Boundaries
You matter within a relationship and boundaries help you to make sure that your needs are met. This is especially important when you are working in a helping position.
Many years ago, my sister was in the tail end of a bad relationship, and over coffee she said to me “he never respects my boundaries”. I remember thinking “that is not how boundaries work!” Boundaries are a challenge for many professionals, and dog trainers and behaviour consultants are no exception. In researching this article, I ended up down a rabbit hole of what boundaries really are and how they work, and I discovered that there are a variety of types of boundaries. What I found was most important though is that there are few hard and fast rules, and boundaries are incredibly personal.
Boundaries are fundamentally about healthy relationships. They are what separate ourselves from others, and yet conversely good boundaries help us to build stronger and more meaningful interactions with others. They help us to meet our own needs and they help us to meet the needs of those we interact with. Understanding what boundaries are and are not and what they can and cannot do will help us to be more successful as dog behaviour professionals.
In short, boundaries are flexible guidelines that you put in place so that you can do your job, live your life and choose who you want to socialize with and who you would prefer to avoid. Everyone has boundaries that are a little bit different and there are no hard and fast rules about what boundaries you should have. Boundaries need to be flexible and will likely change throughout your life. They may also be relationship specific. I am likely going to hug and kiss my aunt when I next see her, but I don’t hug or kiss people I have just met. This is normal and healthy.
There are a variety of different types of boundaries. Two broad categories that we need to consider are personal and professional. Personal boundaries are those that you create in order to live successfully with your friends and family. In the home I grew up in for instance we had a boundary that no one was permitted to swear in the house. If we invited a friend over, and they were heard to use a forbidden word, my mother would calmly but firmly remove that friend from the home, and usually she would follow up with that child’s parent. The rule was not simply a house rule but a reflection of the culture my mother fostered within our home. She did not expect that everyone would follow her rules, but she was clear about what the outcome might be and her outcome was well known in the neighbourhood. Even children who might have sworn on the playground or at home knew the rule and did not cross it. Even adults who didn’t agree with the rule followed it when they came to our home. This is an example of a strong personal boundary and I want to parse it out so we can see how it works and why it was such a good personal boundary before I move on to business boundaries.
When you know the rules, and the outcomes of the rules are clear, you will find that people will follow your guidelines without them being repeatedly told to do so.
The first thing to recognize is that it was a very clear rule. When we state our boundaries as rules, we can often decide if they are rules we want to follow, or if they need to be changed. My mother liked her rule, she could state it clearly and she communicated it well to everyone. Interestingly, she never stood up in the neighbourhood and said “at my house we don’t do THIS”. She just knew what her rule was, and importantly she knew what she would do in the event that someone crossed her boundary.
This brings to light the second part of the boundary. My mother knew what the outcome would be if her boundary was crossed. I remember her gently taking a child by the hand and saying, “I am sorry, but you will need to go home now. We don’t use those words in my house” and then she took the kid back to his own house. Clarity in outcomes meant that she was not left wondering about what would happen. She just carried out the outcome and then moved on.
To my knowledge my mother was not upset by the outcome either. Language is important when communicating the outcome. She included the child in her words; “we don’t use those words in my house” tells the child that this boundary was not randomly applied; it was the same rule for everyone. And it told the child that he or she would be welcome to behave otherwise when outside of her home! By saying “my house” she was telling the child clearly that this was her boundary and that other people might have different boundaries. When you are clear about the outcome, you don’t have to feel badly about the outcome. It is important to notice too that although other people’s behaviour was changed by this boundary, there is no attempt to control the other person. Boundaries are all about us; what we accept and reject, what we choose to include in our lives and what we decide that we will not tolerate.
Personal boundaries include things such as freedom to hold your own thoughts, values and opinions, control over your emotional availability, agency over your financial and property decisions, control over your internal regulation and the energy you spend on yourself, control over topics of discussion, control over your privacy, space and body, and limits to how much time you will spend on a given activity.[1] Sometimes it can be tricky to navigate these things, but knowing what you need to spend time and energy on can help you to take control over your personal boundaries. Having good personal boundaries prepares us to have good professional boundaries.
Professional boundaries can vary from field to field. In the field of dog behaviour and training, we often find ourselves bending boundaries that might be much firmer in other fields. For instance, although behaviour consulting is very similar to counselling, I probably have more personal relationships with clients than a typical counsellor might. Some of this is philosophical (I am not certain that the division that counsellors typically create between themselves and their clients are actually healthy) and some of this is practical (I don’t know too many counsellors who go for multiple hour long hikes with their patients!).
We can think about professional boundaries being divided into two sections. The first are the boundaries we have with our clients. The second are the boundaries we have with our colleagues; training assistants, other trainers or behaviour consultants, and our veterinary professionals. Keep in mind that you have to decide on what your own boundaries are, as the choices you have for your life might not fit for mine, or for any other behaviour professional.
