Quotes About Boundaries

Not spoiling' a child means trying to break that child's spirit.

Real change will come when you focus on yourself - not on changing him, Real change comes when you are willing and able to state your claim on what you are and are not willing to live with. Just remember to let him in on it

It is basic to any relationship, and particularly important in open relationships, that no one can own another person.

What you are not responsible for is your lover's emotions. You can choose to be supportive—we're great believers in the healing power of listening—but it is not your job to fix anything.

How are we to teach our children to say "no" to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say "no" to? When we try to keep sex secret from our kids, they are aware that something is going on, but they don't know what. And if we leave them to get their sex information in the playground or on the street, from equally ill-informed other kids, we consign them to the jungle.

A ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals.

when you own your feelings, you have lots of choices. You can talk about how you feel, you can choose whether or not you want to act on those feelings, you can learn how to understand yourself better, you can comfort yourself or ask for comfort. Owning your feelings is basic to understanding the boundaries of where you end and the next person begins and the perfect first step toward self-acceptance and self-love.

Once you've gotten comfortable with "no," "yes" is usually easier. Try it, in all its variations: "Yes, please." "Yes, when?" "Yes, but I have some limits I want to tell you about first." "Yes, but I need you to talk to my partner first." "Yes, but not tonight; how does next Tuesday look for you?" "Hell, yes!

Be nice to your body and then go find somebody else's body to be nice to, and somebody will be nice to your body, too. Someone who has happily given themselves as many orgasms as they want is unlikely to approach their other relationships in a state of sexual desperation. Sexual self-sufficiency is an important slut skill that makes us far less likely to play with the wrong person just because we're so horny. Be your own best lover.

You might also want to do some thinking about how much time you need to get your needs met: do you really have to stay over and have breakfast together the next day, or would an hour or two of cuddling and talk be just as nice?

We bottom in order to go to places within ourselves and with our partners that we cannot get to without a top. To explore these spaces, we need someone to push us over the edge in the right ways, and to keep us safe while we're out there flying.

If you have a lover and a best friend who are not the same person, you're already practicing many of the skills of sluthood as you manage each of their needs for intimacy, time, and affection.

Topping, like bottoming, gives us permission to explore energies that are not OK in the outside world

We each have the responsibility of living our own lives, determining our individual needs, and arranging to get those needs met. We cannot live through a partner, nor can we assume that just because we have a lover, all our needs should automatically be satisfied.

If you don't want to play tennis with me, I'll ask somebody else, and if you don't want to play bondage games with me, somebody else will—our relationship will not be less for it. What we share is valuable for what we share. Period.

In fact, what we do in S/M is that we act as though we were giving up or taking real-world power, while retaining the ability to keep as much power as we need to feel safe, or to take no more than we feel OK about having.

Many of us find that the more we play, the closer we want to come to the gray area between "enough" and "too much," between consent and nonconsent. These desires may grow so strong that we feel that we're craving genuinely nonconsensual play – that we really do want to kidnap a stranger or whip a slave or punish a child.

Clean love is love without expectations.

We define consent as an active collaboration for the pleasure and well-being of all concerned.

Most of us resent it when another person tells us how we feel—whether or not they are correct, it is a violation of our boundaries when another person presumes to tell us what our inner truth is. Try asking a respectful question. "How are you feeling right now? I'm wondering if you're sad.

The binary nature of monogamy-centrist thinking tends, we think, to cause problems: you're either the love of my life, or you're out of here.

To be an ethical slut you need to have very good boundaries that are clear, strong, flexible, and, above all, conscious.

When you respect your limits, other will learn to respect them too.

No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys.