On "Healthy Boundaries"

My recent book Unclean is mainly preoccupied with analyzing failures of welcome, hospitality, and missional engagement in the life of the church. I basically argue that the opposite of love is Otherness. And the psychological dynamics that create the experience of Otherness is the psychology of purity, disgust, and contamination. This suite of psychological processes erect emotional, cognitive, and behavioral boundaries between the self and the Other. Love, welcome, hospitality and missional engagement, by contrast, dismantle these boundaries. In the words of Miroslav Volf, love is the "will to embrace."

Given this analysis, one of the more provocative things I do in Unclean is to take on a fundamental truth of contemporary psychotherapy, the concern over "healthy boundaries." It is almost a given in modern psychotherapy that the client will be directed to erect, monitor, and maintain "healthy boundaries" between herself and others. In Unclean I challenge this notion (see Chapter 8).

Given how I'm challenging a sacred cow in modern psychotherapy, I've been very interested in seeing how the Christian psychological community responds to the argument in Unclean. In light of this, see Dan Brennan's summary and reaction to my argument in Unclean and how my analysis might relate to his own work exploring cross-gender friendships in the church (see Dan's book Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions).

If you want a visual depiction of my analysis in Unclean, try the Coke commerical "Border":