Where to Draw the Line: How to Set Healthy Boundaries Every Day - Softcover

Katherine, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684868067 ISBN 13: 9780684868066

Publisher: Fireside, 2000

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of the perennial favorite Boundaries, Where to Draw the Line is a practical guide to establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries in many different situations.

With every encounter, we either demonstrate that we’ll protect what we value or that we’ll give ourselves away. Healthy boundaries preserve our integrity. Unlike defenses, which isolate us from our true selves and from those we love, boundaries filter out harm.

This book provides the tools and insights needed to create boundaries so that we can allow time and energy for the things that matter—and helps break down limiting defenses that stunt personal growth. Focusing on every facet of daily life—from friendships and sexual relationships to dress and appearance to money, food, and psychotherapy—Katherine presents case studies highlighting the ways in which individuals violate their own boundaries or let other people breach them. Using real-life examples, from self-sacrificing mothers to obsessive neat freaks, she offers specific advice on making choices that balance one’s own needs with the needs of others.

Boundaries are the unseen structures that support healthy, productive lives. Where to Draw the Line shows readers how to strengthen them and hold them in place every day.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Katherine, now retired from her forty years as a psychotherapist, is a screenwriter, ghost writer, and National Park ranger. She is the author of numerous titles, including Boundaries, Where to Draw the Line, The Yesterday Doctor, and Stalking Yosemite.

Reviews

The premise here is that people all have many demands on their time and that by setting boundaries they may protect their time and energy for the things that matter most. Being in complete agreement with this idea, the first thing this reviewer should say is that she doesn't have the time to read a whole book about setting boundaries. Although important, this topic could have been adequately covered as a couple of chapters in a larger book on life management. Mental health counselor Katherine (Boundaries) discusses setting boundaries with friends, relatives, lovers, and exes. Other reasonable topics include anger, intimacy, sex, and divorce. Among the more frivolous chapters are those covering tidiness, food, Internet, and therapist boundaries. The author does give helpful examples of each type of boundary, with advice on where to draw the line. The topics seem so specialized, though, that audience appeal is limited. Purchase is warranted only for extensive self-help collections.AKathy Ingels Helmond, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: What Are Boundaries?

Pause a moment. Stand on the earth and sense the spiral of your life. You have not come to this place by chance. All your choices have brought you here.

You created this life by the people you let in and the people you shut out, by giving your time to the quests that matter and by letting hours trickle toward lesser goals, through the pursuits to which you gave your energy, by the pressures to which you gave heed.

Every decision you've ever made, step by step, brought you to this pass. In short, your boundaries -- or your defenses -- created a corridor through which your life moved.

What is a boundary? A boundary is a limit that promotes integrity. At the most elemental level, your skin marks your physical limits. If it is ripped, the integrity of your body is threatened. Your cells hold their shape because a membrane contains them. Your nerves are sheathed. Your brain is protected by blood and bone.

Thousands of other boundaries might also be yours, protecting every treasured aspect of your life -- your relationships, your time, your home, the way you do things, your children, your priorities, your health, and your money. These boundaries are unseen, held in place by your decisions and actions.

A boundary is a limit. By the limits you set, you protect the integrity of your day, your energy and spirit, the health of your relationships, the pursuits of your heart. Each day is shaped by your choices. When you violate your own boundaries or let another violate them, stuffing spills out of your life.

A boundary is like a membrane that keeps an organism intact. It lets positive things through. It keeps harmful things out. In this way it operates quite differently from a defense, which indiscriminately keeps things out.

Boundaries provide a clear moral compass. They keep us on track. They protect the important, tender parts of ourselves.

Look at the parts of your life that work, that have integrity. This wholeness comes from the limits you have set to protect them.

Any part of your life that is not working can be improved by boundaries. Whether the organism is you, your body, your health, a friendship, your marriage, your work, or your energy, its integrity can be strengthened by boundaries.

This book is a boundary handbook. It can help you discover the walls that are missing as well as rules or customs that confine you to one place, preventing you from occupying the wider spaces. It will also expose defenses that you may have erected in place of healthy boundaries -- defenses that may do a lot of harm to you and your relationships.

We all make constant decisions about how to use this minute and that minute, whether to say yes or no to that request, whether to respond to a friend's need or rest a bit. It's the little decisions that can use up our lives, that can either support or sabotage our larger mission.

This book is about how to handle the daily demands of life in a way that protects your time and energy for the things that matter. It can help you to be clearer about what to include and what to leave out, so that you can fill the spaces of your life with the people, activities, and pursuits that are truly yours.

You are the only one who can change your life.

Copyright © 2000 by Anne Katherine, M.A.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fireside
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684868067
• ISBN 13: 9780684868066
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288