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Boundaries are really important – important in culture, in church, in relationships and particularly in marriages. As important as they are, they are often misunderstood. The Writings for the New Church teach a lot about boundaries. Honoring boundaries can make a powerful difference in relationships. Macroboundaries are the boundaries that everybody knows about. Macroboundaries are boundary violations against the Ten Commandments, violations against a person’s body or external life. Some examples: physical violence, cruelty, lying, humiliating behaviors or words, sarcasm, teasing, name calling, gossiping, triangulation, belittling or ridicule. We know that infringing on macroboundaries is wrong. Microboundaries are more subtle. Microboundaries are violated when someone trespasses on your internal state. Your internal state is the realm of consciousness, the workings of our mind. The internal state is what the whole New Christian Church is about. The New Church is about refining our pattern of thinking, feeling, and behavior that leads to salvation. The Lord loves us and wants us to grow and become more spiritual.

When someone else talks about our internal state there is immediately a sense of being on guard and a sense of possible attack. In many cases, especially when couples get to the stage of seeking counseling, it’s an actual attack. It’s an attack upon that person’s sense of self–life and autonomy.

Our internal state, particularly thoughts and feelings, the Writings for the New Church say, are governed by particular influx. Particular influx is influx that comes through spirits, both good and not so good. You don’t have control over which ones you get at any given moment.

If somebody else begins to talk about your internal state as though you could or should have control over it, or as though you could or should have the internal state that this person wants you to have or thinks you should have, there’s a problem. Then, whatever the problem is between the couple or in the relationship, whatever the content of it is, is no longer the issue. The new issue is control. It’s a power struggle. The power struggle of who is in charge of me, you or me? The condition that is the most supremely destructive of any relationship is love of dominion, control.

Types of Microboundaries: Microboundaries are rarely articulated, and at the same time familiar to many people. Here are a few I have identified:

Feelings
Your feelings are known to you alone. Others may speculate about your feelings, they may try to read your mind, or your body language, but they can’t know them. In a relationship, if you talk about someone’s feelings as though you have any authority about them, as you know what they are and what they should or could be, you’re in trouble. Whatever the content you were talking about, when that starts happening the content isn’t the issue anymore. It is now a battleground for the power struggle, the struggle to be you.

Intentions, Desires and Motives
Intentions for future behavior, desires for present behavior, and motives for past behavior are all internal states. In fact, the Writings for the New Church say we can hardly know our intention on any given deed or word. How can someone else claim to know them if we don’t know them? Intention and changing intention is the Lord’s business. It’s His to change as we do the spiritual work of personal growth. Our intentions are often mixed. Our feelings are often mixed. In relationships, we don’t like people to be that complex, do we? We don’t want their feelings to be mixed about us. We want them to be simple and clean and clear. Then we become lazy. We think, “I know who you are. I got you pegged. I can relate to you just the way you are.” If a wife or a husband expects a partner to always be the same as he or she was on the day of their wedding, it’s not going to work.

Thoughts, Opinions and Belief
You can’t know another person’s thoughts, so you can’t talk about another person’s thoughts, opinions and beliefs. They change every minute anyway. You can talk about actions and your own thoughts, opinions, beliefs. You can talk about other people’s actions because they are observable, right? You can say to your partner, “I don’t like it when you do or say x.” You can say that. You can’t say, “and I know that when you did ‘x’ you really did it to get back at me.”

Family of Origin
Another microboundary is your experience of your family of origin. You cannot talk about your partner’s family of origin without getting into some kind of trouble. Why would that be a problem when you could think that his or her family of origin is observable, right? Of course, the thing that most often gets talked about our family of origin with a partner or another person is the aspects of our family of origin that wounded us. So then the other person responds in a way that somehow says to us that he or she knows better, or that we shouldn’t have that feeling or reaction, or that mom really isn’t like that, or that dad really isn’t like that or you really are just like your mother or your father. You get in trouble. Talking about a family of origin you didn’t grow up in is not a good idea.

Your Experience of Your Body
Despite appearances, your experience of your body is an internal state. It took me ten years of marriage before I realized it wasn’t healthy for me to say to my wife, “Hey, why don’t you take an aspirin if you have a headache?” Why wouldn’t she take an aspirin for her headache when I know that aspirin helps mine? It makes perfect sense, right? Why wouldn’t you do what works? The assumption is that her biology is the same as mine. You know some people just can’t tolerate aspirin. It makes their stomachs hurt, it burns, and it doesn’t work anyway, so why would they take it? I learned to respect a person’s own experience of his or her body.

Essential Self
These boundaries are around our essential self. There may be more. The Lord works to protect the self that comes to love Him through the process of spiritual growth. We have a right to our self and our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and intentions. We are responsible for our actions. We have control over our behavior. The whole spiritual growth plan in the New Church is about behavior. You can change behavior because you can control your behavior, and words are behavior. You can always change your behavior no matter how much you say you can’t. It’s not easy, but you can do it. We cannot control others’ behavior, nor change their thoughts or feelings. The more you try to do it, the more you will be defeated.

Limits of Power
In a relationship, you have to know the limits of your power. What you can control is you. When microboundaries are intruded on we feel a range of emotions such as annoyance, irritation, resentment or anger, and the need to fight back. We feel the need to protect or defend the self. We intrude on others’ microboundaries when we claim to know about their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, or judge or attempt to change or control any of them. Almost any statement that you make to another that begins with the word “you” will cross a microboundary.

Genuine Love
The essentials of genuine love that the Writings for the New Church describe are twofold. One, to love another outside of self, outside of the boundary that you have. Second, to wish to be conjoined with and render that person blessed. This is the definition of the Lord’s love for us, and it is the definition of love in any relationship, but particularly in marriage. We tend to be threatened when people really think differently than we do, especially if we are committed to them. We don’t want to be threatened, so we try to manipulate or coerce or encourage or cajole them to think or feel the same way as we do. When you do that, it simply drives them away.

Relationship Paradox
Here’s the paradox in relationships and in marriage; the more distant you allow yourselves to be, the more different you allow yourselves to be, the closer you can actually be! If you try to occupy the same spiritual space, autonomy issues are up and running and you’re out of there. If you allow for the autonomy and the individuality and the separateness, then the way you can be together can actually happen. Boundaries are critical to all our relationships, most significantly our marriage relationship. As we strive to respect the boundaries of the ones we love, we will find new freedom and new intimacy in our relationships.

by Mark Carlson
also published in Spirituality and Marriage issue of New Church Connection Magazine