Setting Boundaries with Outlaws! - Leadership Masterworks

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[ This is Part 2 of a 3 Part Series; Part 1 is here: Part 3, here ]

We Still Haven’t Established Who the Outlaws Are

There is a particular kind of family gathering that begins long before anyone arrives. The invitations have been sent. The menu is planned. The children are excited to see their grandparents, someone has volunteered to bring dessert, and someone else has already called twice to make sure everyone knows what time dinner begins. Everything seems to be going well.

Then the telephone rings.

Your mother wants to know why your family is not coming a day earlier. You explain that the children have school and that you and your spouse have already made arrangements. She reminds you that she will not be around forever. You tell her you understand, but you cannot change the plans. She becomes quiet.

You know that silence. You have heard it before.

Then comes the sentence: “You know, your brother never has a problem making time for us.”

By the time you hang up, you feel guilty, frustrated, and angry. You turn to your spouse and announce, “We need to set some boundaries with your in-laws!”

Your spouse looks at you. “My in-laws?”

You think for a moment. “Oh. Right.”

Welcome to Setting Boundaries with Outlaws! Before we go any further, however, we need to establish something important:

We still haven’t established who the outlaws are.

They may be your parents or your spouse’s parents. They may be adult children, siblings, grandparents, or another relative who has made family life unnecessarily difficult. There is also the uncomfortable possibility that the outlaw might be us. That possibility deserves more than a passing smile because it is remarkably easy to recognize unreasonable behavior when somebody else is responsible for it. We are often considerably less enthusiastic about examining our own conduct with the same precision.

A mother may believe she is expressing concern when she is actually using guilt to obtain compliance. A married son may believe he is protecting his household when he is actually punishing his parents for disagreeing with him. A father may call his financial involvement generosity while quietly expecting the money to purchase influence. An adult daughter may describe her mother’s disappointment as manipulation simply because she does not want to feel uncomfortable saying no.

Sometimes the wrongdoing is unmistakable. Sometimes several people are contributing to the conflict in different ways. Sometimes one person bears considerably more responsibility than everyone else. Research on family estrangement gives us an interesting reason to begin carefully. In one study of 898 estranged parents and adult children, parents and children frequently gave different explanations for why the relationship had broken down. Parents more often attributed the estrangement to their children’s relationships or sense of entitlement, while adult children more often pointed to parental behavior or feeling unsupported and unaccepted. Parents were also more likely to say they did not know why the estrangement had occurred.[1]

That research cannot tell us whose explanation was correct in any particular family. It tells us something else that matters enormously: two people can inhabit the same family history and construct remarkably different explanations of what happened.

That is why we begin with reality rather than allegiance. Truth does not require us to distribute blame equally, and refusing to choose sides prematurely does not require us to pretend everybody bears the same responsibility.

Fairness does not require equal blame. Truth requires accurate responsibility.

Boundaries Aren’t the Destination

The language of boundaries has become common in conversations about relationships, and that can be helpful. A boundary can help us understand where one person’s responsibility ends and another person’s begins. It can clarify authority, protect children, prevent generosity from becoming control, and keep compassion from becoming endless rescue.

Yet boundaries can also become an appealing way to give psychological or spiritual legitimacy to something we already wanted to do. We can call avoidance a boundary, resentment a boundary, punishment a boundary. We can even use the language of boundaries to protect ourselves from correction. That is why we need to establish our destination before deciding where to build the fence.

Boundaries aren’t the destination. Faithful love is.

Jesus did not summarize God’s law as protecting ourselves from difficult people. He taught us to love God and love our neighbor. Love, however, does not mean surrendering every responsibility God has entrusted to us. Sometimes love welcomes and sometimes it refuses. Sometimes love gives generously, while at other times it stops financing something harmful. Sometimes love drives Dad to another medical appointment even though Dad remains difficult, and sometimes love says, “Dad, I love you, but you may not speak to my wife that way in our home.”

The boundary does not tell us what love is. God does. The boundary simply helps us faithfully steward where God has placed responsibility, authority, and care.

Paul gives us a remarkable picture in Galatians 6. In verse 2 he writes, “Carry one another’s burdens,” and only three verses later he says, “For each one should carry his own load.” Those commands belong together. We are called to help carry what has become too heavy for another person without continually taking from another person what God requires that person to carry.

Carry what love requires you to carry. Do not take from another person what God requires them to carry.

That is not contradiction. It is rightly ordered love.

Start With Reality, Not Labels

Before we call someone controlling, toxic, narcissistic, abusive, manipulative, or dysfunctional, we should slow down long enough to identify what the person is actually doing. Labels can sometimes describe reality. They can also prevent us from examining it.

“My mother is manipulative” tells us considerably less than, “When I tell my mother we cannot come for dinner, she stops speaking to me for several days and tells other family members that my wife is keeping me away from her.” Now we have conduct we can examine. Likewise, “My daughter is disrespectful” tells us less than, “My daughter interrupts me, calls me names when we disagree, and has twice threatened to prevent me from seeing the grandchildren unless I give her money.” Again, now we have something to examine.

This distinction matters because conflict itself does not establish dysfunction. Research involving 158 families and 474 parents and adult children found that tensions in adult parent-child relationships are normal. Relationship-centered tensions were associated with lower solidarity and greater ambivalence, and subsequent work found that constructive approaches to conflict were associated with better relationship quality while destructive and avoidant approaches were associated with poorer quality.[2]

Scripture gives us a much older reason to examine carefully before reaching judgment. Proverbs 18:13 warns against answering before listening, and verse 17 reminds us that the first account can appear right until another person examines it. So rather than beginning with Who is toxic?, we might ask a more revealing question:

What happens in this family when someone disagrees, says no, raises a concern, disappoints another person, or tells an uncomfortable truth?

Can the concern be discussed? Can someone say no without retaliation? Can Dad be corrected without everyone spending the next week paying for it? Can Mom express disappointment without using that disappointment to control the decision? Can adult children receive counsel without treating every suggestion as interference? Can the married couple be challenged without declaring that their “boundary” has been violated?

Those questions tell us considerably more about family health than the mere existence of disagreement. The first responsibility in a difficult family relationship is not to identify the villain. It is to understand the truth.

Five Questions Before We Build a Boundary

A useful boundary begins with at least five questions: What responsibility belongs to me? What responsibility belongs to you? What authority actually belongs to each of us? What access is appropriate in light of the relationship and demonstrated trust? What does love require of me now?

Those questions prevent us from treating boundaries as a way of controlling other people’s behavior. Suppose Mom repeatedly calls during dinner. We can ask her not to call then, silence the phone, and return the call later. We cannot establish a boundary requiring Mom not to feel hurt about it. Her feelings belong to her; our manner of communicating with her belongs to us.

Suppose an adult son repeatedly asks his parents for money because he spends more than he earns. His parents cannot force him to become financially responsible, but they can decide whether they will continue financing the pattern. Their money belongs to their stewardship. His spending belongs to his.

Suppose Dad repeatedly criticizes his daughter-in-law in his son’s presence. The son cannot make his father like his wife, but he can decide whether he will remain silent while his wife is demeaned.

This leads to a distinction that keeps boundaries from becoming merely intellectual:

A boundary can identify responsibility. It cannot fulfill responsibility.

Knowing that Mom’s emotions belong to Mom does not fulfill my responsibility to speak lovingly to her. Knowing that my son’s finances belong to him does not tell me whether love requires assistance in this particular crisis. Knowing that my father has no authority over my marriage does not fulfill my responsibility to honor him.

Truth discovered creates responsibility for truth applied.

What Belongs to Me?

This may be the most important boundary question because it keeps us from beginning with what everybody else needs to change. Jesus’ warning about the plank and the speck in Matthew 7 does not teach us to ignore another person’s wrongdoing. It teaches us to examine ourselves honestly before attempting to correct someone else. So before asking only, What are they doing to me?, we should ask, What am I doing?

Have I allowed my parents to mistreat my spouse because confronting them makes me uncomfortable? Have I expected my spouse to tolerate conduct from my family that I would never tolerate from theirs? Have I used my children as leverage against their grandparents? Have I used money to purchase influence over my adult children? Have I repeatedly rescued an adult child from consequences he is capable of carrying himself?

Perhaps I have withheld affection when someone disagreed with me. Perhaps I have called every uncomfortable conversation “toxic” because I do not want to hear something that might be true. Perhaps I have become so focused on establishing my boundaries that I have stopped asking whether I am loving anyone well. Those questions are uncomfortable. They are supposed to be.

Self-examination does not require us to accept every criticism. It requires us to be willing to discover when a criticism is true.

This is where the distinction between explanation and responsibility becomes especially important. We may eventually understand why Dad responds to disagreement with anger. We may learn something about his childhood, personality, fears, family history, or previous experiences. That understanding can increase compassion without making the behavior right.

Explanation is not exoneration.

Dad still owns what Dad does. So do we.

What Belongs to You?

There is another side to responsibility. Some people have spent much of their lives carrying things that never belonged to them. Mom is disappointed, so we assume we have done something wrong. Dad is angry, so everyone changes the plan. Our adult child has made another financial mess, so we quietly write another check. Our sibling refuses to help care for an aging parent, so we absorb every responsibility while resentment grows. Someone else has a problem, and somehow it becomes our emergency.

Compassion can make us vulnerable to taking responsibility for things that belong to someone else, and that is not always love. A person may genuinely suffer because of a decision we make without our decision being wrong.

Another person’s disappointment may deserve our compassion without establishing our guilt.

This is particularly important when guilt has become part of the family’s method of governing behavior: “If you really loved me…” “After everything I’ve done for you…” “Your sister never treats us this way.” “I guess we know where we stand now.”

Those statements may occasionally express genuine hurt. They may also be attempts to transfer responsibility. Feeling guilty does not prove that someone manipulated us, but feeling guilty also does not prove that we are guilty. Scripture, not the intensity of another person’s disappointment, establishes our moral responsibility.

Emotion is evidence that something is happening. It is not by itself evidence of what is true.

Love Does Not Create Unlimited Authority

Families often confuse love with authority. A mother may love her adult son deeply and still have no authority to govern his marriage. A father may possess decades of financial experience and still have no authority to determine how his married daughter and son-in-law spend every dollar. Grandparents may love their grandchildren profoundly and still not possess parental authority over them.

Likewise, a married couple does not acquire authority over everyone around them merely because they have established a household. Marriage does not authorize a husband to isolate his wife from loving parents. It does not authorize a wife to demand that her husband neglect an aging father. Parenthood does not give a couple permission to use access to grandchildren as a weapon whenever grandparents disagree with them.

Being responsible for something and possessing unlimited authority over everyone connected to it are not the same thing. We must be careful not to use God’s authority to enlarge our own. That requires humility on every side. We can advise without controlling, disagree without punishing, care without possessing, and protect without dominating.

Love, Forgiveness, Trust, Relationship, and Access Are Not Synonyms

This may be one of the most important distinctions in the entire article. I can love someone without giving him unlimited access to my household. I can forgive someone without pretending he has become trustworthy. I can honor my mother without giving her unrestricted access to our finances. I can care for an aging father without permitting him to verbally abuse my spouse. I can desire reconciliation without pretending reconciliation has already occurred.

These realities are related, but they are not identical.

Love is commanded. Forgiveness refuses revenge. Reconciliation requires relationship. Trust responds to trustworthiness. Access is stewarded.

Consider a grandparent who has repeatedly encouraged grandchildren to hide things from their parents. The parents may love the grandparent and refuse bitterness or personal vengeance. They may desire restoration and stand ready to receive genuine repentance. They may also decide that unsupervised childcare is no longer appropriate.

That need not be punishment. It may simply recognize reality. If trust is rebuilt through changed behavior, access may appropriately change again. A healthy boundary is not necessarily a permanent wall; sometimes it is a gate whose openness reflects the responsibilities involved and the reality that presently exists.

The question is not merely whether the gate is open or closed. The question is what reality warrants.

When Money Gets a Vote

Money has a remarkable ability to expose confused family boundaries. Financial assistance can be a beautiful expression of love. Parents may help a young couple survive unemployment. Adult children may support aging parents. Siblings may share caregiving expenses. Grandparents may generously help with education or a first home. Scripture speaks seriously about caring for family members with genuine needs.

Money can also become control.

Imagine a father who gives his married daughter and son-in-law a substantial down payment on a house. Everyone is grateful. Then Dad begins offering opinions about renovations. Soon he is questioning their vacations, and eventually he wants to know why they purchased a particular car. The gift has quietly acquired strings nobody discussed.

Dad may think, After what I gave them, surely I deserve some say.

No.

Generosity does not purchase governing authority over another adult household.

Now reverse the picture. A married son has a good income but repeatedly spends beyond his means. His parents have rescued him several times. When they finally say they will not provide more money without understanding his budget, he becomes angry. “I thought family helped family.”

Family should help family. That does not establish that Mom and Dad must finance irresponsibility.

Large-scale longitudinal research on parental financial assistance to young adults illustrates why simplistic conclusions are unhelpful. Using samples ranging from roughly 9,100 to 13,400 people, researchers found parental assistance associated with increased closeness to mothers and fathers. Its relationship to well-being was more complicated; assistance was also associated with increases in depressive symptoms in some circumstances, particularly among young adults already occupying adult social roles.[3]

The study does not tell us whether a particular check is wise, loving, enabling, necessary, or controlling. It tells us why parents gave money is not enough information. We need to ask what the money is accomplishing.

Generosity should not purchase control, and family love should not be used to demand the financing of irresponsibility.

Sometimes love writes the check. Sometimes love helps build the budget. Sometimes love says, “We will help you through this crisis.” Sometimes love says, “Dad, we love you. We have helped six times this year. We aren’t going to give you more money while you continue spending this way. We will sit down with you, look at the numbers, help you make a plan, and walk with you through it. But we aren’t going to keep funding the problem.”

That is not abandonment. It is an attempt to keep help from becoming part of the problem.

The checkbook does not determine which response is loving. Faithful stewardship does.

When the Children Become the Battleground

Few family disputes become emotionally charged as quickly as disagreements involving grandchildren. Grandparents often possess decades of parenting experience, and some of that wisdom can be enormously valuable. Experience, however, does not transfer parental authority.

Suppose Grandma believes her grandson needs more discipline. She may even be correct. She can appropriately raise the concern with his parents, offer wisdom, and pray. What she should not do is quietly tell the child, “Your mother is too strict. You can do that at Grandma’s house. Just don’t tell her.”

The problem is no longer the rule. Grandma has taught the child that affection gives her permission to undermine his parents and that secrecy is an acceptable solution to adult disagreement. The parents may need to change the conditions under which Grandma cares for the children.

Parents have responsibilities here too. A grandparent who expresses an unwelcome opinion is not automatically unsafe. A grandmother who says, “I’m concerned about what I’m seeing with Caleb” has not necessarily violated a boundary. Parents can become so defensive about their authority that nobody is permitted to tell them anything they do not want to hear. That is not healthy authority either.

A boundary should protect responsibility from inappropriate interference without protecting us from truth.

Children should never become pawns in an adult power struggle. Children should not be required to carry the cost of adult conflict.

When the Siblings Disagree About Mom and Dad

Aging parents often reveal family boundary problems that remained hidden while everyone was younger and healthier. Dad begins forgetting appointments. Mom can no longer safely drive. Bills go unpaid, and the refrigerator contains food that expired six months ago.

One sibling lives twelve minutes away and has been at Mom’s house five times this week. Another lives three states away and calls every Sunday. The distant sibling says, “Mom sounds fine to me.”

The caregiving sibling thinks, You have absolutely no idea.

Research involving 450 adult children in 214 families in which mothers had recently needed care found that providing care and perceiving that the mother favored a particular future caregiver were associated with greater sibling tension.[4] Again, the research does not decide who is right. It helps us see why these relationships become difficult.

People can love the same parent while having very different access to reality. The sibling carrying most of the daily responsibility may see deterioration the others do not see. The caregiving sibling may also become exhausted enough that fatigue affects judgment. Everyone needs humility.

The solution is not necessarily to divide every task equally. Geography, finances, health, work, and family responsibilities may make equal participation impossible. The goal is truthful participation. Who is doing what? What does Mom actually need? What can Dad still responsibly decide for himself? What assistance is required? Who has the capacity to provide it? Who is carrying a burden that has quietly become invisible to everybody else?

Family responsibility becomes dangerous when the person carrying the most is also expected to say the least.

When Honoring Our Parents Becomes Hard

The Fifth Commandment does not contain an exception for difficult parents. Neither does it say that honoring parents requires surrendering our marriage, tolerating abuse, financing irresponsibility, or giving parents authority God has not given them. Some adult children therefore face extraordinarily difficult Both/And responsibilities.

Dad genuinely needs transportation to medical appointments, and Dad also insults his daughter every time she takes him. Mom genuinely needs financial help, and Mom also repeatedly attempts to divide her son and daughter-in-law. The need is real. The wrongdoing is also real. One does not cancel the other.

Research with adult children helping older parents illustrates the tension. In one qualitative study, adult children described trying to balance respect for their parents’ autonomy with concerns about health and safety. They generally hesitated to override parental autonomy until they had clear evidence of danger or guidance from an authority figure.[5]

That is not a biblical rule, but it illustrates a reality many families know well: caring for an aging parent can require us to hold respect, responsibility, autonomy, safety, and love together. A couple may arrange transportation through another relative. Siblings may divide responsibilities. Professional caregivers may become necessary. Financial assistance may be structured in a way that meets a genuine need without creating inappropriate control.

Providing appropriate care does not necessarily require personally absorbing every harmful interaction. We should not use a parent’s wrongdoing to excuse neglect, and we should not use a parent’s needs to excuse wrongdoing.

That is what rightly ordered love can look like when love becomes expensive.

When the Family Has Learned to Stay Quiet

Some families have lived with destructive patterns for so long that nobody calls them destructive anymore. Everyone knows which subjects cannot be discussed. Everyone knows who must approve the plans. Everyone knows what happens when Dad becomes angry and how Mom reacts when someone tells her no. Everyone knows which sibling will be blamed when the gathering goes badly.

A newcomer to the family may be startled. “Why didn’t anybody say anything when he spoke to her that way?”

Someone shrugs. “That’s just Dad.”

Perhaps it is. That explains something. It does not exonerate him.

Over time, families can develop elaborate systems for managing one person’s reactions. People edit what they say, conceal problems, arrange events around anticipated anger, and stop raising concerns because experience has taught them what honesty costs. Eventually the family can appear peaceful because everyone has learned how to prevent an explosion.

That is not necessarily peace. It may simply mean fear has become efficient.

When maintaining family peace requires everyone to conceal reality, the family has not achieved peace. It has made truth too expensive.

Here we must be careful about whom we ask to fix the problem. The most accommodating family member is often the person carrying the greatest relational cost. The quiet daughter should not be required to become braver merely so everyone else can continue avoiding Dad. The daughter-in-law should not be sent alone to confront a mother-in-law whose own son has spent years refusing to address the problem. A child should never become responsible for managing an adult’s emotional reactions.

The wounded person may need to speak truth, and the rest of the family may need to make it safer for truth to be spoken. A family cannot become healthier by requiring its most vulnerable members to keep paying the price of everyone else’s comfort.

When Guilt Has Been Running the Family

Guilt deserves special attention because not all guilt is bad. Sometimes we feel guilty because we are guilty. If we have neglected our parents, lied to our spouse, manipulated our children, withheld care, or behaved selfishly, discomfort may be doing us a favor. We should repent.

Guilt can also become a method of family control: “If you cared about us, you would come.” “After everything we sacrificed…” “I guess your wife’s family matters more.” “Your father may not be here next Christmas.”

The difficulty is that statements like these may contain elements of truth. Our parents did sacrifice. Dad really will not be here forever. We may genuinely need to reconsider how much time we are giving them. The presence of truth inside a statement, however, does not automatically justify the way that truth is being used.

We therefore return to responsibility. What do I actually owe? What have I promised? What need exists? What competing responsibilities has God entrusted to me? What would love require if nobody were pressuring me?

We should repent of actual guilt without becoming governed by manufactured guilt.

Forgiveness Does Not Eliminate the Need for Truth

Christian families should be unusually good at forgiveness. We should also be unusually serious about repentance. Unfortunately, we sometimes use one to bypass the other.

A person causes harm, offers a vague apology, and then expects everyone to return immediately to the previous arrangement. “I said I was sorry. What more do you want?”

Perhaps what is needed is change.

Research on reconciliation offers useful corroboration. In a longitudinal study of 337 people who had recently been harmed by a relationship partner, conciliatory gestures such as apologies and offers of compensation were associated with faster forgiveness and reduced anger, in part through changes in how the injured person perceived the offender’s relationship value and likelihood of harming them again.[6]

More recent research examining parental apologies found another important distinction. Across three phases involving 288 adolescents, victim-centered apologies were associated with greater forgiveness and relationship satisfaction than defensive apologies or no apology.[7]

Consider the difference. “I’m sorry you were hurt. I was only trying to help.” That may express regret, but it may also carefully avoid acknowledging wrongdoing.

Compare it with: “I criticized you in front of the family. That was wrong. I embarrassed you and damaged our relationship. Will you forgive me? I want to handle my concerns differently.”

Now reality has entered the room.

Scripture takes that reality seriously. Biblical repentance is not merely feeling badly about consequences. Paul describes godly sorrow as producing repentance (2 Corinthians 7:10–11), and John the Baptist called people to “produce fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8 BSB).

An apology acknowledges the past. Repentance begins to change the future.

This is also why we should distinguish forgiveness, repentance, reconciliation, trust, and access carefully rather than collapsing them into one event. Christians differ on some theological questions concerning the precise relationship between repentance and interpersonal forgiveness, and we should not pretend those differences do not exist.

Yet Scripture plainly gives us responsibilities that remain even when restoration is incomplete. We are forbidden to pursue personal vengeance (Romans 12:19). We are commanded to love even enemies (Matthew 5:44), reject bitterness and malice (Ephesians 4:31), and cultivate a forgiving posture modeled on God’s mercy. Scripture also takes repentance, truth, correction, reconciliation, and changed conduct seriously.

We therefore should not tell an injured person that forgiving means pretending nothing happened, nor should we allow an injured person to use another’s sin as permanent permission for bitterness or revenge.

Forgiveness must never be used to make truth unnecessary.

Repentance Has Feet

Suppose Mom repeatedly criticizes her daughter-in-law. Her son finally addresses it. Mom cries. She explains that she never intended to hurt anyone and reminds him that she has always loved his wife. Perhaps all of that is true.

Then comes the real test: What happens the next time she disagrees with her daughter-in-law? Does she repeat the criticism, recruit another relative to deliver it, or complain that her son has become too sensitive? Or does she behave differently?

Repentance is more than correctly describing yesterday. It begins changing tomorrow. That does not require perfection. People learning new ways of relating will stumble. A mother who has spent thirty years expressing concern through criticism may not become perfectly gracious after one conversation, and we can extend patience toward someone who is genuinely trying to change.

There is nevertheless a meaningful difference between struggling to change and demanding that everyone else stop mentioning the problem.

Repentance does not require instant perfection. It does require a new direction.

The standard applies to all of us. Dad must repent when he has controlled. Mom must change when she has manipulated. A husband must act when his silence has left his wife unprotected. A wife must listen when her husband’s concern is legitimate. Adult children must take responsibility when repeated rescue has become a way of life. The wounded must guard against allowing a real wound to become permanent moral leverage.

Nobody gets a designated villain’s chair.

Trust Is Not Owed on Demand

Trust deserves special treatment because Christian families sometimes treat it as though withholding trust is itself unforgiving. It is not that simple. Trust concerns what we reasonably believe another person will do.

If someone has lied to me repeatedly, I may forgive him while reasonably recognizing that he has not yet demonstrated truthfulness. If Grandma has repeatedly disregarded the parents’ instructions, the parents may genuinely love and forgive her while concluding that unsupervised childcare is not presently wise. This is not a declaration that the person can never change. It is an acknowledgment that trust is connected to reality.

The research on conciliatory behavior is useful here because the injured participants responded not only to words but to information suggesting that the offender remained valuable as a relationship partner and was less likely to repeat the harm.[6] That makes intuitive sense.

“I won’t do it again” matters. Over time, not doing it again matters more.

Trust is not rebuilt by demanding that someone trust us. It is rebuilt by becoming increasingly trustworthy.

That places responsibility where it belongs. If I broke the trust, I should be less preoccupied with how quickly you restore it and more preoccupied with becoming the kind of person to whom trust can safely return.

When a Boundary Needs Consequences

A boundary that has no relationship to our actions can become little more than a repeated request.

“We’ve asked Dad ten times not to arrive unannounced.”

What happens when he arrives?

“We let him in because otherwise he’ll get upset.”

Then Dad has learned something. The actual family rule is not Call before visiting. The actual rule is Dad may visit whenever he wants if he is willing to become sufficiently upset.

Consequences need not be punitive. They simply make the boundary real. If Dad arrives unannounced, perhaps the family says warmly, “This isn’t a good time. Call us and we’ll find a time to get together.” If Grandma repeatedly encourages children to keep secrets from their parents, unsupervised visits may stop. If an adult child repeatedly fails to repay loans, additional loans may stop. If a relative becomes verbally abusive during telephone calls, the conversation may end when the abuse begins.

The purpose is not revenge. It is stewardship.

Consequences should ordinarily be proportionate to the conduct, connected to the responsibility being protected, and open to reconsideration when meaningful change occurs. Some conduct is serious enough that immediate protective action is necessary. Violence, credible threats, sexual abuse, child endangerment, and other dangerous conduct are not merely “boundary problems.” Safety, appropriate professional help, and where necessary civil authorities may need to take precedence over private attempts at family reconciliation.

Love does not require us to give someone repeated opportunities to do the same harm.

Neither should consequences become an excuse to punish someone indefinitely for conduct that has genuinely changed. The destination has not changed.

Faithful love.

Distance Is Not the Same as Healing

Sometimes distance is necessary. It may lower conflict, protect children, give a marriage room to recover, or interrupt a destructive pattern that has continued for years. Yet distance itself should not be confused with healing.

National longitudinal research offers an important perspective. Using U.S. data involving 8,495 mother-adult child relationships and 8,119 father-adult child relationships, researchers found that 6 percent reported a period of estrangement from mothers and 26 percent from fathers. Importantly, the majority later became unestranged in subsequent waves: 81 percent of maternal estrangements and 69 percent of paternal estrangements.[8]

Those numbers do not mean reconciliation is always possible or wise. They do show that estrangement is not necessarily a permanent state. Today’s distance does not inevitably dictate tomorrow’s relationship.

This is another place where family-systems research can provide a useful concept without becoming our authority. Bowen theory uses emotional cutoff to describe attempts to manage unresolved relational tension primarily through emotional or physical distance. A 2021 review examining 295 studies of Bowen’s broader concept of differentiation of self found substantial associations with psychological health and marital quality, while also emphasizing the shortage of longitudinal, causal, and intervention evidence in important areas.[9]

So we should be careful. Distance can stop an interaction. Distance cannot, by itself, heal a relationship. Sometimes distance creates conditions in which healing can begin. Sometimes the other person refuses to change. Sometimes a limited relationship becomes the most faithful relationship presently possible.

Our task is not to force closeness. Neither is it to make distance the measure of success.

When the Outlaws Are Us

By now, some readers have identified exactly who needs this article.

Before you send it to them, keep reading.

What if some of it belongs to you?

Have several family members described the same pattern in your behavior? Do people hesitate before telling you bad news? Does your adult child repeatedly say that you do not listen? Does your spouse become visibly tense when your parents call? Do your children know that disagreement with you will produce anger, silence, ridicule, or withdrawal? Do you routinely explain why every criticism of you is mistaken?

Have you made another person’s wrongdoing the permanent explanation for your own?

Perhaps everyone criticizing you is wrong. That is possible. It is also possible that corroboration deserves examination. Multiple people agreeing does not automatically establish truth, but it gives us reason to look carefully.

