Melissa Hartwig Urban

I was born in the 1950s. This is a book that I would like to have had 50 years ago in place of platitudes, which generally had the effect of making me angry or depressed. I would certainly have been better off to start learning these things in my teens instead of struggling to teach myself over a period of decades. I would also have wasted less times on unworkable situations.

I sometimes wonder why parents don't make more of an effort to teach their children to stand up for themselves, recognize rhetorical cliches, set boundaries, and stand up to anger or temper tantrums, then I realized its probably because then they couldn't use those techniques on their children.

Melissa Urban gives a number of scripts for a variety of situations, I read through the ones that seem best suited for me at my age. She starts with an autobiographical section about how she learned the very hard way that boundaries are good and useful, but they should be tell people what you will and will not do, not what they should do. A boundary tells someone, for example, that you don't allow smoking in your house, but doesn't try to tell them that they can't smoke at all. She points out that boundaries aren't mean; in practice, I've found that the people who object to your boundaries often have a lot of their own, and will try to tell you that you are being mean, though, but you are as entitled as anyone else.

I think that this could be particularly helpful to young adults, or to people first learning to set boundaries. It gives the reader samples of things that they can say, and hopefully begin to adapt to a particular situation. She also advises people to start slowly and gently, and escalate protecting boundaries, and to try to phrase them in kind ways.… (más)