About boundaries

I like Ethiopian food on occasion, but Ill take pita bread any day over that bread with the texture of the spongy bottom of a mushroom cap. 🍄

That doesnt injera my feelings cuz i have boundaries!

And some boundaries are going to be nebulous. A therapist may agree to between session e-mailing and then find the client abuses the privilege to the point of harassment. If the therapist takes the privilege away will the client think that the therapist has unfairly tightened the boundaries that he set in the first place?

If the therapist frames it that way -- as a privilege to be taken away -- then I'd say it's basically a parent-child relationship and there are bigger problems than whether emails are answered. In my experience this kind of punitive, infantilizing language is the default when it comes to boundaries in therapy.

I am a little uneasy with the notion of email as a privilege, and it's definitely not the way my therapy works. I use email regularly in my therapy. It's not a privilege- it's just a means of communication. I can't quite get my head around a construct that identifies one adult sending another an email as a privilege.

But my therapist and I are both probably a little unusually conscious of issues of authority and hierarchy generally and we both blanch at hierarchical therapy approaches.

My guess is the client could feel s/he was treated unfairly. Or maybe the therapist feels they were treated unfairly? The therapist could screw up and over extend themselves with emails or the client can screw up and email too much when they don't need to. That's part of the interpersonal skill, i think-negotiating boundaries and dealing with consequences. Everyone will be different in their views of 'unfair' 'hurt' 'wrong' etc. Using concepts like 'upset' certainly minimizes the concept of 'harm'. I think if the therapist has a healthy sense of self, they would be reasonable. OTOH, a lot of people have problems with people pleasing, taking care of others-therapists could be very prone to that. People overextend themselves worrying about making the other person happy (even when the person never asked) then start to resent it and later get angry and pull back.

A a lot of boundaries are going to be nebulous, probably more often than not so interpersonal factors are a big deal. Preventing harm is not people pleasing and trying to appease others. As was mentioned in a previous post, balance might be the key. But i totally think harmful does not mean 'not upsetting someone'; it's more like this: This blog post does a good job explaining some of this, at least for me it did...setting a boundary as a healthy thing to do vs using it to control and manipulate:

I can understand more why therapists are often recommended to be more clear about boundaries than outside of therapy, for one because it's easier to not harm someone. I still think it was more useful for me to do it the other way, which is more like relationships outside of therapy. Definitely more payoff in that sense. I think for some therapists, having automatic boundaries is just laziness.