have certain responsibilities toward the people they serve, assist, teach, supervise, or lead. The person who has power carries an ethical mandate not to exploit their position, not to abuse a subordinate in order to extract personal gain.

  Therapist boundaries serve both to protect the client and to model clean, trustworthy authority. Thus, of all the boundaries we need, boundaries with therapists, counselors, and spiritual leaders are among the most critical—and can cause the most damage if they are violated. This is not only because the client or follower is open and vulnerable, but because, from the therapeutic experience, clients can envision the boundaries that apply to other situations in which they invest someone else with authority.

  If it seems I’ve drawn these boundaries with a particularly heavy hand, it is because there is so much at stake. So much can be lost through even an accidental or well-intentioned violation.

  By knowing about boundaries, you can make good judgments about whether or not a person deserves to be granted authority. When someone you look to as an authority behaves in a way that is beyond appropriate ethical limits, you can withhold your trust, withdraw your generosity or energy for the person, and even remove yourself from the relationship.

  By preserving good boundaries, we can learn to look beyond titles to the standards a person keeps. Knowing the correct boundaries for any situation enables us to choose what our relationship with another person will be. Boundaries free us from the tyranny of roles.

  Chapter 28

  YOUR SAFE COUNTRY

  A remarkable change can grow in your life as you practice the art of setting boundaries. Your life takes on more definition. You know who you are more clearly. Time and energy are freed for your chosen pursuits. People gain respect for you.

  As you set clear boundaries in different situations, you may begin to discover yet another benefit. As boundaries knit together, we begin to have a clearer sense of our spiritual presence in the world. Although boundaries are a practice, a defined behavior, they also carry us to a wider place within ourselves, a place where we discover what our lives are really about.

  Harbra grew up in a fractured family. Her alcoholic father’s attention was on matters outside his family. Her mother, Cilla, was narcissistic and manipulative. Cilla’s primary interest in her children was in what they could do for her. Harbra did an amazing job of taking herself out of the culture that raised her. She educated herself, got a good job, and entered therapy. Over time, she set clearer and firmer boundaries with her mother and her other relatives, but they still occupied a corner of her life, and each week, a certain amount of time and energy went into protecting herself from them or recovering from their assaults.

  Finally Cilla broke the last thread by allowing Harbra’s niece to be assaulted by Cilla’s lover. Cilla defended herself as an innocent and testified in court on behalf of the lover. Her granddaughter would have been tossed to the wolves had not Harbra and her sister rallied vehemently around the child, who was hustled into therapy and embraced by her sane female elders.

  Harbra decided the boundary had to be stronger. She wrote a letter to Cilla saying she wanted no more contact with her. It was hard for Harbra to cut herself off from her mother, but it had become clear that Cilla would never be capable of even the mildest positive relationship with her progeny.

  Taking this step freed Harbra immensely. A part of her that had always had to be on guard began to relax. After recovering from her grief at having to separate herself from her mother, she dispatched a few other manipulative and draining relationships.

  Suddenly, the only people in her life were healthy ones. Little defenses she used to carry against the sucklings melted away. She felt stronger and healthier. Her mind was clearer. She was more freely centered within her own life. Within two months, she had an inspiration about the work she really wanted to be doing. Within another month, she had figured out how to get the education to do it. Within another month she had restructured her life to financially support her new educational goals.

  You can’t imagine how much energy is being used by defenses until you set strong enough boundaries with the people who would sip your lifeblood. Boundaries are far more than a nifty technique to preserve your Saturday at home. When applied in the right places with the appropriate amount of firmness and dimension, they make way for entire possibilities that aren’t even dimly formed until you are free.

  Each time you set a boundary and dissolve a defense, you pave your way to your own safe country, your own unique territory that is the fulfillment of your life and your mission.

  I hope you have, through embracing this book, discovered walls or rules, roles or customs that have confined you to one place, preventing you from occupying the wider expanses. I hope you’ve seen ways to open the fortresses that have restricted you, that you are sacking any intruders in your life, and welcoming vision holders and good people. Most of all, my wish for you is that you have begun the enterprise of creating your own safe country.

  ANNE KATHERINE, M.A., is a certified mental health counselor, speaker, and the author of Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin and Anatomy of a Food Addiction. She lives near Seattle, Washington, where she leads programs for recovery and healing.

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  1 M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 47–69.

  2 Ellen Friedman, Light Her Fire (Morton Grove, Ill.: Mega Systems, 1995).

  3 Margaret Hyde and Elizabeth Forsyth, The Sexual Abuse of Children and Adolescents (Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1997).

  4 Ibid.

  5 Dale Robert Reinert, Sexual Abuse and Incest (Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1997).

  6 Kathleen Barry in Encyclopedia Americana, International ed., vol. 29, s. v., “Women’s Rights.”

  7 Ibid.

  8 Anne Perry, Bethlehem Road (New York: Fawcett Books, 1991)

  9 John M. Smith, MD, Women and Doctors (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992).

  10 Susan R. Johnson and Gloria A. Bachmann, in Encyclopedia Americana, Internationa
l ed., vol. 29., s. v., “Women’s Health.”

  11 An example is Women for Women in Bosnia, PO Box 9733, Alexandria, VA 22304.

  12 7738 Bell Road, Windsor, CA 95492-8518, (707)838-6000.

  13 Jean Houston, “Laughter of the Gods,” lecture presented at Mystery School for Hollyhock Centre, Cortes Island, BC, 1995.

  14 John Gottman, PhD, Clinical Manual for Marital Therapy (Seattle, Wash.: 1999).

  15 John Gottman, PhD, “A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy,” lecture delivered in Seattle, Wash., 1999.

  16 Kathleen Miller, Fair Share Divorce (Bellevue, Wash.: Miller Advisors, 1995).

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  Copyright © 2000 by Anne Katherine, M.A.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Katherine, Anne.

  Where to draw the line : how to set healthy boundaries

  every day / Anne Katherine.

  p. cm.

  1. Interpersonal relations. 2. Intimacy (Psychology) I. Title.

  HM1106.K37 2000

  302—dc21 00-026486

  ISBN 0-684-86806-7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-43914-809-9 (eBook)