SIX WEEK COURSE | LIVE MEETINGS & RECORDED LESSONS
Boundaries with Integrity: Fundamentals of Boundary Setting for Human Service Providers
May 23 - July 3rd, 2025 | Registration open until May 22nd
Most of us have heard the phrase “healthy boundaries,” but what does that really mean? What exactly is a boundary—and how do we recognize, set, and maintain them in our own lives?
Boundaries are essential for self-care, emotional clarity, and personal integrity. In this 6-week workshop, you'll learn how to recognize, set, and maintain healthy boundaries in both personal and professional life. Explore practical tools, emotional regulation techniques, and the inner dynamics that shape your boundary patterns.
Learn to say yes to what matters—and no without guilt.
This course is appropriate for counselors and therapists, teachers, coaches, social workers, pastors and spiritual directors, those who volunteer in community social service agencies, and other human service professionals.
Learning objectives
Participants will:
Define boundaries with integrity—understand what they are and are not—and evaluate the integrity of one’s own boundaries in both personal and professional contexts.
Explore the relationship between boundaries, emotional regulation, self-awareness, and internal parts that influence how boundaries are set and maintained.
Identify common barriers to setting and maintaining healthy boundaries and develop effective strategies to overcome them.
Differentiate between personal and professional boundaries and learn how to navigate challenges specific to professional environments.
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Modules
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Week 1: Boundaries and Integrity
We begin with a quick review of what others say about boundaries and common misconceptions about boundaries. We explore: What is a boundary? What is integrity? and why are boundaries with integrity the key to effective boundary work? (And why is called boundary “work”?) We’ll take some time to confront the painful costs of not setting or maintaining boundaries in our personal life and in our work as human service providers, with a close look at empathy fatigue.
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Week 2: Common barriers to setting and maintaining our boundaries
If there are significant repercussions to having poor boundaries, why is it so challenging to set the boundaries and/or maintain them? This week we’ll explore a variety of barriers to effective boundary work. This includes a brief introduction to the concept of parts and Self Energy, the basis of the efficacy of the Internal Family Systems paradigm.
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Week 3: How to set and maintain boundaries with integrity in personal and professional relationships
We’ll work on developing the skills necessary to set and maintain boundaries with integrity, keeping in mind our personal challenges in doing so. This week will include a deeper dive into communication and emotion regulation, as we continue to strengthen our relationship with the parts of us that create barriers to boundary setting.
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Week 4: When boundaries are challenged, crossed, or violated
In this module we’ll explore the internal and external backlash when we set a boundary and how to navigate these situations. We’ll draw on the previous skills presented and practiced from the first three lessons. In this lesson, we’ll look at when and where professional ethics and boundaries bump up against personal ethics and boundaries.
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Week 5: The unique nature of boundaries within a human services organization
We’ll take a close look at the nature of human services and where our call to serve humanity interweaves, strengthens, and challenges our ablities to articulate, set, and maintain boundaries. We will take time to explore our identity as human service providers, how our boundaries are a crucial aspect of the work and a significant challenge.
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Week 6: More on boundaries as a human services professional, wrapping up, and where to go next
This last week, we’ll take a closer look at the relationships between our clients, colleagues, and our self. How does our identity as a human service provider, our identity as a human being greater than the sum of our parts, and the needs/jobs of our inner parts inform boundary work? We’ll explore our values, our directives as human service providers, the expectations from above and around the provider, and how to incorporate this knowledge and wisdom into our boundary work.
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Your Takeaways
Visual and didactic lectures rich with examples and clear delineation of concepts to introduce you to the surprising nature of true boundary work;
Opportunities to practice and explore between lectures your relationship with boundaries, boundary setting, the impact of boundaries on relationships, and the internal backlash when we do and don’t set boundaries;
Weekly live meetings with Dr. Barre to get your questions answered, present examples, participate in demonstrations to work through challenges in boundary setting;
Lifetime access to all recordings and materials.
Meet your instructor
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Meet your instructor ✳
About Dr. Robin Barre
Dr. Robin Barre has 30 years of experience working with adolescents in various settings, from teaching high school and middle school to running a private practice. She is a Level 3 trained certified Internal Family Systems therapist and IFS Institute approved consultant. Dr. Barre earned her MA degrees in counseling and depth psychology, as well as her Ph.D. in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Pulling from her extensive experience in the field and years of research, she is dedicated to helping caregivers, practitioners, and organizations improve the lives of the adolescents they serve by refining, developing, and deepening their knowledge and approach.
Brenda Littleton | Jungian Coach, Retired Professor of Graduate Studies in Education, Marriage Family Therapist
"Dr. Robin Barre is the foremost expert in adolescent psychology. As a psychologist, her applied research integrates life as a therapist, a teacher, a parent, a poet, a soul-seeker. Her experiences as a scholar and educator are not isolated from the real world. Instead, Robin’s intuitive, therapeutic work lives in day-to-day moments of personal transcendence, as she provides light and meaning for her clients’ pathway through challenging times of emotional chaos and psychological duress. As an advocate for the adolescent in all of us, she understands the forgotten language of this part of life, those bridge years in between childhood and in becoming an adult, and provides guidance into how to reclaim the exiled self. Working with Dr. Barre is an initiation into remembering the many blessings of one’s heart, soul, body and mind."