Why "Just Set Those Boundaries" is Often Unhelpful Feedback
An introduction to grudging acts, the reality that we all perform grudging acts, and why family estrangement is so damn complicated.
This week, we’re revisiting the complexities of family estrangement and emotional cutoff.
Famed family therapist Michael Kerr describes emotional cutoff this way in his 1988 classic, Family Evaluation:
“Cutoff can be accomplished by physical distance, keeping family contacts with family brief and infrequent, and/or through internal mechanisms, such as withdrawal and avoidance of emotionally charged areas while in the presence of the family.”
His co-conspirator, Murray Bowen, suggests that emotional cutoff has five common negative long-term effects, which Michelle Chesson organizes in a 2023 Medium article:
Difficulties developing emotional support in other relationships: Emotional cut-off often contributes to a greater sense of distrust, which can lead to feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Unresolved conflicts: And these unresolved conflicts can develop resentment and other deeper emotional reactions, which can morph into problematic communication patterns, like avoidance, hypervigilance, and higher reactivity.
Difficulty forming relationships: Bowen suggested that unresolved issues with cut off family members will manifest themselves in long-term relationships, such as partnerships, marriages, and parent-child dynamics. I see the manifestations of this everyday in my therapy office.
Increased anxiety: As we’ll talk about Friday, emotional distance seldom results in the termination of relationships. People who engage in family estrangement still worry about their family members, and experience an ambiguous loss of a relationship that may regenerate given different circumstances (i.e. sobriety, engagement in therapy, exodus from a toxic culture or organization).
Replication of communication patterns: The dynamics that lead to family estrangement often repeat themselves in future generation without a lot of intentional work.
Family estrangement is a common topic within former Evangelical spaces.
For starters, Evangelical communities encourage their members to follow Jesus’ words in Luke 14:26. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
Often family estrangement gets initiated by younger generations of folks who grew up learning to love our neighbors as yourself, to practice justice and walk humbly, and to wash the feet of those with less privilege than you, only to watch their parents and other family members engage in religious systems who very much do the opposite.
For what it’s worth, Julia and I run a relational/sexual health coaching practice designed otherwise meet the unique needs of people leaving Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal spaces.
One of my biggest pet peeves about 21st century wellness and mental health trends are providers and accounts who tell you to “just set those boundaries”.
If your family member voted for Trump, just set those boundaries and ditch them. If they voted for Trump twice, especially ditch them for their untrustworthiness.
If your family member makes racist, sexist, or homophobic comments, just set those boundaries and call them out. Tell them what your position is, and what they can expect from you if they make a comment like that again. Or, vote with your feet and avoid communication and contact with them altogether.
If your family member participates in communities fueled by disinformation and propaganda, just set those boundaries and tell them why they are wrong.
While “just set those boundaries” may seem like sage therapeutic intervention, it’s simply not that easy. For many people, it’s simply not realistic.
Most people who are experiencing complicated relationships with family members engage these interactions with much more complexity, nuance, and political savvy.
As we’ll discuss Friday, even if a person chooses to estrange themselves from a family member, they are often performing a ton of emotional labor keeping tabs on that family member(s) and ensuring that their larger family system stays constructed given the vacuum created by the distance.
But today, I want to acknowledge that the family estrangement process doesn’t just involve emotional labor.
Family estrangement involves what University of Manchester sociologist Wendy Bottero refers to as “grudging acts”. In an August 2023 issue of Sociology, Bottero explains:
“Grudging acts are those activities we would really rather not do, but which we perform nonetheless.
They can be acts of omission, such as biting or tongue, holding back, and more generally the exercise of caution, avoidance, and self-restraint.
They represent the things we do (or fail to do) not because we endorse or will such actions but rather because we feel we must perform them.”
In a society that prioritizes individualism and autonomy, Bottero reminds us that a functional system depends on the performance of grudging acts. After all, the goal of any system, be it a macro-system, like a state or company, or a micro-system, like a family, is homeostasis, or maintaining the status quo.
Bottero gives numerous examples of grudging. Bottero studies macro-systems, and makes allusions to longer-lasting practices of grudging, such as assimilation, consent to political or organizational authorities, and what David Graeber refers to as “bullshit jobs”.
However, she observes that grudging acts become grudging based on our emotional responses, either the emotions that we outwardly express while doing them, or more commonly, the emotions that we repress so that homeostasis can be maintained.
Many people assimilate and conform to political or organization authority out of a sense of protection and an avoidance of derision and standing out (assuming they’re even aware of the ways they conform). For instance, I recently wrote before about my experience of being a Brown person in White spaces; when I was a child, the few times that I’ve attempted to explore my Spanish-ness, I was met with confusion or dismissiveness. I’ve also had multiple experiences with police where the cops have code switched upon hearing my bizarro Southern-infused New England accent.
