Glossary
Boundaries.
A boundary is a limit a person sets on what behavior they will accept from others, paired with what they will do if that limit is crossed. Despite how the word is used in everyday speech, a boundary is not a rule imposed on someone else; it is a statement about oneself.
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Definition
The therapy literature, going back at least to Henry Cloud and John Townsend's Boundaries (1992) and widely used since, treats boundaries as the personal limits that define where one person ends and another begins. A boundary describes one's own behavior, not someone else's. “I won't continue this conversation if you're yelling at me” is a boundary; “you have to stop yelling at me” is a demand. The distinction matters because the first is enforceable by the person setting it (they can leave the room); the second depends on the other person's cooperation.
Healthy boundaries include physical (what touch is acceptable), emotional (what one will and won't be drawn into), time (when one is and isn't available), financial (what one will and won't pay for), and relational (what one will and won't disclose, with whom). Boundaries are a function of selfhood, not of conflict; people with intact selves set them automatically, often without naming the act.
How the term gets weaponized
Two distortions are common in narcissistic dynamics. First, the survivor's boundaries are framed as cruelty, control, or rejection. The covert narcissist's standard line — you've changed, you used to be so open, you've put up all these walls — recasts the survivor's increasingly normal self-protection as the abuse.
Second, the narcissist appropriates the language to enforce control. “I have a boundary that you can't talk to your sister without telling me first.” That isn't a boundary; it is a rule imposed on someone else. The therapeutic vocabulary, used fluently and incorrectly, becomes a tool of the abuse — see covert tactics, the entry on weaponized therapy talk.
What healthy boundary-setting looks like
For survivors recovering from long covert abuse, learning to set boundaries is often the hardest part of the work. The instinct that produces a boundary — I matter; this isn't acceptable to me — is precisely the instinct that years of devaluation have eroded. The literature on complex PTSD treats this as a core deliverable of recovery rather than as a starting skill.