With clients, I have a boundary about where I meet them. With my behaviour clients, I will not do a first meeting in person. Over the thirty years I have been in this career, I have been attacked many times by dogs I have worked with, and the times I have been bitten have all been in my client’s homes, where I don’t control the variables. One of the positive outcomes of the pandemic was simply that we were forced to work online and that meant that I learned how to evaluate behaviour remotely, but still in real time. Since dogs are usually accustomed to having a screen with a talking head in it, I could see the dog, observe his behaviour, communicate with the client, make changes and observe again, and see what was going on. I am very certain that this helped me to avoid getting hurt many times over the years since March 2020. I am as clear about this boundary as my mother was in the example above. How do I enforce the boundary? Quite simply! If someone won’t meet me online, I don’t accept them as a client.
Setting firm time boundaries are important when working with clients and colleagues. One of the challenges about the dog industry is that many of us enjoy spending time with other dog people so much, that sometimes we forget to leave at the end of the day!
Once I know the client, and I understand more about their dog, I can flex this boundary. I might suggest meeting in my training hall, in a local park, in the veterinarian’s office, or even at my client’s home. Boundaries need to be flexible if they are to serve us well. There is no benefit to continuing to meet remotely when there is no reason to do so. When I have a client whose dog is too dangerous, or who does not take care with the safety of those who visit their home, they will keep bumping into my boundary. I simply won’t meet them anywhere other than online.
Beyond location, I have time boundaries. Personally, I struggle with time boundaries. One of my senior instructors also struggles with time boundaries. And to make matters worse, when we are together we have a lot of fun working and then playing. We like to walk our dogs together, and we enjoy knitting, and talking about philosophy, and ordering books, and making Tiktoks and listening to her music assignments, and watching dumb videos and playing cribbage and pretty much anything new and shiny! It should not come as a surprise that my instructor has occasionally stayed overnight at my house because she is too tired to drive home after work when work ended at 5 and we “chatted” until one in the morning. There have been times when we have socialized for longer than the workday! We are working together to set better time boundaries. We do things like book appointments for other activities at the end of the workday so that we don’t spend 24 hours a day together! Another way that works for some folks is an alarm; my snooze hitting skills are too slick for an alarm when it comes to my instructor though, so we have to work on a better way.
Contact with clients is another boundary that you have to navigate as a professional. When my clients are seeing me for behavioural help, they only get my personal cell number if I believe that they may legitimately be in danger from their dog, and we are working on ways to get the dog the help it needs immediately. I have email on my cell and I check my emails very regularly, so for the most part, they don’t need to call me on the phone. I tell all of my clients (in writing!) that if they email me, they can usually expect to hear back from me within two hours, but that I guarantee that I will get back to them within 24 hours. That allows me the latitude to control my response time based on both their urgency and my life.
Sometimes I get to know a client very well. I have one client right now who still consults with me, and when I broke my leg, she travelled with me overseas, and arranged for me to stay with a relative whose home was wheelchair accessible. I have known her for over 20 years, and we have become fast friends who see one another outside of the dog training hall. This is not a common situation; in those twenty years, I have had thousands of other clients who have not come to my home or travelled with me. The important thing as the professional is that I get to decide who I want to open that door to, and who can come through.
There are dozens of other boundaries we could talk about, but I will talk about one final one that really pertains to the dog training and behaviour industry. Ethics. Everyone in the dog training industry is touched by ethics. There are sports some of us won’t play; I won’t do any of the weight pull sports because I think they are too risky to my dog’s health, and my ethics preclude me from causing harm to my dogs. I have a friend who won’t do barn hunt because she has concerns for the welfare of the rats involved. Some people will do a sport, but there is equipment they won’t use, such as a clicker, a shock collar or a prong collar, and each individual cites their commitment to ethics. Many trainers refer to ethical models such as Humane Hierarchy to guide their training. We each need to be very clear about what skills and sports we will teach, what work we will do, and how we will train, and set clear expectations and boundaries around that, including what we will do if presented with a situation where our boundaries are crossed.
At the end of the day, boundaries are respected when you know what they are, what will happen when a boundary is crossed, and you then carry out the plan when someone crosses your boundary. You also have to be aware of when you might be flexible with a boundary and when you need to be rigid. As the old saying goes, good fences make good neighbours. Good boundaries make good relationships. I wish I had the clarity of mind all those years ago to explain that to my sister.
[1] How to Set Healthy Boundaries & Build Positive Relationships, Jo Nash, PhD., Positive Psychology.com, 5 Jan 2018, https://positivepsychology.com/great-self-care-setting-healthy-boundaries/
