Summary
Boundaries are about controlling your own behavior. Ultimatums are about trying to control others’ behavior.
Ultimatums destroy relationships. Boundaries create room for negotiation.
Ultimatums are easy to learn. The simplicity removes the anxiety of uncertainty. Boundaries are hard to learn, and if you weren’t fortunate enough to have role models in your life show you how, then you will need someone to teach you (like I did).
Introduction
According to Harvard anthrologist Joseph Henrichs, 80% of human learning happens by imitiating “prestigious models” (The Secret of Our Success, Henrich 2015). Beginning at a very young age, human children are able to discern the people worth modeling from the people worth ignoring. By trying on the behaviors they observe in role models, even very young children figure out what sort of behaviors work and which don’t.
Mothers are the most obvious role models for very young children, because they are typically the primary caregivers and spend the most time with the child. However, Fathers, other family members (especially older siblings or cousins), peers, teachers, coaches and celebrities all become important role models as the child matures.
Language is the best example of acquiring new knowledge by imitation of prestigious models. At first, children learn to imitate the sounds they hear their parents speak. Then, they learn how to use those sounds in certain contexts to communicate desires. As their social circle expands, children pick up new words that they’ve never heard at home and work those into their vocabulary as well. It’s not until about the age of 5 that they typically get any formal education in language — long past the age at which they’ve already started thinking in their native language.
You probably know that it’s much easier to learn a foreign language as a child than it is as adult, so the question is “What do adults do when they’ve failed to learn from role modeling the language skills they need?”
The answer is typically found in the other 20% of human learning — formal training.
Because Henrich’s interest is primarily culture, he doesn’t spend much time analyzing formal training. In my experience, knowledge of things like mathematics, chemistry, and engineering (my profession) isn’t typically acquired through imitation. For those things, we typically need school.
Recently I’ve also discovered that there are certain conversations that I never learned to master as a child, and this left me deficient in my ability to communicate desire, to negotiate, and (most importantly) to establish and enforce boundaries.
As a child growing up in my family, I never learned how to establish and enforce boundaries. It wasn’t until my mid-fifties that I realized I didn’t even know what boundaries were, much less have the conversational tools with which to establish them.
I was going to have to learn boundaries the hard way.
In Resolving Inherited Trauma I wrote about the existential Fear of Abandonment I may have inherited from my grandfather Thomas (for whom I am named). His father, my great-grandfather, died when Thomas was a young boy, and it makes sense to me that Thomas never fully recovered from the loss.
With that in mind, I can see how my co-dependent inclinations would lead me to marry an alcoholic who could never leave me. And I can see how that co-dependency would present an obstacle to learning how to establish and enforce boundaries. In my naive mind, boundaries were probably the last lesson I’d ever wanted to learn as a child. For me, only complete merging with other human beings would feel like the ultimate defense against abandonment.
It wasn’t until years after I gave my wife the ultimatum that led her to quit drinking that I realized I needed to learn what boundaries were.
If you’re anything like me, and you never learned how to set boundaries from the role models in your life, then maybe some formal education will help you fill in the gap.
That’s what this article is about.
Ultimatums are easy
Most of us learn how to issue ultimatums at a very early age. We learn from our parents, teachers, and the older children who subject us to them.
An ultimatum sounds like “Either you do ___, or you’re going to get ___.”
In other words, ultimatums are never about the people issuing the ultimatum. The whole purpose of issuing an ultimatum is to control someone else’s behavior, which is why the ultimatum is phrased in the second person “you.”
Sometimes, direct orders are disguised as ultimatums. For example, I walked into High School English class one day and my teacher said, “Tom, today we are going to read Shakespeare. I know you hate that, so you can either stay in class and read with us or you can go to the library.”
I chose the library.
She said, “No, you won’t. You will stay and read with us.”
I spent the next 50 minutes reading MacBeth aloud, and it turned out I didn’t mind at all.
In that case, my English teacher was using the language of an ultimatum, even though what she really wanted was to give me a direct order. I learned two things that day. The first is that my English teacher is an untrustworthy liar and the second was that I kind of like Shakespeare.
—
When I realized that my wife’s drinking was hurting my kids and making my marriage intolerable, I told her she had only two options: A) sober up, or B) divorce.
She probably thought I was bluffing.
I really wanted to believe in myself, because I didn’t want to be like my High School teacher. Nonetheless, I never gave my wife a deadline. I never gave her specific instructions or steps to take. Maybe that’s why instead of choosing to either option A or B, she spent a couple months considering her choices and trying to renegotiate around the ultimatum.
She eventually got herself into a 12-step program, sobered up, and demanded a divorce, anyway.
Perhaps no marriage can survive an ultimatum.
Setting boundaries is something we have to learn
A Post-doctoral Scholar called me one day. He was fantasizing about quitting his job. He complained that his Boss was abusing his time. He felt powerless, exploited, over-committed, and trapped.
Because he couldn’t go on feeling like that, he was ready to quit — but he had the wisdom to seek my advice first.
I listened to the litany of complaints he had about the way his Boss’s demands were encroaching on his personal commitments, and how he felt like promises were made to him that weren’t being kept.
This is what I told him:
You’re angry because your supervisor has violated a boundary. You had a commitment from you Boss to respect your 20 hours/week schedule in accordance with your reduction in pay, but you’re still being directed to work as if you were being paid full-time.
Anger is a healthy, normal, human reaction to violation of a boundary. So congratulations on being normal.
