As I began my career in psychology I often saw the trouble and turbulence taking place between a client and someone else in their life.

I could visualize the problem taking place in a sort of conceptual space between them and I was able to identify this as a boundary zone.  Within the context of that boundary zone, the problem was more about how they interacted and what made them interact that way than it was about whether or not they were good people or whether they cared about each other.

I wanted a terminology and theory base to explain what I was seeing, but nothing I’d learned while earning my doctorate or that I had seen in the scientific or theoretical literature of psychology seemed sufficient. I fumbled along and talked about “boundaries” with these clients in the best way I knew – vaguely and imprecisely with plenty of “do this / don’t do that” thrown in for good measure.

My conception of people’s boundaries was a bunch of rules based on little more than experiences and observations and some small amount of research where it existed.

I wanted a true model of boundaries; one both descriptive (what boundaries are) and explanatory (why they are what they are). I was looking for a model sufficient for describing some of these problematic interactions between people as well as illuminating the more deeply hidden interactions between internal aspects of a person.

Some models of psychology do talk about boundaries, but the boundary ideas they described always seemed to be limited to use only within that psychological theory and were not more broadly applicable outside that theory. I wanted a model of boundaries that could stand independently of existing psychological theories, a model that focused in on the boundaries themselves – what they are and how they work. I wanted this model to be integratable – applicable within a broad range of psychological and interpersonal theories.

To my surprise, I had more success finding information and theories about boundaries in the popular psychology realm where I found a few attempts at models of boundaries. However, these didn’t delve deeply enough into the workings of boundaries, or weren’t explanatory enough for my purposes. In any case, they all tended to be dominated by the author reciting their rules of what someone should or should not do in any particular situation. These were rule books, not models of how boundaries actually work and they represented exactly the kind of approach to boundaries that I was trying to break out of.

I was finally forced to conclude that if I wanted a model of how boundaries work, I would have to develop it myself.

As I began work on developing the foundations for what would become The Human Boundaries Model, I found that the literature that was most helpful wasn’t in psychology at all, but in a separate domain of scientific study called systems theory.

Systems theory is a diverse group of models and theories about the way various elements come together and interact in nature, society, and science. It’s a framework within which we can investigate and describe any group of things that work together to produce some result. Many of these various systems theories (and there are LOTS of systems theories) described the purposes and operations of boundaries within systems and I began to study and think about how these principles of boundaries in systems might operate in human psychology.

Most relevant to my goals were the kinds of systems described as COMPLEX SYSTEMS and those described as ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS.

Complex systems are systems composed of elements that interact with one another in such a way that they formed something new, something greater than the sum of its parts.  Think of the way birds come together to form a flock – a thing that can only exist if a group of individual birds adapt their behavior to somehow get together in the first place and then continue to adapt their behavior to maintain it.

Adaptive systems are those systems capable of altering themselves – most especially their own boundaries – in such a way as to increase the chances that the system will continue to exist. Think of the way a hermit crab takes a discarded shell as its home and how that shell serves to protect the crab from predators.

Additionally, I began exploring and developing the concept of INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS. Intelligent systems are those capable of designing and creating their own system boundaries and are capable of applying them toward a specific adaptation deemed necessary to maintain existence and stability. To accomplish this, intelligent systems must be able to perceive their own system boundaries, create a mental model of how those boundaries will serve in the future based on memory of past experience and anticipation of future circumstances. Only intelligent systems are capable of welcoming systemic change by choice instead of changing only when forced to by circumstances. This ability is relatively unique to human beings. It doesn’t mean the change is easy, of course, it just means that humans are capable of actively pursuing change and enduring the inevitable discomfort that comes with it in exchange for the long term benefit of the adaptation.

Over the course of several years, by developing these and other related concepts, the model of boundaries I had been searching for came to be.

This approach, now called The Human Boundaries Model, has fundamentally changed my understanding of identity and why we do the seemingly nonsensical and maladaptive things we do.

The Human Boundaries Model provides a framework to understand:

• How people get stuck in their development and even though they may want to change, why they can’t seem to make that change happen and why they continue to repeat old behaviors that they know full well will make their lives, and the lives of others, worse.
• How emotions and sensations in early life lead to patterns of behavior; these patterns then become ideas and these ideas become persisting mental structures. These structures then develop into the deeply-rooted and self-perpetuating beliefs that the Human Boundaries Model calls “Ideas-of-Self.”
• How these deeply-rooted concepts of the self use our emotions to direct us to create and engage boundary behaviors designed to protect the preexisting concept of the self and that punish, prevent, and discourage anything that threatens it.
• How these patterns form into a self-perpetuating and actively self-protective SYSTEM that operates within us. A system that uses our own brains and our own minds for its own purposes.
• How, once created, this adaptive system needs no further conscious input from us to maintain its existence.
• How this process continues regardless of whether it benefits the person as a whole. It’s a process that continues indefinitely until we get tired of it, expose it, resist it, alter it, and eventually replace it with something better.

But beyond just explaining, the Human Boundaries Model has led to development of tools and interventions that give us the power to change and alter the boundaries of these systems in such a way as to change the nature of the beliefs themselves when those beliefs are not enhancing our quality of life, when they are disrupting our ability to adapt effectively to changing circumstances, and when they are diminishing open and healthy relating to others.

If you’ve ever wanted a better life, more self-respect, healthier and more satisfying relationships, but found that your efforts to change seemed to get you nowhere, then perhaps the Human Boundaries Model has the tools to help you understand the secret systems inside you – systems that keep you thwarted, stuck, and unsatisfied. Perhaps this new approach to understanding our inner selves and creating real change that lasts could be the key to get you moving forward again and meet the potential locked inside you.