3 Steps In Breaking the Bonds of Enmeshment

The bonds of enmeshment can be quite confusing.

Have you ever felt disloyal to a parent for simply growing up or moving away? For wanting to make decisions on your own? Even for having your own life?

It’s a crazy feeling. And very confusing. Because everything on the surface looks great. It looks to others like a deep love between parent and child. While on the inside for the “child”, it feels much more like a responsibility to that parent – to be who they need you to be.

The dynamic is called enmeshment. And it’s a huge problem – because that loyalty to your parent – that message that you’re their “person” means you’re not supposed to leave them. That’s not always a spoken expectation. But even if you move, your duty is still to remain available.

 

What’s the difference between empty nest and enmeshment? 

 Most parents want their kids to launch – to go out into the world with the skills they’ve hopefully learned at home, at school, at work … and succeed.

And some parents will need to grieve that now, their nest is empty – or emptying.

So if you’re the “child,” you might hear from those parents:

“What am I going to do without you?”

“I love you so much and I can’t stand to think of not having you around.”

These can sound like a stage of separation – or a transition that is often tough for a parent.

And of course, that can be exactly what it is. A transition.

Your job is never finished when the bonds of enmeshment remain… 

But what if it’s not? What if a parent can emotionally rely so heavily on a child that encouragement or even permission to build their own life – away from the parent – is never given? In its most serious form, this kind of enmeshment – literally (if you’re the child) your life is never separated from your parent’s life – if it remains your “job” to be there for them . I

It’s enmeshed. Overly-connected. And it can feel like your job will never end.

Why?

Because you don’t actually have the ability to make your parent happy in the long haul. They are the only one that can do that.

The irony of enmeshment…

The irony of enmeshment is – to others – it can look like an incredible bond of caring.

Yet all along, it’s more about manipulation and a parent’s need…. a

I lived enmeshment out with my mom. And I remember well when my therapist said, “Your mom is never going to give you permission to leave or to grow away from her.”

Again, my mom wasn’t preventing me literally from having my own life.

But she called… a lot. (Texting wasn’t a thing yet.. I shudder to think about how much contact there would’ve been if it had been.) She called multiple times a day – I’d get home and there would be several messages – all loving. “Just wondered how that test went.” Or, “Call me when you get home. Can’t wait to hear how work went today.”

But the message might also be:

“I thought you were going to get back with me today. I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I hope you’ll remember to call…”

Or: “Dad and I have been fighting. And I really need to talk with you because you’re the only one who understands how I feel.”

People can even say, “I wish I had a mom (or dad) like yours, who really cared about me.” What they don’t hear or see is how stuck you are in the relationship – and how it’s inhibiting your ability to live your own life.

If you’re connecting with this, you’re among many people who have experienced enmeshment with a parent. But it can also be with a friend or a partner. That lack of boundary – feeling as if you don’t have your own identity in the relationship is one of the problems. Maybe you’re always accommodating to your friend’s needs – or your partner isn’t okay with you having a separate life from theirs.

3 steps to break the bonds of enmeshment…

The first is awareness – almost a relabeling of your relationship. You can begin to see how what started out as you filling a special role as child for a parent – not a sexual one, but an emotional one – has become a heavier burden for you to carry.

You have to fight a sense of disloyalty for questioning what has been labeled for you as a deep love that that parent has for you. That’s when you may need some professional help to see how this dynamic affected your own life. And

The second step is realizing how your own growth as an individual has been hampered by such a dynamic between you and that parent. Maybe it’s hard for you to make your own decisions, even the tiniest of them. Maybe your “closeness” to that parent has replaced or gotten in the way of you creating intimate relationships or friendships with others. It’s important then to not only be aware, but to see how you might’ve developed a kind of dependence on that parent – that now, you want to change.

The third step is slowly beginning to disentangle yourself from your parent’s expectations. You’re not going to get permission for this necessarily. But you can begin to pull away from their heavy involvement in your life. Maybe you’d not always include them in things for example. At the same time, you can begin to create and build other relationships in your life that can act as support, to lessen contact so that it’s more manageable, and to challenge whatever voices you might inwardly hear that are labeling your “disentanglement” as “abandonment.”

By the way… 

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