You’re sitting across from a friend for the third time this month, explaining the latest chapter in an exhausting relationship. You’ve had this conversation several times already. You’ve tried being patient and understanding, but nothing changes.
Eventually, your friend leans back and offers the same advice almost everyone offers these days: “You need to set a boundary.”
It’s good advice; what’s interesting is how often “setting a boundary” translates to “cut them out of your life completely.”
According to a recent survey, 60% of Gen Z adults say they’ve gone “no contact” with a friend or family member in the past year. More than a third say they’ve blocked someone close to them on social media, and nearly a third have removed someone from a group chat because of a conflict.
Some of those decisions involve genuinely unhealthy situations. Others reflect a broader cultural shift: relationships that once might have been worked through are now more likely to be walked away from.
In practice, boundaries have become one of the most powerful words in modern relationship culture. They’re invoked in conversations about family, dating, friendships, work and church. Sometimes they’re used to protect people from genuinely harmful situations. Other times they’re used to justify a quiet exit from relationships that have become difficult, frustrating or inconvenient.
Which is why Dr. Henry Cloud finds himself making a clarification he probably never expected to make.
The psychologist and bestselling author of Boundaries says a lot of people have misunderstood the very concept he helped popularize.
“I don’t think she read the book,” Cloud said, recalling parents who occasionally blame Boundaries for a child’s decision to cut off contact. “Boundaries are in service of love, not to destroy love.”
The modern understanding of boundaries often treats them as a form of protection. Someone hurts you, creates stress or repeatedly crosses a line, so you reduce access. You create distance by removing yourself from the situation.
Cloud isn’t opposed to any of that — when it’s necessary. In fact, much of his career has been spent helping people recognize unhealthy patterns and stop enabling destructive behavior.
What concerns him is the growing tendency to view boundaries primarily as a way out of relationships rather than a way to improve them.
“The boundaries are to set limits on things that destroy love or destroy people so that love can thrive,” he said.
That’s a much harder definition because it demands something most people would rather avoid: confrontation.
Cloud points to Matthew 18, where Jesus instructs believers to address conflict directly. If someone has wronged you, the first move isn’t withdrawal. It’s a conversation.
“If I step on your toe, you correct a wise person, as Proverbs says, and they will thank you for it,” Cloud said. “Our relationship is better because you said that.”
In other words, healthy boundaries often require more engagement, not less.
That’s the part that gets lost.
It’s easier to unfollow someone than confront them. Easier to complain about a relationship than try to repair it. Easier to label someone toxic than explain why they’ve hurt you.
Cloud believes many people have adopted the language of boundaries while skipping the work boundaries were designed to accomplish.
That doesn’t mean every relationship should be saved.
Cloud understands there are situations where separation becomes necessary. He pointed to biblical precedents that call for distancing yourself from abusive, divisive or persistently destructive people after repeated attempts at reconciliation have failed.
But those situations aren’t the definition of boundaries. They’re the exception.
The larger purpose of setting a boundary is to create healthier relationships, not fewer relationships.
That conviction is connected to a broader theme in Cloud’s work. Although he’s spent decades practicing psychology, he doesn’t see psychology and faith as competing explanations for how people heal. In fact, he argues the opposite.
After entering the field, Cloud became increasingly frustrated with what he describes as popular Christian approaches to emotional struggles. Many people were doing all the “Christian stuff” and still struggling with depression, anxiety, addiction and relational dysfunction. As his clinical experience grew, he began reexamining both the prevailing Christian models and Scripture itself.
What he found surprised him.
“I could not believe that everything that actually worked, the processes that worked and changed people and are in today’s language evidence-based, they’re all right there in the Scriptures,” he said.
One example is connection.
Cloud argues that much of what psychology has learned about attachment and relationships, even mental and emotional health, points back to truths that have been present in Scripture all along.
“When you start to look at diagnostically what actually causes many mental health struggles,” he said, “the basic breakdown of human connectedness is often near the center.”
It’s an observation feels particularly relevant at a moment when loneliness continues to rise and relationships increasingly move online. Americans have become more fluent in the language of emotional health than perhaps any generation before them. We’re quicker to identify unhealthy dynamics and are more willing to seek therapy than ever before.
Those developments are largely positive.
The question Cloud raises is whether we’ve become equally skilled at repairing relationships. Because there’s a difference between protecting yourself from harm and insulating yourself from discomfort.
