Boundaries are real. The 43% statistic about them is not.

I should say up front that I’m not a psychologist. I run performance marketing, I write under the name Growth Therapist, and I’m building a communication app called Subtext. What I am is a person who kept seeing the word “boundaries” everywhere, got suspicious of how confident everyone sounded, and went and read the actual research. Take this as one curious person’s notes, not clinical advice.

What got me started was the sheer range of things that word now covers. Coworker annoying you? Boundary. Mom texting too much? Boundary. Friend going through a hard time and leaning on you? Careful, that might be a boundary violation. The word has been stretched until it means almost nothing, and sometimes it means “I did something unkind and I’d like it to sound like self-care.”

So I wanted two answers. Is setting boundaries actually good for you, or is that just something we say? And where’s the line between protecting yourself and quietly cutting everyone off until you’re alone?

Where the word even comes from

Most people using the word have no idea where it came from, and the origin surprised me.

The book that put “boundaries” into everyday language is Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life¹, written by Henry Cloud and John Townsend and first published in 1992 by Zondervan, a Christian publisher. Per the publisher’s own page, the series has sold over 4 million copies. It’s also an explicitly evangelical Christian self-help book. It gives you what it calls “biblically based answers,” and it defines a boundary as a “personal property line” that marks what you are and aren’t responsible for. That property metaphor, the idea that you own a plot of emotional land and get to decide who steps on it, is the mental model almost everyone is using without knowing its source. Nothing wrong with a Christian book being influential. It just means the thing people repeat as settled psychology started life as ministry.

Behind that popular book sits older clinical theory. Murray Bowen, working on family systems², gave us “differentiation of self,” which is the ability to stay yourself while staying connected to people who matter. He also described “emotional cutoff,” and this part matters a lot. Bowen treated cutting people off as a way of managing anxiety, not as a sign of maturity. The person who flees the family and the person who can never leave it are, in his view, driven by the same thing. Hold that thought, because it comes back.

Then somewhere around 2020 the language escaped into the wild. Katy Waldman wrote a sharp essay on “the rise of therapy-speak”³ in The New Yorker in March 2021, describing how the vocabulary of the therapist’s office flooded friendship, dating, and activism. “Boundary” was right at the center of it.

Is it actually good for you? Mostly yes, with caveats

I expected the research here to be thin, and in some places it is. But the core idea holds up better than I assumed.

The strongest evidence is about the opposite of boundaries. There’s a construct called self-silencing, which is basically the habit of burying your own needs to keep a relationship smooth. A 2021 meta-analysis by Pintea and Gatea⁴ pooled the research and found a moderate, reliable link between self-silencing and depression (r = .39, p < .001). One wrinkle worth knowing about. The idea started with Dana Crowley Jack, who framed self-silencing as mainly a women’s issue rooted in gender roles, and the later data complicated that. Most studies since⁵ find the self-silencing and depression link in men too, so the “this is a women’s problem” framing didn’t really survive contact with the evidence.

There’s a related concept I found more useful, called unmitigated communion. That’s the technical name for focusing on others to the point of erasing yourself. Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz built a whole theory around it⁶, and in a year-long study of adolescents with and without diabetes⁷ (132 with, 131 without), unmitigated communion predicted more psychological distress and, for the kids with diabetes, worse control of their illness, partly through disordered eating. So the failure to protect yourself shows up as more than an abstract vibe problem. It tracks with real distress and, in that group, with real physical outcomes.

What about the skill of actually asserting yourself? For decades this was called assertiveness training, and it fell out of fashion. Two researchers literally titled their 2018 paper “a forgotten evidence-based treatment”⁸. The good news arrived recently. A 2026 meta-analysis by Hede, Malouff, and Meynadier⁹ looked at randomized controlled trials of assertiveness training for social anxiety, pooling 12 trials with 503 people, and found a moderate benefit (Hedges’ g = 0.62), with no sign of publication bias. So the effect is real, and it’s also smaller than what CBT gets for social anxiety, which puts assertiveness training somewhere in the helpful-but-not-magic range.

