How Good Are Your Boundaries?
Saying it, holding it, and not turning it into a fight
Boundaries is a new word for something psychologists have studied since the seventies under a duller name: assertiveness, defined as the middle path between giving your position away and taking somebody else's. The reason it needs three separate measurements is that most people are good at one part and fail at another. Saying the thing is one skill. Still meaning it forty minutes later when somebody is disappointed is a completely different one. And doing both without it becoming a confrontation is a third.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about the people it is hardest with - family, a partner, a manager - rather than about strangers. Boundaries are easy with people whose opinion you do not need.
What it measures
The three parts of holding a position. Saying is whether the limit gets voiced at all. Holding is whether it survives contact with someone's disappointment. Keeping it clean is whether you can do it without hostility, which is the part that separates assertiveness from aggression and is the reason the two should never have been confused.
Based on: Assertiveness research (Rathus, 1973)
Possible results
Saying it
Whether the limit gets voiced at all.
Holding it
Whether it survives someone being disappointed.
Keeping it clean
Doing it without hostility.
Common questions
How is this different from the people-pleasing test?
That one is about motive - why you put other people first, and what it costs you internally. This one is about mechanics: whether the sentence gets said, whether it survives, and whether it lands as a limit or as an attack. They overlap at one point, the difficulty of refusing, and separate everywhere else. Plenty of people who are not people-pleasers at all still have a low third bar, because saying no calmly is a skill rather than a disposition.
Why do I feel guilty after setting a boundary?
Because the discomfort is a response to someone else's disappointment, and that response does not check whether you were right. It arrives the same way regardless of whether the limit was reasonable, which is precisely why it is such a poor guide to whether to hold it. The practically useful fact is that it is short: the peak is in the first minutes and it fades within the hour, so the question is never whether you can tolerate it forever but whether you can tolerate it until dinner.
Is there such a thing as too many boundaries?
Yes, and it shows up in the third bar rather than the second. A limit is a piece of information about what you can do; a wall is a refusal to be involved, and the two use identical words. The distinguishing question is whether the other person is left with something - an alternative, a time when you can, or simply the sense that they are still welcome to ask. Relationships survive a great many nos. What they do not survive is being unable to make a request.
Sources
- Rathus, S. A. (1973). A 30-item schedule for assessing assertive behavior. Behavior Therapy.
An honest note Boundaries is a popular term rather than a research construct, and there is no validated scale for it. What there is, and what this test is built on, is fifty years of work on assertiveness - which was defined precisely to distinguish three things that get confused: passivity, where your position is given away; aggression, where somebody else's is taken; and assertiveness in the middle. The three bars here are an adaptation of that idea and not a measurement of it. Two honest limits. This is self-report about how you behave, and behaviour is exactly the thing people describe least accurately about themselves - your view and the view of someone who lives with you would not match. And how assertive it is reasonable to be varies enormously by culture, by workplace and by how much power you actually have in a relationship, so a low score can be an accurate reading of a situation rather than a deficiency in you.