The Ten Laws of Boundaries

Law #1: Consequences 

God’s blueprint: You reap what you sow. If you overspend, you will get calls from creditors (eventually). If you smoke, you will develop a smokers hack, ruin your teeth and drastically increase your chances of cancer. On the positive side, if you eat properly and exercise, you will lose weight. Or if you pray, stay close to the sacraments, and grow in virtue, you will become more Christ-like. 

Codependency: Today, God’s law of reaping and sowing is still in place. But we, as human beings, have become really good at protecting one another from the consequences of our actions. To violate the boundary of reaping and sowing is to prevent an individual from facing the natural consequences to his or her actions. If this boundary is violated for long enough, it will cost both individuals. The one doing the protecting begins to need to protect. They will often try to prevent the person they protect from getting his or her life together out of fear of not longer being needed. And the person being protected, having never survived the consequences, becomes so afraid of being on their own that they never do it. A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, allows one another to try and fail. 

Law #2: Responsibility 

God’s blueprint: I am responsible for my inner experience and you are responsible for your inner experience. I cannot feel your feelings, or think your thoughts, or make your choices for you. I cannot grow, change, or alter you. I can only work on myself and encourage you to do the same. But I am not responsible for whether you grow. If someone experiences a conversion, that’s the work of grace. If someone falls away from the Church, that’s ultimately their choice. Not yours. 

Guilt and shame: Today, many people suffer from the guilt and shame that is associated with placing the responsibility of someone else’s life on their own shoulders. The mandate from God is to love one another. We are responsible for helping to meet the temporal needs of those around us, sure, but we are not responsible for rescuing one another from sin. That’s God’s job, not ours. A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, takes responsibility for their own inner life and no one else’s. 

Law #3: Power 

God’s Blueprint: God is the God of outcomes. He controls what happens and what doesn’t. No matter how much we might want to determine the events of life or how things unfold, it’s not within our power to control it. We can do our best to influence the direction of our own life and the life of others but we are ultimately not in control of outcomes. Only God is. 

Control: Today, with advances in modern technology and information, the ability to influence outcomes has drastically increased. With that increased ability has come more and more people living as if they can control what happens to them, their children, their spouse, or anyone else that means a lot to them. A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, surrenders the outcomes of life to God and focuses solely on own individual effort. 

Law #4: Respect

God’s Blueprint: God prioritizes free will. He respects our ability to choose and doesn’t take that away from us. And he calls us to respect the free will of others as well. 

Disrespect: There is often a fear involved with decision making for those who struggle to stay strong against those who violate the boundary of respect. They will say things like, “But they won’t accept me if I say no” or “they will get angry if I don’t do what they ask” and so on. The problem is, your decisions are between you and God. They impact other people, no doubt, but in the end, they are about God’s will and your willingness to follow it. To allow others to influence your decision making because they refuse to respect your free will is to act as if you believe that it is more important to appease others than it is to do what God is calling you to do. In a healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, two people are free to follow God’s will without fear of relational repercussions. 

Law #5: Motivation 

God’s blueprint: It is better to give than it is to receive. If you're giving freely, as God calls you to give, then that giving will lead to a sense of meaning, joy and purpose. Giving will not deplete your inner life, it will enrich it. 

Unappreciation: If you find yourself giving or serving with a constant feeling of unappreciation, then it’s time to examine your motivation for giving. Are you doing it out of a fear of abandonment, angering another, loneliness, guilt, or a need for approval? A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, includes the ability to give to another freely, for the right reasons. 

Law #6: Evaluation 

God’s blueprint: Hurt and harm are different. To make a decision without taking the feelings of another into account can be cruel. But not telling another person something because it will hurt their feelings is also cruel. God calls us to avoid harming another. But he often also calls us to endure hurt on the way to healing. Eating sugar everyday will feel good but it will harm you. Getting your tooth drilled because of a cavity will hurt you but it will bring healing not harm. Hurt is a necessary part of life and healthy relationships understand that. 

