273emotional home somewhere. No matter how caustic the criti-
cism, or how severe the rejection of the one we’re in conflict
with, we aren’t alone. And that makes all the difference in the
world in boundary setting.
Step #4: Treasuring Our Treasures
After you feel safe being around people who believe that
grace and truth are good (John 1:17), your values will start to
change. You will begin to see that taking responsibility for your-
self is healthy, and you will begin to understand that taking
responsibility for other adults is destructive.
When people are treated as objects for long enough, they
see themselves as someone else’s property. They don’t value
self-stewardship because they relate to themselves the same way
that significant others have related to them. Many people are
told over and over again that nurturing and maintaining their
souls is selfish and wrong. After a while, they develop a deep
conviction that this is true. And at that point, they place little
value on taking care of the feelings, talents, thoughts, attitudes,
behavior, body, and resources God entrusted to them.
This principle is taught in Scripture: “We love because he
first loved us” (1 John 4:19). In other words, we learn to be lov-
ing because we are loved. Grace must come from the outside for
us to be able to develop it inside. The opposite side of this truth
is that we can’t love when we aren’t loved. And, taking the think-
ing further, we can’t value or treasure our souls when they
haven’t been valued or treasured.
This is a key principle. Our basic sense of ourselves, of what is
real and true about us, comes from our significant, primary rela-
tionships. That’s why many people who were unloved in childhood
can be inundated by caring people in their adult years, yet not be
able to shake a deep sense of being worthless and unloveable, no
matter how much people try to show them their loveability.
Helen’s father sexually abused her in her early years. She
was terribly traumatized by the molestation, but tried to keep
the secret and protect the family from being upset. By her
How to Measure Success with Boundaries