Boundaries in Helping Fields

Setting healthy boundaries is a huge topic of importance in helping fields, particularly mental health. Boundaries have a great significance for a number of reasons. For one, they represent personal values, preferences, and ideas, especially within relationships. Secondly, they communicate value for oneself and others and help to establish trust. 

What prompts a need for boundaries? Typically challenges present themselves in which someone’s personal values, preferences, and ideas are not respected, or the participants involved have different expectations of one another, which can result in feeling misused or abused. On the other hand, they can be one’s stance to proactively set expectations and/or demonstrate care for themselves and others in establishing and maintaining a relationship. This is certainly the goal but unfortunately does not always take place. In either case, there is an intentional effort of one participant or more to not only identify what’s important to them, but to communicate this to others, and put this into practice.

All, if not most, people have experienced challenges with boundaries on some level personally and/or professionally. This can be difficult to navigate, more so at times professionally due to the nature of workplace culture, learning to understand different personalities and work styles, and other complexities that exist within organizations. At the same time, organizations in helping fields are in a great position to support both clients and professionals in that organizations have a responsibility (and opportunity) to foster and model healthy boundaries. 

However, a concern that I’ve had often in my experiences working in helping fields, especially community mental health services, is the lack of boundaries established between professionals and clients and/or between professionals and the overwhelming burnout that professionals can experience. This is often due to gross use of services on the part of the client, even demands of leadership or society at large, yet enablement of such on the part of the organization. In this dynamic there is often a missed opportunity for clients to develop personal values, preferences, and ideas that encourage them in their growth and for professionals to likewise be supported. We can see this in relationships that involve providing assistance one to another personally as well. 

Personally and professionally, how are you communicating value to yourself and others towards growth and change? What does this look like in your role either in serving clients directly, supporting a team, leading an organization, or other area of influence? 

I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share a comment or reach out if you’d like to connect, have questions, or are interested in partnering.

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