When We Set Boundaries We Honor Ourselves and Others

"My name is a holy word. Treat me like a gift from God above.
You know my name is love”

I‘m Talking, Holy Word

I’m Talking was an Australian synthpop band that released one album back in 1984, Bear Witness. The album produced several hit singles Down Under, but failed to capture the rest of the world. One of the album’s Top 10 Aussie hits was “Holy Word.” The song is all about setting boundaries. It’s about self-respect. I immediately loved the song on first hearing it some 22 years after its initial release, and I‘ve wondered why it wasn‘t a huge hit in America.

Every person on earth needs to understand, own, set and enforce personal boundaries. The concept of “my name is a holy word“ is true for all of us. Every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. Our individual names-- as varied and diverse as humanity itself-- all speak of God’s great love for everyone, with no exceptions. Our names joined together express the greatness of God’s love.

To say “My name is a holy word. Treat me as a gift from God above” is to set a boundary. In essence we are saying we will not tolerate being treated as anything less than a child of God, a unique gift to this world. We proclaim to others that abusive behavior is unacceptable and out of bounds.

In order to set this type of strong boundary, a person has to really treasure themselves. It takes powerful self-love to own our boundaries, powerful self-esteem to set them and powerful courage to enforce them. Setting important boundaries also means that we sometimes have to stand up to people we fear as well as people we love.

We may have parents who abuse alcohol or drugs and then vomit their self-hatred all over us, blaming us for all of their problems. Or we may have adult children who are constantly in legal trouble, and who guilt us into accepting responsibility for their mistakes. Or we may have siblings or friends who gamble away all they have and then shame us into bailing them out of trouble. All of these situations require tough love and strong boundaries.

Tough love is really another way of saying authentic love. Authentic love sees when a person is abusing themselves and others. It understands that to accept verbal, emotional or physical abuse is to condone the behavior. It also understands that to take blame for other people’s behavior or errors is to enable them to keep making the same mistakes. Failing to set boundaries is like giving people a stamp of approval to bad behavior. For example, every time we give a compulsive gambler money to cover their debts, we give them a blank check to continue their addictive behavior. They know they don’t have to take responsibility for their actions because they can depend on us to rescue them.

If we continue to clean up their messes, we can claim we are doing it for any number of reasons, except love. Don’t call it love. We may be doing it out of guilt or shame, but we aren’t doing it out of love because love does no harm. To keep enabling someone’s addictive behavior is to harm them; it has nothing to do with love. If we truly love someone we need to set a strong boundary with them and then surrender them to God. We can ask God to do for them what they cannot do for themselves. And we can ask for wisdom to help them in healthy ways, like affirming their hurt or their positive growth. God will do the rest. Set good boundaries and allow your soul shine!