BPDFamily.com

I see there are lots of discussions about boundaries and the excellent article below helps to clarify the board's understanding of the term and ethos surrounding it.

https://bpdfamily.com/content/setting-boundaries

But I am still confused and I imagine others are too. One problem is that the term "values" is as vague and muddled as "boundaries" itself. Some people use the term as a synonym for "principles". Some people use the term as meaning "things that have value to me". Most people use it to mean first one thing and then the other, falling into the fallacy of equivocation and thus muddling their thinking further.

Another understanding of "boundaries" is the quite literal one of differentiation between persons - in this sense, a boundary is a line that marks that the separateness of Self and Other, that prevents one person from invading the individuality of another and serves to prevent enmeshment and engulfment.

I think the most useful understanding of "boundaries" is in terms of limits.

Our limits might:

1. Reflect our values-as-principles ("I will not have more than two alcoholic drinks because I believe that drunkenness is morally wrong") OR

2. Reflect our values-as-things-we-value ("I will not have more than two drinks because keeping a clear head is important to me"). OR

3. Represent how much we can withstand ("I will not have more than two drinks because I get sick and clumsy and light-headed when I do"). OR

4. Serve to delineate the individuation of self and other ("It is not my partner's place to tell me how many drinks to have - just because they choose to stick to two drinks doesn't mean I have to").

All of these things are boundaries and all of them are important, but there doesn't seem to be any one way of capturing them all without mixing them up.

I think a problem is that the term "boundaries" is inherently ambiguous - it is an umbrella term for a number of actually quite different things ("limits" shares that inherent ambiguity).

However, I do fear that the emphasis on "values" risks causing confusion of a different sort - if members take this to mean values-as-principles then they risk blurring boundaries in the line-between-self-and-other sense by thinking that they should require their pwBPD to act in ways that are consisent with their (the member's) principles instead of their (the pwBPD's) own.

I have briefly fallen into all of the above traps myself and I'm a Philosophy grad, so, for people with little experience of deconstructing and disambiguating, it must be even more confusing.

Regardless of the terms used, I think the most important thing is to remember and  emphasise is that our boundaries are about us and not our pwBPD.