But, you also feel upset, frustrated, and helpless because you don’t know how to establish and enforce your boundaries. When you were a child, you weren’t allowed to have boundaries, and now as an adult, even if you knew what a boundary was, you don’t have the conversational tools you need to establish and enforce them.
Does that sound right?
He told me it was spot on.
I explained to him that establishing boundaries starts with first person, “I” statements, as in “I don’t work more than 20 hours/week,” or “I don’t listen to people who speak to me in that tone.”
I also told him that I spent more than five decades on this planet without knowing how to establish and enforce boundaries. I had to learn it, too, and that I would teach it to him.
—
It was
who taught me the language of boundaries. Stone writes about the praxeology of intersexual relationships, including dating and marriage. You can probably understand why that became important to me after the ultimatum I gave my wife, but still took me several years to appreciate Stone’s lesson for establishing and enforcing boundaries in romantic relationships.Stone suggests saying, "I don't date girls who do that."
That’s it.
The difference between a boundary and an ultimatum is in the subject of the sentence. Boundaries are about the person who is establishing them, whereas ultimatums are about the person receiving them.
When you say, “I don’t…” you aren’t talking about what other people should do, or trying to manipulate them into doing anything, or trying to control their behavior.
The only thing you’re doing is saying what you will not do and that’s what a boundary is.
Avoid escalating boundaries to ultimatums
In the case of our overworked Post-doctoral Scholar, he might have said something like “I don’t work on weekends,” or “I don’t work more than 20 hours a week,” or used any number of boundary-setting sentence stems that started with “I don’t… .”
His Boss might have responded with an ultimatum like “Well, if you’re not willing to put in these extra hours this weekend, then you’re fired!”
But where would that have left the Boss with regard to the data for the journal article? Behind schedule, with an irreparably damaged relationship, and no post-doc to do all the work.
As you practice establishing and enforcing boundaries, you’re likely to encounter people who tempt you to escalate your boundary to an ultimatum. The most difficult thing about boundaries is probably avoiding that temptation.
For example, suppose I had started the conversation with my wife with a boundary sentence like, “I won’t be married to a drunk anymore.”
You can probably imagine her responding with something like, “What are you going to do about it?”
That’s an invitation for me to escalate to the ultimatum I was seeking to avoid.
The most difficult thing about setting a boundary is the awkward, unresolved uncertainty of avoiding the escalation to an ultimatum.
Ultimatums are easy. They cut through the anxiety of uncertainty with their either/or simplicity.
Boundaries are hard, because they allow the negative emotions associated with uncertainty to hang in the air for what seems like forever.
When establishing a boundary, you don’t owe anybody an explanation. They’re not entitled to any information about what’s on the other side of that boundary.
Had I taken the boundary approach with my wife, instead of the ultimatum approach, the question, “Well, what are you going to do?” would result in a tension so thick that I’d probably be unable to recognize the question as the trap it is.
The fact was that I didn’t have it all sorted out in that moment, and it would have been unreasonable to expect me to have. In that moment, there is no honest answer, except to say I didn’t know.
Maybe some guys would advise me to have drawn up the divorce papers ahead of time and have them in my back pocket, ready to go — but that’s ultimatum thinking.
Probably the best answer I could have given in the boundary approach would have been to say, “I’m not sure yet. I don’t know what I will do, but I’m certain of what I won’t.” Then I would’ve had to walk away, stay at a motel, refuse to answer my phone, and consider my options.
Desires are different from boundaries
In Why Is It So Hard To Ask For What We Want? I quoted psychotherapist Esther Perel, who said “Desire is the art of wanting.”
Communicating desire is not the same as establishing and enforcing boundaries.
Desire might sounds like, “I want a wife who isn’t drunk,” or “I want my weekends off,” or “I want to date girls who don’t do that.”
It’s a wonderful thing to have the courage to communicate desire, but it’s not a boundary.
Communicating desire is an invitation to a negotiation, not a boundary.
When you’re open to negotiation, there’s nothing wrong with communicating desire.
For example, imagine I’d told my wife “I want you to get sober.”
That’s not a boundary. It’s not an ultimatum. It’s an invitation to negotiate, and some people might see it as kinder, more gentle, and more in keeping with the spirit of partnership.
The problem is that there can be no negotiation with addiction. The addict is incapable of making and keeping commitments, so negotiation is a pointless exercise in false hopes.
But most of us aren’t dealing with addicts all the time.
For example, the Post-doctoral Scholar didn’t want to quit his job. He liked his job — at least when he wasn’t feeling exploited or taken for granted.
When you use boundary language by saying what you will not do, you leave room outside your boundary for negotiating, which is way better for your relationship than an ultimatum.
How to negotiate beyond your boundaries
Learning the skill of establishing and enforcing boundaries earns you the opportunity to negotiate (and avoid destructive ultimatums). You may find that during a negotiation, you are called upon to re-establish or remind your counter party of your boundaries.
People will test your boundaries all the time. Because almost everyone has the experience of dealing with phonies like my High School English Teacher, they’re probably not going to believe you the first time you use boundary language. So you’ll have to use it again, and again.
Nevertheless, as your negotiation skills improve and you establish a consistent pattern in your boundaries, you’ll be tested less and less.
The way I teach the conversational skills for boundaries is through role play. That is, I have practice conversations with my students that help them remember what to say, even while they’re experiencing and managing all their negative emotions in real time. We start by sticking very close to a script, and then we open it up for more and more improvisation.
Here’s the script I used to walk the Post-doctoral Scholar through the conversation that saved his job, and got him the time off to which he was entitled:
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