Decolonising the Self: Why Psychology Needs to Rethink "Healthy" Boundaries

Somewhere in the first year of my psychology training, I remember sitting in a lecture on attachment theory, nodding along dutifully as we mapped out the markers of a "securely attached, well-individuated adult." Autonomous. Self-directed. Comfortable setting firm boundaries with family. I remember thinking: by this definition, my entire extended family — and honestly, most of the aunties I grew up around — would be diagnosable.

I was joking. Mostly. But underneath the joke was something I've spent the better part of my career unpacking: mainstream psychology was not built with people like my clients — or people like me — in mind.

The Self That Psychology Assumes

Most of what we're taught in psychology training, from attachment theory to CBT to the standard trauma frameworks that get handed to us like gospel, rests on a particular model of the self. It's a self that is bounded, independent, and defined largely by its separateness from others. Health, in this model, looks like autonomy. Progress looks like differentiation from family. And the ultimate marker of psychological maturity is the ability to say "no" to your parents without flinching.

This isn't a neutral, universal truth about the human mind. It's a cultural worldview — a fairly specific one, rooted in Western, individualist ideas about personhood — dressed up in clinical language and taught to generations of psychologists as though it were simply how people work.

For a lot of my clients, particularly those from Indian-background and broader South Asian communities, that model doesn't map cleanly onto their lived experience. Identity isn't something they hold in isolation from their family — it's something they hold with their family. Obligation isn't automatically a red flag; it can be a source of meaning. Wellbeing is relational before it's individual. And when a psychologist walks into that with a checklist built for a different cultural context, things start to go sideways.

Where the Individualist Lens Gets It Wrong

Here's where it gets messy in the therapy room. When psychologists apply an individualist framework uncritically to collectivist family structures, the missteps aren't subtle — they're baked into the language we use.

Take "enmeshment." It's a real and useful clinical concept in some contexts — genuinely blurred boundaries that leave someone without a functioning sense of self can absolutely cause harm. But it gets reached for far too quickly and far too broadly. A client who talks to their mother every day, who factors their parents' opinions into major life decisions, who feels a pull of duty rather than resentment when caring for ageing relatives — that's not automatically enmeshment. Sometimes it's just... family. Sometimes it's culture working exactly as intended. But if your only frame of reference is the individualist model, closeness starts to look like pathology, and connection starts to look like a problem to be solved.

Or take the go-to therapeutic move of "boundary-setting" as the universal marker of progress. I cannot tell you how many clients have come to me having previously been told, essentially, that healing meant putting more distance between themselves and their families. For some clients, sure — that might genuinely be what's needed. But for many of my Indian-background clients, that advice lands like a foreign language. It's not that boundaries are irrelevant; it's that the goal being sold to them — separation as success — was never theirs to begin with. Living with your parents into your thirties isn't automatically a developmental failure. Prioritising family obligations over individual preference isn't automatically self-abandonment. Sometimes it's a value system that's been coherent and functional for generations, and the job of therapy isn't to override it with a different one.

This is the quiet violence of well-meaning, poorly-adapted clinical practice: it doesn't announce itself as culturally insensitive. It shows up dressed as evidence-based, as best practice, as the thing you learned in your Masters that you're now applying with total confidence to a client whose entire value system it was never built to hold.

What the Adjustment Actually Looks Like

So what's the fix? It's not "throw out attachment theory" or "abandon CBT." It's something more foundational — and honestly, more uncomfortable, because it asks psychologists to interrogate the frameworks we were trained to treat as neutral.

The adjustment I'd advocate for is treating family and cultural context as a legitimate part of the clinical formulation — not background noise you note in an intake form and then quietly set aside, but something you actively work with. That starts with a genuinely simple but rarely-asked question: what does a good outcome actually look like for this client, in their own value system? Not the outcome your training taught you to aim for by default. Not the outcome that would make sense if this client had grown up in a nuclear family in a Melbourne suburb with a very different relationship to independence. The outcome that fits them.

Sometimes that means the work isn't about separating from family — it's about renegotiating roles within it. Helping a client find language that lets them honour duty and connection while still creating space for their own needs, rather than framing those two things as mutually exclusive. Sometimes it means slowing down before reaching for a diagnostic label like enmeshment and asking whether what you're seeing is actually distress, or whether it's just a form of closeness your training didn't equip you to recognise as healthy.

And sometimes — this is the less comfortable part — it means being honest with yourself, and with your client, that the frameworks you were trained in are not culturally neutral. That "here's what secure attachment looks like" or "here's what a healthy boundary is" comes from somewhere, and that somewhere has a cultural address. You don't have to abandon the theory. You just have to stop treating it as gospel and start treating it as one lens among several, to be applied with judgement rather than defaulted to on autopilot.

Why This Matters Beyond the Session

I'll be honest — this isn't just an academic exercise for me. It's personal. As someone who's second-generation and Indo-Fijian, I've sat on both sides of this: as the person who once absorbed the message that "healthy" meant "independent from family," and later, as the psychologist watching clients arrive in my room already half-convinced that their closeness to family was something to be fixed, because a well-meaning but poorly-adapted clinician told them so before me.

When we get this right, the shift in the room is genuinely noticeable. Clients stop bracing for the moment therapy tries to talk them out of their culture. They stop pre-emptively defending their family structure before we've even gotten to the actual issue they came in for. That defensiveness — which honestly, who could blame them for — starts to soften, and what's underneath it gets room to breathe: the grief, the shame, the intergenerational conflict, the stuff that was never really about "boundaries" in the first place.

This is, at its core, decolonial work. Not in the abstract, theory-heavy sense the word sometimes gets flattened into, but in the very practical, very daily sense of asking: whose model of health am I applying right now, and does it actually belong here? It's slower. It's less tidy than working off a checklist. But it's the difference between therapy that asks clients to shrink themselves to fit the model, and therapy that actually meets them where they are.

Psychology doesn't need to throw out its toolkit. It just needs to stop pretending the toolkit was built for everyone.