I’ve been thinking about boundaries for years. In discussions with other clinicians, clients and friends in my own life, in reading advice from others, and somehow it didn’t really feel like I was finding a map that helped me come into my relationship with myself enough to know what the right kind of boundaries would be right for me.  

In my bones it felt like that old AA saying was true: Clear is kind, unclear is unkind. But clear about what? Did I need others to behave in specific ways for me to feel emotionally safe enough or was that part more up to me? What about being courageous in how I talked to my loved ones? Did boundaries help make courage and vulnerability more possible? What about setting boundaries with myself? Is that the same kind of work inside as we do on the outside?

These questions had been floating around in my life and in many of my client’s lives for years. Then, a colleague of mine asked me to be on her podcast. I sat with Sue Marriott and Ann Kelley before recording and we chatted about what I might talk about on the show. They had asked me to be part of their podcast because of my history with teaching interpersonal neurobiology, but we hadn’t honed in on our subject matter yet.  We chatted about memory reconsolidation, grief, and how I had been thinking about psychological and containing boundary work inside my own life, as well as with my clients. Sue and Ann decided that the boundary work I described would be fun to chat about, and so in 2018 we recorded an episode on Therapist Uncensored called How Boundaries Actually Bring Us Closer Together.  

In 2021, an editor from New Harbinger approached me because she had heard a replay of that podcast. She wondered with me if I would be interested in turning my ideas about boundaries into a book.  

We were in the middle of a pandemic at that point, I had taken a sabbatical from my practice (IPNB Psychotherapy of Austin) in order to pursue more research and writing on the mentalization neural network (and surprise! teach my daughter first grade), and I began developing a psychological boundary practice based on that research. I had also been creating a containing boundary practice that was an interweaving of experiential work, mindfulness practices, neuroscience discoveries in self-compassion, and values work that was inspired by Brené Brown’s podcast. It was the episode where she was interviewing Jim Collins about finding value words. 

Alongside all this, for years in couples work I had been slowly growing a teaching of what I now call the six steps to setting an external boundary. The seeds for what has become the six steps were laid down for me by my mentor, Carol Middelberg, many years ago, and they have expanded through the years through discussions with clients and students.

In 2020, I teamed up with Therapy Wisdom and I created a training about helping the brain experience deeper safety through boundary work. I wove together the physical boundary work I had been doing with those who had been recovering from trauma, which was largely inspired by my training as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, together with the other three boundaries. This course for clinicians helped me solidify my thinking about how all of these boundaries are interwoven to increase self-trust and psychological safety.

So, when Jennye from New Harbinger came to me to ask if I was interested in writing a book about boundaries, I thought that it might be time to put all of these thoughts together in one place. I offered their team a map of a potential book and two years later the book is written (thanks to amazing editing help), and I am sending this thing out there in the hopes that it might help some people. Writing this book has helped me get more clear in my thinking and practices, and I do these practices regularly alongside any one else who reads and uses this book.  We are in this bumbly human thing together, and I’m so grateful to all of those who have helped me, taught me, challenged me, loved me, inspired me, invited me, and pushed me.