In my last post, I defined personal boundaries and explored their importance to our health and well-being, also looking at ways people struggle with developing and maintaining boundaries. In this post, I discuss key factors I feel are most at play when clients find themselves unable to establish and/or maintain boundaries, or struggle with knowing how or when to be flexible with the boundaries they have established. I conclude with a short discussion of the way I work with clients to strengthen ‘boundary skills’.

One of the issues I often see in my work as a therapist is difficulties with setting personal boundaries. The problem can be either a failure or inability to set boundaries or maintain our boundaries in a reasonable way once we have set them. Since boundaries are central to our wellbeing and safety (both emotionally and physically), this ability to create and sustain them is important.