Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Ask a Therapist: Boundaries around boundaries?
Part one (of two)
Of course! But maybe...
Note from Sam the Therapist: The content provided here is not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment regarding medical or mental health conditions. Content is presented in summary form, is general in nature, and is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Do not delay in seeking the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any concerns you may have regarding a medical, psychiatric, or psychological condition.” On to the questions!
Hi Sam,
My wife and I appreciated your thought-provoking reflections on boundary-setting in adult relationships *[Ask a Therapist, March 5, 2025]*. We’d be grateful to know your thoughts about factors you think may be contributing to what seems like an increasingly common phenomenon: adult children unilaterally, and even permanently, cutting off all communication with their parents, leaving the parents deeply hurt, wondering “What did we do to deserve this?”, and not knowing what, if anything, they can do to heal the breach.
Honestly, we wonder: could it be that everyone’s right to set legitimate boundaries (as in, “If you start using abusive language, our conversation has to stop”), often ends up, at least in our current culture, creating the isolating “walls” that you warn against — especially in the hands of easily offended young adults preoccupied with self-protection (“I need to avoid anything that triggers me”)?
Some examples from our experience: one friend, a conscientious mother of five grown children, writes, “Our 25-year-old daughter has just informed me and my husband that we are not to text or call her. She rebuffs all efforts to reconcile.”
Two of our next-door neighbors — the kind of people who go out of their way to be helpful to anyone — appear from everything we’ve seen to have a loving relationship with their older daughter, her husband, and their two kids. But these neighbors also suffer a deep sadness with regard to their younger daughter. “Two years ago,” the father says, “my wife said something in a phone conversation that upset Mary. Since then, she has not spoken to us.”
Another father shares this: “After two years of therapy, my adult daughter made the choice — heartbreaking for me — that I’m not a good fit in her life at this moment because of me ‘triggering’ her. I couldn’t even understand some of the vocabulary she was using. Triggered? Boundaries? I found myself ruminating over possible scenarios where I did something terrible to deserve this.”
In short: what, if anything, do you recommend as “boundaries around boundaries” so that they foster mutual respect, collaborative problem-solving, and the healing of hurts, rather than being unilaterally or irreversibly imposed? From your experience with clients, could you share some specific examples of positive, growth-facilitating boundaries and some illustrations of negative, growth-impeding ones? Thanks very much in advance for your kind help.
Tom E.
La Mesa
Dear Tom,
Thanks for your letter. Your concerns are rich and valid, and they touch on some important topics. So much so that I’m going to break my responses into two chunks over this and the next installment of this column. Here’s chunk one, which considers the matter of language that the heartbroken father mentioned. “I couldn’t even understand some of the vocabulary she was using. Triggered? Boundaries?”
The word “triggered” has certainly become a lot more popular over the past years. It’s a word that has made its way out of psychotherapy and recovery environments into the culture at large, where it often seems to be used to mean “really upset.” But in a therapeutic context, it’s more specific than that: when I’m triggered, I am immediately and powerfully shifted into a different state of mind. I become stuck in my fight/flight/freeze response. What’s more, I’m activated in a way that I might feel but not be able to acknowledge. I can know that I am “triggered” when I lose control, to some degree, of how I am responding. The word is especially useful when talking about trauma responses. Things that remind me of my trauma will often be triggering. Working through my trauma will likely mean learning to navigate both my triggers and my responses to them.
A boundary might entail a complete cut-off of communication with somebody, but it doesn’t have to. A boundary might simply limit amounts or types of interaction, how or when they happen. Boundaries can refer not just to disengagement, but to the rules of engagement, so to speak, in a relationship. You gave a good example of that when you mentioned stopping conversation when one party uses abusive language. A boundary may be set in advance in a relationship (like in a relationship with a therapist), but is often not discussed until there is a boundary violation that ends up needing to be addressed.
Boundaries ought to be protective rather than vengeful or avoidant. If I’m setting a boundary to hurt someone or to run away from something that could or should be addressed, then I should probably look critically at that. Ditto if I’m cutting off lots of people. Ditto if I’m not using other skills apart from setting boundaries. Ditto if I’m not open to feedback from the trustworthy and well-intentioned people that I (hopefully) have in my life. These points would, by the way, be a way to think about the “boundaries around boundaries” issue that you mention in your letter.
A boundary is something I set up for myself or for people under my care, like children. But whether for the sake of myself or others, it often requires a change in behavior on another person’s part. If the boundary is framed in a conditional way — “Until x happens, I need to y” — then the hoped-for change is made especially clear.
There’s a third word you mention, one that is often attached to the other two: “safety.” A boundary should be set in the interest of a person’s physical and/or emotional safety. There is, of course, a subjective element here: the individual person must decide what “feels safe.” I’d say that a good way to characterize emotional safety would be this: safety is a state in which I’m not having a physical/emotional stress response beyond what I feel I can manage without it negatively affecting me. But it is worth noting that discomfort or anger are not inherently unsafe.
Stay tuned. Next time I’ll get to your question about growth-facilitating and growth-impeding boundaries, and I’ll also discuss ways to respond to impasses like the ones you mentioned.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Therapist: Boundaries around boundaries?
Part one (of two)
Ask a Therapist: Boundaries around boundaries?
Part one (of two)
Of course! But maybe...
Note from Sam the Therapist: The content provided here is not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment regarding medical or mental health conditions. Content is presented in summary form, is general in nature, and is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Do not delay in seeking the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any concerns you may have regarding a medical, psychiatric, or psychological condition.” On to the questions!
Hi Sam,
My wife and I appreciated your thought-provoking reflections on boundary-setting in adult relationships *[Ask a Therapist, March 5, 2025]*. We’d be grateful to know your thoughts about factors you think may be contributing to what seems like an increasingly common phenomenon: adult children unilaterally, and even permanently, cutting off all communication with their parents, leaving the parents deeply hurt, wondering “What did we do to deserve this?”, and not knowing what, if anything, they can do to heal the breach.
Honestly, we wonder: could it be that everyone’s right to set legitimate boundaries (as in, “If you start using abusive language, our conversation has to stop”), often ends up, at least in our current culture, creating the isolating “walls” that you warn against — especially in the hands of easily offended young adults preoccupied with self-protection (“I need to avoid anything that triggers me”)?
Some examples from our experience: one friend, a conscientious mother of five grown children, writes, “Our 25-year-old daughter has just informed me and my husband that we are not to text or call her. She rebuffs all efforts to reconcile.”
Two of our next-door neighbors — the kind of people who go out of their way to be helpful to anyone — appear from everything we’ve seen to have a loving relationship with their older daughter, her husband, and their two kids. But these neighbors also suffer a deep sadness with regard to their younger daughter. “Two years ago,” the father says, “my wife said something in a phone conversation that upset Mary. Since then, she has not spoken to us.”
Another father shares this: “After two years of therapy, my adult daughter made the choice — heartbreaking for me — that I’m not a good fit in her life at this moment because of me ‘triggering’ her. I couldn’t even understand some of the vocabulary she was using. Triggered? Boundaries? I found myself ruminating over possible scenarios where I did something terrible to deserve this.”
In short: what, if anything, do you recommend as “boundaries around boundaries” so that they foster mutual respect, collaborative problem-solving, and the healing of hurts, rather than being unilaterally or irreversibly imposed? From your experience with clients, could you share some specific examples of positive, growth-facilitating boundaries and some illustrations of negative, growth-impeding ones? Thanks very much in advance for your kind help.
Tom E.
La Mesa
Dear Tom,
Thanks for your letter. Your concerns are rich and valid, and they touch on some important topics. So much so that I’m going to break my responses into two chunks over this and the next installment of this column. Here’s chunk one, which considers the matter of language that the heartbroken father mentioned. “I couldn’t even understand some of the vocabulary she was using. Triggered? Boundaries?”
The word “triggered” has certainly become a lot more popular over the past years. It’s a word that has made its way out of psychotherapy and recovery environments into the culture at large, where it often seems to be used to mean “really upset.” But in a therapeutic context, it’s more specific than that: when I’m triggered, I am immediately and powerfully shifted into a different state of mind. I become stuck in my fight/flight/freeze response. What’s more, I’m activated in a way that I might feel but not be able to acknowledge. I can know that I am “triggered” when I lose control, to some degree, of how I am responding. The word is especially useful when talking about trauma responses. Things that remind me of my trauma will often be triggering. Working through my trauma will likely mean learning to navigate both my triggers and my responses to them.
A boundary might entail a complete cut-off of communication with somebody, but it doesn’t have to. A boundary might simply limit amounts or types of interaction, how or when they happen. Boundaries can refer not just to disengagement, but to the rules of engagement, so to speak, in a relationship. You gave a good example of that when you mentioned stopping conversation when one party uses abusive language. A boundary may be set in advance in a relationship (like in a relationship with a therapist), but is often not discussed until there is a boundary violation that ends up needing to be addressed.
Boundaries ought to be protective rather than vengeful or avoidant. If I’m setting a boundary to hurt someone or to run away from something that could or should be addressed, then I should probably look critically at that. Ditto if I’m cutting off lots of people. Ditto if I’m not using other skills apart from setting boundaries. Ditto if I’m not open to feedback from the trustworthy and well-intentioned people that I (hopefully) have in my life. These points would, by the way, be a way to think about the “boundaries around boundaries” issue that you mention in your letter.
A boundary is something I set up for myself or for people under my care, like children. But whether for the sake of myself or others, it often requires a change in behavior on another person’s part. If the boundary is framed in a conditional way — “Until x happens, I need to y” — then the hoped-for change is made especially clear.
There’s a third word you mention, one that is often attached to the other two: “safety.” A boundary should be set in the interest of a person’s physical and/or emotional safety. There is, of course, a subjective element here: the individual person must decide what “feels safe.” I’d say that a good way to characterize emotional safety would be this: safety is a state in which I’m not having a physical/emotional stress response beyond what I feel I can manage without it negatively affecting me. But it is worth noting that discomfort or anger are not inherently unsafe.
Stay tuned. Next time I’ll get to your question about growth-facilitating and growth-impeding boundaries, and I’ll also discuss ways to respond to impasses like the ones you mentioned.
Comments