Now the part I need to be blunt about. A lot of the boundary content online cites much bigger, shinier numbers than any of this, and I couldn’t find the studies behind them. More on that in a minute.

Blocking versus actually taking care of yourself

This is the question I cared about most. When is walking away self-care, and when is it Bowen’s anxiety-driven cutoff wearing a self-care costume?

The neuroscience gave me a surprisingly clean way to think about it. Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki study the difference between empathic distress and compassion¹⁰. When you soak up someone else’s pain until it becomes your own overwhelm, that’s empathic distress, and it lights up brain regions tied to pain, and it burns you out and can push you to withdraw. Compassion works differently. It’s caring about someone’s suffering without drowning in it, it recruits a network tied to warmth and reward, and, importantly, it can be trained. Which means the fix for burnout may have less to do with caring less and more to do with catching the moment when “I am overwhelmed” has quietly turned into “you are the problem.”

That reframes cutting people off. Distance is sometimes the compassionate, differentiated choice, and sometimes it’s just the fastest available way to make your own anxiety stop, dressed up afterward. The test I keep coming back to is whether I’m moving toward the life and relationships I actually want, or only moving away from a feeling I’d rather not sit with. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy makes roughly this distinction between values-based action and plain avoidance, and I found it more useful than any script.

The estrangement data is sobering. Karl Pillemer’s national survey, reported by Cornell¹¹ and written up in his book Fault Lines, found that 27% of American adults were estranged from a family member, which works out to roughly 67 million people. This is common. Two findings landed hard, though. Most estranged people were not relieved. They were sad and wished for reconnection. And among the people who did reconcile, the ones who succeeded had almost all given up the demand for an apology and a shared version of the past. They stopped needing to win the history in order to have a present.

The communication researcher Kristina Scharp adds an important corrective in her grounded-theory study of adult children who distanced from parents¹². She found estrangement is an ongoing process rather than a single clean break, made of many small dimensions, and she’s clear that distancing can be a healthy solution to an unhealthy environment. Both things are true at once. Cutting off is often driven by anxiety and often leaves people sadder, and it is also sometimes the right call.

The exception that everything else depends on

There’s one situation where the “reflect on whether you’re avoiding a feeling” advice is not just useless but dangerous, and it needs saying plainly.

If someone is being controlled or abused, the polite, graduated, communicate-your-needs boundary advice can get them hurt. Evan Stark, in Coercive Control¹³, reframes abuse as a “liberty crime,” a systematic stripping away of a person’s freedom and autonomy rather than a series of isolated incidents. In that context, “have you tried setting a boundary” badly misreads the situation, because the whole mechanism of coercive control is that the victim’s boundaries get punished. If any of this is your situation, the useful move is a safety plan and specialist support, not a better-worded “I” statement. I’m not qualified to guide that, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

A rule for you is not a request of them

This reframe fixed more confusion for me than anything else I read.

A boundary is something you do. A demand is something you want someone else to do.

“I’m not going to keep talking when I’m being yelled at, so I’ll leave the room” is a boundary you control. “You have to stop yelling” is a request that depends entirely on them. People say “I set a boundary” and mean the second one, then feel betrayed when the other person doesn’t comply, which was never theirs to enforce in the first place.

Marshall Rosenberg’s work on Nonviolent Communication draws a similar line between a request and a demand, though I’ll flag that NVC’s evidence base is thin and its scripts can come out sounding robotic. Take the distinction, skip the formula. Practically, that means stating what you’ll do, keeping it to things inside your own control, and letting go of managing the other person’s reaction.

How to let people in without draining yourself

The anti-boundary crowd has a point here, and the research backs them up.