Knowing something about yourself because other people keep telling you is not necessarily self-awareness. Self-awareness begins when you are willing to examine whether what they are telling you is true.

The person most committed to truth should be the person least frightened by examination. A boundary should protect us from inappropriate control. It should never protect us from reality.

Nobody Gets Off the Hook

This is where the conversation about boundaries must eventually lead. We are not trying merely to help people establish better boundaries. We want something better than that.

We want Dad to repent. Mom to change. Husband to act. Wife to listen. Adult children to take responsibility. Siblings to stop hiding. The wounded to speak truth. The wrongdoer to repair what can be repaired. Everybody involved needs to learn how to love more faithfully.

A boundary may help us identify where responsibility lies. It may protect what has been entrusted to us, make wrongdoing more difficult to ignore, or stop us from continually rescuing someone from responsibilities that belong to them. A boundary cannot repent for us. It cannot forgive for us. It cannot make us tell the truth, listen well, or repair what we have damaged.

Boundaries aren’t the destination. Transformation is.

Even transformation serves something greater.

Faithful love.

The Physics of God

There is something fascinating about studying human relationships. Researchers observe hundreds and sometimes thousands of families. They measure relationship quality, follow marriages across years, compare adult children with their parents, study caregiving and sibling conflict, examine apologies and reconciliation, and investigate what happens when families become estranged.

Again and again, familiar patterns emerge. Constructive responses to conflict tend to travel with better relationships. Apologies that genuinely take responsibility function differently from defensive apologies. Conciliatory actions matter. Caregiving exposes hidden family tensions. Financial help can strengthen connection while producing complicated effects in other areas. Estrangement can interrupt a relationship without necessarily determining its permanent future.

We might smile and say, Huh. Apparently human beings flourish when they behave roughly according to the manufacturer’s specifications.

There is a reason reality keeps behaving this way.

God designed human beings, marriage, and families. He established responsibility and authority. He commands truth, love, forgiveness, repentance, care, humility, and justice. He tells us to carry one another’s burdens and tells each of us to carry our own load.

There are no maverick molecules.

Reality ultimately belongs to Him. Research does not establish Scripture’s authority. It can, however, become another corroboration of reality—human beings studying God’s world and repeatedly discovering that His design has consequences.

So our goal is not to discover a clever psychological technique that will finally make difficult relatives behave. We are trying to learn how to live faithfully inside the reality God created.

Sometimes that will mean drawing a boundary, and sometimes it will mean removing one we erected selfishly. Sometimes it will mean saying no, while at other times it will require sacrificing far more than we wanted to give. Sometimes we will need to confront someone we love, and sometimes we will need the humility to listen when someone we love confronts us.

Sometimes the door can open again because trust has slowly been rebuilt. Sometimes faithful love requires keeping the door closed while continuing to desire the person’s good. The boundary is not our master, and neither is the other person’s reaction.

God determines what love requires. Our responsibility is to faithfully steward what He has entrusted to us.

That is where healthy boundaries ultimately lead—not toward independence, control, winning, or even necessarily closeness, but toward faithfulness. Where truth, responsibility, repentance, forgiveness, and love are permitted to do their work, something else may begin.

Transformation.

Summary

Family boundaries are not primarily about keeping difficult people away from us. They are about faithfully stewarding responsibility, authority, love, truth, trust, and access. Sometimes that means saying yes. Sometimes it means saying no. Sometimes it means giving more than we expected to give, and sometimes it means refusing to continue carrying what God has given someone else to carry.

The difficult work is learning to distinguish what belongs to us from what belongs to someone else without using that distinction to escape our own responsibilities. We should examine conduct rather than rush to labels, listen before reaching conclusions, refuse both manufactured guilt and self-protective denial, honor family without surrendering responsibilities God has entrusted elsewhere, and remember that love does not give any of us unlimited authority over another person.

Forgiveness does not erase truth. Repentance must eventually develop feet. Trust is rebuilt through trustworthiness, not demanded as proof of forgiveness. Consequences can make a necessary boundary real without becoming revenge, and distance may sometimes protect a relationship without being mistaken for healing.

Most importantly, nobody gets the designated villain’s chair. Every person remains responsible before God for what belongs to him. The person who controls must repent. The person who manipulates must change. The person who has remained silent may need to speak. The person who has been wounded must resist bitterness and vengeance. The person who has enabled irresponsibility may need to stop rescuing. The person establishing the boundary must remain open to truth about his own heart.

Boundaries aren’t the destination. Faithful love is.

Five Coaching Questions

What is actually happening? If I remove labels such as controlling, toxic, selfish, or disrespectful, what specific conduct can I describe? Is this an occasional failure, a recurring pattern, or something serious enough to require immediate action?
What belongs to me? What responsibility has God actually entrusted to me in this relationship? What have I neglected, excused, enabled, controlled, or blamed on someone else?
What belongs to them? Am I carrying another person’s disappointment, finances, decisions, emotions, or consequences in a way that prevents that person from carrying responsibilities that properly belong to them?
What do love, trust, and appropriate access require now? Have I confused forgiveness with restored trust, love with unlimited access, or a boundary with punishment? What present arrangement is warranted by reality?
What must change next? If everyone else in this family remained exactly as they are, what truth do I already know that requires me to repent, act, speak, listen, forgive, stop rescuing, establish a boundary, remove an unnecessary boundary, or begin repairing what I have damaged?

Endnotes

Kristina M. Scharp and colleagues examined reasons for estrangement reported by 898 parents and adult children. The generations differed significantly in the reasons they gave; importantly, the study compared perspectives rather than adjudicating which party’s explanation was objectively correct.
Kira Birditt and colleagues studied 158 families comprising 474 parents and adult children. Their work found adult parent-child tensions to be normative and found constructive strategies associated with better relationship quality, whereas destructive and avoidant strategies were associated with poorer relationship quality.
Patrick Wightman and colleagues analyzed longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, with sample sizes ranging from 9,128 to 13,389 depending on outcome. Parental financial assistance was associated with increased closeness to parents; associations with psychological well-being were more complicated and varied according to adult social roles. The findings should not be interpreted as demonstrating that financial assistance itself is either healthy support or unhealthy dependence in a particular family.
J. Jill Suitor and colleagues examined 450 adult children nested within 214 later-life families in which mothers had recently required care. Providing care and perceptions that the mother preferred a particular future caregiver were associated with increased sibling tension.
A qualitative study of adult children assisting older parents explored the tension between respecting parental autonomy and protecting health and safety. Participants generally described hesitating to override parents’ autonomy without clear danger or external guidance. Because the study involved only 16 adult children, its value here is illustrative rather than broadly generalizable.
Michael McCullough and colleagues followed 337 people who had recently experienced an interpersonal harm. Conciliatory gestures, including apologies and offers of compensation, were associated with increased perceptions of the offender’s relationship value, reduced perceived exploitation risk, faster forgiveness, and reduced anger.
A 2025 multi-method, three-phase study involving 288 adolescents found that victim-centered parental apologies were associated with greater forgiveness and relationship satisfaction than defensive apologies or no apology. The population was adolescents rather than adult family relationships, so we use the finding narrowly as corroboration for the distinction between responsibility-taking and defensive apologies.
Rin Reczek and colleagues used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data to examine 8,495 mother-adult child and 8,119 father-adult child relationships. Six percent reported a period of maternal estrangement and 26 percent paternal estrangement. In subsequent waves, 81 percent of those estranged from mothers and 69 percent of those estranged from fathers became unestranged. These figures describe this study population and should not be interpreted to mean that reconciliation is always possible, safe, or desirable in a particular relationship.
María Calatrava and colleagues’ 2021 scoping review included 295 primary studies examining differentiation of self in Bowen Family Systems Theory. The review found substantial support for associations with psychological health and marital quality and positive associations with physical health and intergenerational relationships, while emphasizing limitations in longitudinal, causal, and intervention evidence.

Scripture for Further Study

Responsibility, self-examination, and burden-bearing: Psalm 139:23–24; Proverbs 18:13, 17; Matthew 7:3–5; Romans 14:10–12; Galatians 6:1–5; James 1:19–25.

Marriage, parents, and family responsibility: Genesis 2:18–25; Exodus 20:12; Matthew 15:3–6; Matthew 19:4–6; Ephesians 5:21–33; Ephesians 6:1–3; 1 Timothy 5:1–8, 16.

Truth, confrontation, and difficult conversations: Proverbs 15:1, 28; Proverbs 25:11–12; Matthew 18:15–17; Ephesians 4:15, 25–32; James 3:13–18; 2 Timothy 2:24–25.

Repentance and restoration: Psalm 51:1–17; Matthew 3:8; Matthew 5:23–24; Luke 17:3–4; 2 Corinthians 7:9–11; James 5:16; 1 John 1:8–9.

Forgiveness, mercy, and freedom from vengeance: Matthew 5:43–48; Matthew 6:12–15; Matthew 18:21–35; Romans 12:17–21; Ephesians 4:31–32; Colossians 3:12–14.

Care, protection, and justice: Psalm 82:3–4; Proverbs 22:3; Proverbs 31:8–9; Isaiah 1:17; Matthew 18:6; Romans 13:1–4.

Love and faithful relationship: Matthew 22:34–40; John 13:34–35; Romans 12:9–18; 1 Corinthians 13:4–7; Philippians 2:3–4; 1 John 3:16–18.

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