Confusion: Those who struggle with boundaries often avoid conflict in the name of maintaining peace within a relationship. What they forget is that Jesus left a lot of people with hurt feelings throughout his ministry. He flipped tables, called Peter satan, and referred to the Pharisees as a “brood of vipers.” In other words, Jesus didn’t shy away from conflict, he leaned into it when it was for the good of the other person. He was willing to endure hurt but he never caused harm. A healthy relationship, one with healthy boundaries, embraces conflict, endures hurt, and avoids harm. 

Law #7: Proactivity

God’s blueprint: Acknowledge and validate your feelings but don’t always follow them. There is a big difference between feeling something and acting on that feeling. Think of a two-year-old, it’s good for them to throw peas onto the floor in frustration. They are learning proper boundaries and trying to understand how to express their feelings of frustration. But throwing peas to express frustration is not acceptable for a 43 year-old. We are meant to mature. Notice here though that maturity doesn’t mean we stop feeling frustrated. It means we find better and more helpful ways of communicating that frustration. Feelings have a tendency to wreak havoc when they are ignored or blindly followed. God invites us to acknowledge how we feel and then use our free will to decide whether we are to follow those feelings or make a different choice. 

Victimhood: Those who struggle with boundaries tend to weaponize their emotions. They feel victimized (which is fine), but then never leave that place. They live within a victims mentality the rest of their lives. Or they feel hurt over something someone said or did and proceed to punish the person who hurt them without end. On the flip side, if you live with someone who weaponizes their emotions, it’s also a boundary violation to allow that person to stay in that state undeterred. In the modern world, many of those who live out of a victims mentality, not only do so undeterred but are often celebrated for it! A healthy relationship, one with healthy boundaries, is not dictated by the intensity of emotions. 

Law #8: Envy

God’s blueprint: St. Paul, in his letter to the Glatians wrote: “Each one should test their own actions. They can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else.” God designed us to focus on who we are, what he calls us to and nothing more. We can get into trouble when we start to focus on what other people have, what they are or are not doing, what our reputation is in their eyes, and so on. But we can find peace and purpose within the context of what we have and where he is leading us. 

Empty and unfulfilled: Boundaryless people feel empty and unfulfilled because their focus is outside the bounds of their own influence. They are resigned to a life of wanting. They spend their time and energy on an idealized vision of what someone else has and lose track of their own responsibility or the gift of their own life. A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, focuses on God, our response to him, and nothing else. 

Law #9: Activity

God’s blueprint: We are made to be proactive, not passive. Think of the parable of the servants responsible for investing their masters' gold. Those who were successful were active and assertive. They moved. They responded. God made us with an expectation, not that we would always be perfect, but that we would always make an effort to be. He doesn’t punish the afraid, but he has frightening words for the lazy. Especially when it comes to the soul. We are meant to be ever vigilant and ever-active against the forces of darkness pursuing the destruction of our souls. 

Passivity: Evil is an active force but it often uses passivity as an ally. When it comes to sin, we cannot shrink back passively. We are called to be active, aggressively protecting ourselves against the infiltration of evil. A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, will define and preserve the boundaries of the soul, creating a fortress against evil, regardless of the short-term cost. 

Law #10: Exposure 

God’s blueprint: You were made for relationship and boundaries are essential to healthy relationships. They define where you end and other people begin. They make it clear who God is and who he is not. They define who you are, who you’re not, what you’re responsible for, and what you’re not responsible for. And that’s what makes the law of exposure so critical. It’s not enough to have boundaries, they have to be visible too. Especially with God. Sharing your needs, emotions, and desires is not a selfish thing, it’s essential to a deep and lasting relationship. 

Fear: Many boundary issues emanate from a fear of exposing our needs, emotions, and desires. Fear of not being liked, of losing love, connection, approval, fear of receiving anger, being known and discarded, and so on. So we bottle ourselves up. We hide ourselves from other people. We keep our needs, emotions, and desires to ourselves and cut ourselves off from the possibility of tremendous hurt or transformative love. A healthy relationship, with healthy boundaries, will expose boundaries with clarity and charity to build a deep and authentic relationship. 

The Ten Laws are based on the work of Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend from their best selling book Boundaries. I simply provide a summary and a short commentary.