What an Actual Therapist Thinks of Jonah Hill's ‘Boundaries’ Texts

Jonah Hill has proven himself to be, like every celebrity, predictably bizarre. Over the weekend, his ex-girlfriend, professional surfer Sarah Brady, released screenshots of text messages she received from him during their relationship. In them, Hill emphasizes his “boundaries” and his unwavering commitment to them. These boundaries don’t quite relate to his behavior, though: rather, they were entirely about dictating Brady’s. Some of his requirements included that she’s not to perform her job—surfing—with men, have certain friendships with them, post bikini photos, model, or spend time with women from her “recent wild past.” He told her that if she needed those things, “I am not the right partner for you. If these things bring you to a place of happiness I support it and there will be no hard feelings. These are my boundaries for romantic partnership.”

The entire dialogue is so crowded with therapy terminology and personal details of their relationship that it feels impossible to parse. And as outsiders, maybe we aren’t supposed to. Nevertheless, people have tried, debating whether his requirements were appropriate or akin to emotional abuse—the case of an over-therapized man who has learned to weaponize this sort of psychological language to his own ends. Perhaps it’s such a hot topic because it highlights bigger questions, too, about our lives: What boundaries do we have in analyzing the relationships of strangers? What boundaries might be crossed in sharing these intimate details of a relationship after it’s ended? What the hell is a boundary, anyway?

Rather than leave these questions purely up to the debate of social media, I decided to speak with a professional who is well-versed in both other people’s romantic strife and the world of therapy. Here, psychotherapist Toby Ingham, author of Retroactive Jealousy, Making Sense of It, explains why Hill, in fact, needed to do a better job of setting boundaries—and that maybe online, we all do, too. 

VICE: From your perspective, are these texts an appropriate example of “boundary-setting” as one might learn it in therapy?
Toby Ingham: I think that boundaries are a good thing. Most relationships work better when we do know what the boundaries are, what we're comfortable with, and what other people are comfortable with. And when we cross those things, then things can become more complicated. And often, people are in therapy because they need to get a better sense of how to have boundaries, so they can stop jumping into relationships with people too quickly or stop doing things they feel they shouldn't do without more thought. So I think boundaries by themselves are not the bad guy here. 

Does Hill appear to be someone with strong boundaries?
It’s complicated because of what she does in her career and on social media. You need to be as clear as you can at the beginning of relationships about what you think works and doesn't work for you. For example, I've written a book about retroactive jealousy. In that book, I explain that when relationships start, there's a bit of a tendency for people—particularly with social media—to ask the other person all about their past relationships. At the beginning of relationships these days, a lot of people will tell people all kinds of things “I had these many lovers, we did this kind of thing.”  But down the road, that material becomes a problem. People become very stirred up often about what they know about the past that they'd rather would not know. 

In a case like this, when things started—man meets surfer—it would have been better to have tried to be as stable and clear about what works and what doesn't, because obviously, it would seem that that pushes certain buttons that were difficult for the relationship to contain. 

One way in which I read the texts, and the way it's been reported, is that it did seem that there was a lot of anger and bitterness that was coming out after a relationship had ended. It seems to me that the kind of mainspring of the conflicts that have driven Jonah's ex-partner to release these kinds of bits of information was perhaps more to do with a relationship breaking down.

So my concern with him is that I think he's someone who probably does better when they are clear about the boundaries they live within, and they are clear about what they like and don't like. And I would guess that this kind of a story about the anger and upset that’s surfacing really speaks to his own emotional instability. 

Some people seem to be saying that this is a case of a man who has had too much therapy. Have you noticed any sort of backlash to therapy in your practice?
There's certainly a backlash around a kind of “woke culture” and around people taking care of themselves, people standing up for themselves. In terms of the backlash against therapy, there's always been a history of people who have been suspicious of the way in which therapy might encourage certain people to feel empowered to complain about things that happened to them in the past. From the beginnings of Freud and seduction theory, that's always been the story. Therapy is a very individual and personal thing. It's like a lot of relationships—it's hard to understand from the outside. But I think really, therapy takes place in a confidential, very boundaried setting, and it's within that intimate place that work occurs. 

How exactly do you define a boundary in your work?
I start with some facts. If people come to see me, the boundaries are the framework of the session. So that's 50 minutes, and it’s whatever it costs on a weekly basis, and it’s about the person I'm working with. It involves internalizing the consistency of that relationship in those factors: time, date, etc. A boundary, in a therapy sense, is a real framework that contains arguments and emotional questions in a safe, confidential way. And I think from there, what happens in therapy is that people start to internalize that and start to deploy those things in their own lives. I think therapy in large part is a modeling of a consistent framework. So I suppose I think about boundaries in that way, as real things.

With therapy often being a place with its own specified boundaries, is it appropriate for a person to take the language and work of therapy and apply it to other settings in the way Hill seems to be doing here?
I think that’s an interesting question. To slightly digress, it did seem to me that the film that Jonah Hill made about his therapist was a bit of an unboundaried project. I could see that that was a benign relationship that he would want to speak very well of, but I personally felt it's very difficult to take a therapy relationship out of a consulting room. Therapy relationships really only work in consulting rooms. Sometimes people will email me to say they want to raise a question about what happened in therapy, and I'll say, look, the email isn't the place for this. The only place that I'm really able to be a therapist is in a consulting room for 50 minutes. 

The insights and the work that happens in therapy is intimate, it's confidential. In this case of these messages, you're seeing people really casting anger and accusations onto social media. That’s anything but boundaried and confidential. But I wouldn't say someone's had too much therapy or that they're using words like boundaries inappropriately. I would guess that there might be a way of being a bit more judicious, being more thoughtful and trying to keep things in check. 

What might being more judicious look like?
I would think it would look like keeping your mouth shut. If we're going to take the idea that boundaries are healthy things, then once we've learned that we're the kind of people that can step across boundaries and we've learned that our lives are more stable when we stay within boundaries, remembering that in all situations is paramount. That would mean not reacting—the more one reacts, the more you provoke further commentary further, and then you and I end up talking about it. The more reaction that happens, the more the boundaries get stirred up.

What is it about this story that makes us all sort of want to play therapist?
Social media doesn't really have boundaries, does it? By its nature, it kind of goes everywhere; it spreads. As soon as things get into the media, that kind of hunger for content becomes natural and we comment on it. The story seems to me like it's kind of an old one, that there's conflict and upset and hurt between old partners. And because of social media, that's being played out on that forum. But it's an old story, isn't it? It's an old story of love broken down.