I have a sense of grief and sadness about my complicated relationship with cultural assimilation, but because I’m so absorbed into White spaces, and that absorption happened as a child, that grief and sadness are buried deep, and haven’t risen close enough to the surface to create a sense of resentment, rage, or other emotions that enable more immediate, urgent change.
And it’s here that Bottero notes that most of the grudging acts that we perform are hours, minutes, or seconds long interactions. Domestic labor. Taking a two hour flight to see how poorly your family is doing. Agreeing not to talk about politics with family members who voted for Trump despite the multitude of ethical and financial violations that the Trump administration is committing. (And the fact that those family members voted for Trump knowing he would commit said violations.)
Bottero delves into domestic labor to describe the affective impact of grudging acts. If a couple works together to share how they tend to their inhabited space, the sense of collaboration can make the mundane tasks of laundry, dishes, and vacuuming more bearable. However, a couple that relies on or slips into rigid gender norms to navigate domestic labor may be prone to having one or both partners experiencing resentment around the inequity of the grudge work performed. Bottero writes:
“When we experience a loss of belief in the wider governing goals that tasks are meant to support, when we feel that the ends do not justify the means, this may lead to more serious disengagement or dissent.”
And it’s here that we return to theme of this week’s Relationship 101: Family estrangement.
If you are in a difficult relationship with a family member, you may find “just set those boundaries” to be a condescending response, a lack of understanding to your challenges.
You’re simultaneously infuriated by the behavior of your family member(s). And you’re also emotionally connected to them. They are the people who’ve known you the longest, the deepest. And, as we’ll discuss Friday, often we’re only upset only at one person within our family, but want to maintain relationships with other meaningful family members.
And so you choose to call your parent, even as you’re bracing yourself for an insensitive comment or eleven. You agree to have a conversation about religion or politics because you know it’s important to a particular family member, even as their positions are oppositional to the values you hold. You also agree to bite your tongue during that conversation. You spend $1000 on airfare, a rental car, and a hotel room to spend a few days with your family and observe first-hand the ways they don’t take care of themselves.
Bottero mentions, grudging acts occur for six common reasons:
We feel a sense of obligation or moral responsibility.
We feel the weight of expectation.
We know that it will help other people who matter to us.
We have two competing values, and grudging acts enable us to do another activity that we do value.
We fear how others might react if we don’t do the grudging act.
Our emotional reserves are limited, and we feel like we’ve gotta pick the battles in which we attempt to change the system.
Think about complicated relationships that you choose to keep and grudging acts that keep you in these relationships. Which of these reasons motivates your decisions to perform grudging acts?
“Just set those boundaries” runs into the limitations of individualism. At its fullest extent, individualism suggests that we are most successful whenever we have full autonomy and freedom over our decisions; when our decisions are based strictly on what we want to do at the expense of the other people and systems that we’re connected with.
While it’s important to make decisions that enable us to care for ourselves, most of us do not have the privilege to live in a land of hyper-individualism. The concept of grudging acts reminds us of our interconnectedness, and the complicated decisions that we have to make to ensure that we stay tethered to complicated humans.
Or, as Bottero writes,
“Grudging acts show the centrality of evaluation in everyday life, a centrality that reflects our condition as needy, vulnerable beings, suspended between things as they are and as they might become, for better or worse, and as we need or want them to become.”
“Just set those boundaries” judges the gray areas that we all inhabit.
After all, the concept of grudging acts reminds us that there are limitations to moralizing authenticity, integrity, and transparency.
While we want to help anyone who works with us to make decisions that align with their values, authenticity and transparency often clash with connectedness and community. For folks who are deconstructing from Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal faith traditions, grudging acts keep us in the both/and of connection with our past and hope for our future. And the pursuit of the both/and can have complicated implications, as Bottero describes:
“All of this work speaks eloquently about the faces we must wear, the hypocrisies and double standards we adopt, the compromises and bargains we make, the acts we perform under sufferance or with mixed feelings, and the obligations and commitments through which we become tied into courses of action that we choose—but not entirely willingly or freely.”
If you are navigating complicated relationships and performing a higher number of grudging acts, a relational therapist or coach who recognizes the complexities of family enmeshment could be a phenomenal investment for accessing, describing, and understanding both the grudging acts that one or both people are performing, the difficult, painful emotions that accompany grudging acts, and the potentially negative communication patterns that develop out of those emotions.
In family estrangement situations, those negative communication patterns often get enacted in the marriage or primary relationship.
Julia and I offer free 30 minute consultations with couples who are interested in pursuing relationship and sex therapy/coaching. (60 minute consultations for paying members of Relationship 101!)
We specialize in working with who participated in an Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal community, and are looking to discover or rediscover the role that sexuality might play in your life and relationship.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia