Setting Boundaries or Delivering Ultimatums?

photo credit: glock­kid

What’s the dif­fer­ence between set­ting bound­aries and giv­ing ultimatums?

Often we believe that set­ting bound­aries requires ulti­ma­tums. In real­ity, ulti­ma­tums are most often about want­ing (or feel­ing the need) to con­trol some­one else’s behav­ior or atti­tude, often, “for their own good.”

Set­ting bound­aries, on the other hand, is about tak­ing care of our­selves. Our job is to clar­ify one from the other.

Before we can set the first bound­ary we must be clear about what we are respon­si­ble for and what we are not respon­si­ble for. If we are liv­ing with an alco­holic spouse, our job is not to get them to stop drink­ing. That is their busi­ness. Our job is to take care of our­self. In ana­lyz­ing what tak­ing care of our­selves means, we may see the need to leave the sit­u­a­tion, or ask them to leave. We then set the bound­ary — not by threat­en­ing or demand­ing, but by clearly and con­cisely stat­ing our inten­tions.
Per­son­ally I do not see a need for ulti­ma­tums because, as I said, they often come across as a threat, and end up being an empty threat when we don’t deliver. Ulti­ma­tums often require that we deliver con­se­quences we are not really pre­pared to deliver. For this rea­son, and oth­ers, they rarely work. Even when ulti­ma­tums give the appear­ance of work­ing, they may be being used as a decep­tive maneu­ver to get us off their back.

What does work is know­ing what our busi­ness is and attend­ing to that. We are not respon­si­ble for deliv­er­ing our fam­ily mem­bers to safe and happy lives; We are not respon­si­ble for their health; We are not respon­si­ble for what they do or don’t do. Try­ing to get them to be or do some­thing we think they should be or do only pre­vents us from being able to tend to our own life.

When we have clear bound­aries, we are respon­si­ble for our own safety, hap­pi­ness, and health. We don’t need oth­ers to change for us to take care of our­selves. We just decide what we need to do to take care of our­selves and then pro­ceed to do it. We may inform our loved ones of our inten­tions and needs, but we do so with­out blam­ing them or demand­ing that they change so we can feel bet­ter. We let the out­comes of their lives be theirs to decide, while we steer our own ships in the direc­tion that we want to go in.

By stay­ing clear about what our busi­ness is vs what their busi­ness is, we not only feel bet­ter all round, we are nicer to be around. No mat­ter what they are doing, because we are tak­ing care of our­selves, we are able to deal with it.