If you build your walls high enough, you solve the wrong problem. A Psychology Today essay called “The Dark Side of Boundaries No One Talks About”¹⁴, written by therapist Alli Spotts-De Lazzer, makes this case well, drawing on watching a friend make one self-protective choice after another and slowly wall off the closeness they said they wanted. She describes generosity retreating in the face of selfishness. Her own prescription is to learn “thoughtfully self-protective” boundaries that protect without punishing, and that serve your values rather than just your stress response. Over-protection cuts you off from the exact thing you were trying to protect.

Isolation also isn’t a neutral lifestyle choice. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analysis of 70 studies¹⁵ found that social isolation was linked to a 29% higher likelihood of death, loneliness 26%, and living alone 32%, effects the authors put on par with well-established risk factors. Whatever boundaries are for, they can’t be for ending up alone.

So how do you stay open without being a doormat?

The thing that helped me most was realising autonomy and independence are different things. In self-determination theory, autonomy means acting from your own values, and you can do that inside a close, interdependent relationship. Needing people and being your own person aren’t in tension. The false choice between them drives a lot of bad boundary decisions.

Close relationships also don’t run on scorekeeping. Margaret Clark and Judson Mills distinguished communal from exchange relationships¹⁶ back in 1979. In an exchange relationship, like you and a plumber, you track inputs and repay them. In a communal relationship, like a good friendship, you track each other’s needs and respond to them, and trying to immediately “pay back” a close friend can actually make things worse, because it signals you want the exchange kind. So the healthy version of letting people in still involves giving a lot. It just runs on real need, in both directions, without a ledger.

And repair matters more than never rupturing. Every real relationship has ruptures. A 2018 meta-analysis by Eubanks, Muran, and Safran¹⁷, covering 11 studies and 1,314 patients, found that repairing ruptures in the therapy relationship was linked to better outcomes (r = .29). The relationships that survive are the ones where somebody goes back and mends the tear.

The practical part, minus the flowchart

A lot of the boundary frameworks online come with elaborate taxonomies. Some of it is useful. There really are different kinds of boundaries, physical, emotional, time, digital, material, and it can help to notice which one is actually being crossed, because “I feel weird about my coworker” gets more solvable when you realize it’s specifically a time-and-digital thing about Slack at midnight. The other useful idea, which floats around the internet in several versions without a source I could pin down, is that boundaries vary in how permeable they are. Too rigid and nothing gets in. Too porous and everything does. The version you want is the one you can adjust case by case.

The single most useful move, though, is to stop treating it as block-or-tolerate. There’s a whole middle. You can go low contact instead of no contact. You can do structured contact, seeing someone only at family events and not one on one. You can use time-limited distance, a few months rather than forever. There’s even the unglamorous “gray rock” approach, where you stay polite and profoundly boring so a draining person loses interest. Binary thinking is what makes people feel they have to nuke a relationship to get any relief, when a smaller adjustment would do.

One table, and then I’ll stop. Same limit, three ways of saying it:

Notice the working column is all things you will do, said once, calmly, no essay required.

About those impressive statistics

I promised I’d come back to this, and it’s the part I most want you to take away.

Somewhere in the reading I started hitting the same too-good numbers over and over. “A longitudinal study found clear boundaries were associated with up to 43% lower anxiety and 37% fewer depressive episodes.” Boundaries linked to “improved sleep quality, reduced inflammation markers, enhanced immune function,” and lower cortisol. These get copied across wellness blogs and coaching sites as if they’re settled science.

I went looking for the source. I couldn’t find one. The 43%/37% figures show up on content-mill statistics pages and wellness blogs with no author, no journal, no year, no link to anything real. The biomarker cluster is the same story. The closest thing to a citation I found was a vague reference to “a longitudinal study published in Health Psychology” with no title and no author, and a “2023 study” in a journal whose name was slightly wrong. There is solid science on how chronic stress and loneliness affect cortisol, inflammation, and sleep. But that research measures stress and loneliness, not “boundaries,” and nobody I could find has run the specific study these numbers claim to come from.

