I could write a book about boundaries. Oh wait! Someone already did. I read the book several years ago, desperate for help.

In a nutshell, Boundaries, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, teaches that people have boundaries, just as surely as property does.¹ Property boundaries mark where one parcel ends and another begins. Personal boundaries mark where one person ends and another begins.

People dispute property boundaries all the time. People challenge personal boundaries too. Typically, the biggest disputes over personal boundaries involve two types of people:

• those who run roughshod over the boundaries of others;
• those who let others run roughshod over them, ignoring any boundary they set.

When I read Boundaries, I finished the book still perplexed. According to everything Cloud and Townsend described, I should have been in a good place, boundary-wise. It was my heart’s desire and my practice to honor other people’s boundaries. I also sought to establish healthy limits and was not easily guilted or coerced to let others mow them down.

Yet something alarming had begun to happen: I would set a healthy boundary. I would identify it clearly and with kindness: “This is what I can do, and will do gladly. This, in good conscience, I cannot.” When tested, I maintained the boundary consistently. But my boundaries were not being honored.

In every case, the boundary involved a major issue, and a spiritual one. The line drawn marked a place I could not go beyond and still remain obedient to God. But people who should have loudly encouraged my choice to follow God never stopped pushing against it. I faced instant and unrelenting pressure to recant – not just to move my boundary an inch or two, but to renounce it entirely. To stand where God had told me to stand, I had to exert an enormous amount of effort for a very long time.

According to the Boundaries book, that should not have happened. People tend to honor the boundaries of those who maintain them consistently. The boundaries may be tested immediately. But when they hold firm, the testers typically move on to people whose boundaries they can shift at will.

“Why is this happening?” I asked the Lord. At last, I began to see:

The refusal to honor my boundaries hinged on the view of adulthood, in general, and womanhood, in particular, in the church culture in which I lived.

Adulthood described

In his book, Changes That Heal, Henry Cloud describes adulthood as a place of freedom, authority and “eye-to-eye equality” with other adults. Adults have freedom:

• to make their own decisions without permission from others;
• to evaluate and judge their own performance;
• to choose their own values and opinions;
• to disagree with others freely;
• to enjoy sexual relations with an equal spouse.²

Adults also have freedom to give up rights and serve others in submission. Cloud wrote:

When we submit in love, we are displaying our freedom; if we submit in compliance, it is not true submission. It’s slavery.

Does that statement grab you like it did me? Reread it. Let it sink in.

Having substantial freedoms gives adults great authority. With freedom and authority comes a weighty responsibility. As adults, we’re accountable to God for every choice we make.

Certainly, we’re not to live as islands. We’re to give and receive wise counsel, to exhort and confront one another in love. But “adults don’t need ‘permission’ from some other person to think, feel, or act.” Rather, adults answer directly to God.

Children, by contrast, relate to adults in a one-down/one-up relationship. Children need permission to make important decisions. If a child makes a choice the parents think unwise, they have the authority to intervene. In fact, if they see their child doing something harmful and don’t take action, they’re accountable. If they say “no,” but the child persists, the parents have a responsibility to discipline and correct.

“Becoming an adult is the process of moving out of ‘one-up/one-down’ relationship and into a peer relationship to other adults.”

Remaining “one-down” in relationships means “looking up to other adults for parental functions,” such as thinking for us, telling us how to live and what to believe.

We miss the important passage into full adulthood if we grow up physically, yet remain “one-down” in key relationships.

Adulthood denied

In every case where people have pushed relentlessly against my boundaries, they denied my adulthood. They saw themselves in a parental, one-up role in my life.

If they had counted me an adult, they would not have tried to impose their will onto my choices. They might have spoken up to give their perspective, but then would have left the matter between God and me.

Instead, they determined, “We will continue to try to make you comply. We will continue to punish you for resisting. We will not stop.” In their minds, they are ones to whom I must listen and from whom I must get permission – and I’m nothing more than a rebellious child.

In every case where people have pushed relentlessly against my boundaries, they counted themselves one-up to me spiritually.

And mine is not an isolated case. Church cultures built on hierarchy and celebrity cast people in static, one-up, one-down roles. It’s rare there to be able to relate adult-to-adult.

Mystery solved

I had learned much. Yet a mystery still remained.

I was immersed in such a church culture from birth. So why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied?

I pondered and prayed over that question for a long time before I realized the answer lay in facing what I had not seen in me.

Though I could not easily be coerced, I could be conned. Especially, I could be conned by people I trusted, in a system I believed to reflect God’s will and ways.

I could be misled by skewed teachings about women – teachings presented as Biblical, and even Gospel. Such teachings were pervasive in my church culture. They fooled me into thinking I was being counted an adult, when the opposite was true. They affirmed me as “mature” each time I agreed to being treated as a perennial child.

I could be taken in by self-absorbed people – who presented as godly Christians. They could ingratiate themselves to me, completely fool me as to their character and motives, and routinely breach my boundaries without my ever knowing it.

The seeds of all that misplaced trust were planted in me in childhood, by key people I should have been able to trust. Long after I grew up, I remained blind to the many ways I was manipulated, exploited, deceived.

But then a day came when those who had used me to get what they wanted began to want what I knew opposed God’s will. When I politely declined to go along, the pressuring started.

The more I chose integrity over compliance, the angrier they became. The more they punished me, the more bewildered I grew.

And then I realized: They did not see me, and were not treating me, as an adult.

And later I saw: They never had. All those years when I had thought I was maintaining healthy boundaries, I was doing what I had been trained to do – responding to other adults as if I were a parent-pleasing child.

The “shift” happened when they could no longer elicit this response by finessing me, and tried to do so by force.

Ah, but the Lord Jesus has never failed me nor forsaken me. And he has accomplished the opposite.

• He who came as a baby and grew to maturity has showed me: He bucked a religious system rather than disobey God the Father.
• He who died and rose again has reminded me: He made the way for us to be born again, not in order to keep us babes, but to grow us up in him.
• He who lives within us by his Spirit has taught me: He connects us and protects us as we learn the forgotten key he gave us. That is, with one mind and heart, we practice loving one-anothering.

And so my battered boundaries set me on a quest to embrace adulthood and, ever more clearly, to see.

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“Case of the Battered Boundaries” is adapted from What About Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé, © 2013, 2021. The original version of this post was published Dec. 3, 2014.

Also referenced: Boundaries, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend (Zondervan, © 1992, 2017).

Image by RitaE from Pixabay

What about women – and adulthood?

• Adulthood and the church that rejects it
• The forgotten key: Loving one-anothering
• Bucking the system: Shunning, submission and Jesus
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now

Other related posts

• Masters of misdirection
• I choose light

Footnotes

1. Henry Cloud has taught important truths about boundaries and adulthood. Lately, he has also taught about spiritual abuse. Yet Henry Cloud maintains convoluted and lucrative relationships with abusive celebrity pastors. In telling my story, I’ve credited people whose words have helped me see something important in a new light. That does not mean I agree with, or endorse, everything they have done and taught. See my post, “The people I quote.” ↩︎
2. Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal (Zondervan, 1990, 1992) Mobipocket Edition March 2009. All quotations under the heading, “Adulthood described,” are from this source. ↩︎