20612. Boundaries and Your Self
S
arah heaved a long sigh. She’d been working on major bound-
ary issues in her therapy for a while now. She was seeing
progress in resolving responsibility conflicts with her parents, her
husband, and her kids. Yet today she introduced a new issue.
“I haven’t told you about this relationship before, though I
guess I should have. I have tremendous boundary problems
with this woman. She eats too much, and has an attacking
tongue. She’s undependable—lets me down all the time. And
she’s spent money of mine and hasn’t paid me back in years.”
“Why haven’t you mentioned her before?” I asked.
“Because she’s me,” Sarah replied.
Sarah was echoing the conflict most of us have. We learn
that boundaries are biblical. We begin setting limits on others.
We begin moving from taking too much responsibility to taking
just enough. But how do we begin to set limits on ourselves? As
Pogo Possum, cartoonist Walt Kelly’s popular swamp character,
says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
In this chapter, instead of looking at the control and manip-
ulation of others, we’ll be looking at our responsibility to control
our own bodies (1 Thess. 4:4). Instead of examining outer
boundary conflicts with other people, we will be looking at our
own internal boundary conflicts. This can get a little touchy. As
the disgruntled country church member told his pastor as he left
after the Sunday sermon, “You done stopped preachin’, and you
done started meddlin’!”