I’m not accusing any particular person of making it up. This is more how the internet works: a plausible number gets written once, and then it’s quoted forever because quoting is easier than checking. Which is a decent argument for reading past the confident stat, on any topic.

Where I actually landed, and where Subtext comes in

After all this, my honest take is that boundaries are real and useful and oversold. The failure to protect yourself tracks with depression and burnout. Assertiveness can be trained and it helps. Cutting people off is sometimes wise and often just anxiety in disguise, and the estrangement data suggests most people who do it stay sad about it. Isolation carries a real cost. And a lot of the loudest boundary advice is built on numbers that don’t exist.

The gap I kept noticing is the one Subtext is built around. Almost every boundary framework assumes the hard part is figuring out what you want. In my experience it usually isn’t. Most people know they’re exhausted, or that midnight Slack is killing them, or that they need less of someone. The hard part is saying it in a way that’s clear without being cruel, calm without being cold. The distance between the feeling and the sentence is where things fall apart.

That’s the specific problem it works on, helping people say the emotionally loaded thing well, in the moment they actually have to say it. Not scripts to memorize. Help with the part that’s hard.

I’ll leave you with the one question I now ask myself before I decide someone has “crossed a boundary.” Am I about to do something that moves me toward the relationships I want, or am I just trying to make an uncomfortable feeling stop as fast as possible? Some days I honestly can’t tell. That uncertainty is probably the most useful thing I got out of reading all of this.

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Found the study behind that 43% figure, or think I’ve been unfair to the boundary literature? Tell me on LinkedIn.

Samet Durgun is the co-founder of Subtext, an app that catches the emotional tone of your messages and rewrites them in your own voice. He’s based in Berlin.

Sources

Every link above goes to the primary source where one exists.

1. Cloud, H. & Townsend, J. Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. Zondervan, 1992. boundariesbooks.com
2. “Emotional Cutoff in Bowen Family Systems Theory.” Springer. link.springer.com
3. Waldman, K. “The Rise of Therapy-Speak.” The New Yorker, 26 March 2021. newyorker.com
4. Pintea, S. & Gatea, A. “The Relationship Between Self-Silencing and Depression: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 40(4):333, 2021. guilfordjournals.com
5. Narrative review of self-silencing and depression, Sex Roles, 2025. link.springer.com
6. Helgeson, V. & Fritz, H. “A Theory of Unmitigated Communion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 2(3), 1998. journals.sagepub.com
7. Helgeson, V. et al. “Unmitigated Communion and Health Among Adolescents With and Without Diabetes.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33(4):519, 2007. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
8. Speed, B., Goldstein, B. & Goldfried, M. “Assertiveness Training: A Forgotten Evidence-Based Treatment.” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 25, 2018. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
9. Hede, J., Malouff, J. & Meynadier, J. “A Meta-Analysis of RCTs on the Efficacy of Assertiveness Training for Social Anxiety.” International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology 11:28, 2026. link.springer.com
10. Singer, T. & Klimecki, O. “Empathy and Compassion.” Current Biology 24(18), 2014. cell.com
11. Pillemer, K. “Family estrangement a problem ‘hiding in plain sight.’” Cornell Chronicle, Sept 2020. news.cornell.edu
12. Scharp, K. “‘You’re Not Welcome Here’: A Grounded Theory of Family Distancing.” Communication Research 46(4):427, 2019. journals.sagepub.com
13. Stark, E. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, 2007. academic.oup.com
14. Spotts-De Lazzer, A. “The Dark Side of Boundaries No One Talks About.” Psychology Today, Aug 2025. psychologytoday.com
15. Holt-Lunstad, J. et al. “Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10(2):227, 2015. journals.sagepub.com
16. Clark, M. & Mills, J. “Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(1):12, 1979. doi.org
17. Eubanks, C., Muran, J. & Safran, J. “Alliance rupture repair: A meta-analysis.” Psychotherapy 55(4):508, 2018. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov