- Hey everybody, happy Thursday.
Now today we're gonna talk about,
enmeshment and family dynamics.
But first, I know we have a lot of new people here, welcome.
And if you have a question or concern,
or if you're wondering if I've talked about it before,
just hop into the search bar on YouTube
and put in my name, Kati Morton,
and then some key words for your search, like,
toxic relationships, family issues, depression.
Eating disorders, whatever it is.
I have over 12 hundred videos, so chances are
I've talked about it already.
Okay, now today's question is,
how do you as an adult, not let your parents dictate
who you are as a person?
For example, my dad just told me that I'm worthless.
Now it triggers back to my past.
And I really like this question because I think
a lot of us can easily get pulled back into old ways
of thinking and acting.
For example, even a personal example of mine,
I remember when I used to go home for the holidays
after being at school all year when I was in college
and I would slide right back into old high school aged Kati.
My parents would try and tell me when I could leave
and what time I had to be back home,
and I would fight them, just like I did back in high school.
It was really crazy, and I remember thinking
after being home for a week that, wow, I'm doing exactly
what I used to do as a kid, why is that?
It's so uncomfortable.
And I used to fight with my mom and say
"But I've been doing this on my own for so long,
"I'm still alive, I'm still fine and you weren't there
"to look out for me when I was at school"
you know, the average stuff but I didn't for a second
take the time to consider that they were just worried.
And they didn't want me waking them up at 2.00am,
you know when I got back home.
And I need to be respectful of their home and space.
As an adult now, I totally see their point and I understand.
But childhood me, just couldn't see that
and it was easy even though I was getting older,
to slide right back in to like 16, 17, 18 year old Kati.
One of the reasons that I think this happens so often
and it's such a common thing, is that we can get stuck
in old stories or patterns.
I've been talking more and more about stories
and if you don't know what I mean by that,
it's kind like the story that we tell ourselves.
So what is it that being home, means to me,
and what is it I tell myself about that?
Does it mean that I am not independent?
Does it mean that I have to listen to my parents?
Does it mean that I wanna fight them?
I'm a certain type of myself, does that make sense?
I get stuck in these old narratives
and if a person says something, like the person
who answers questions that my dad just told me
that I'm worthless.
That certain scenario, that certain statement that was made
can fit right in to this old unhealthy,
maybe negative, story that I've been telling myself.
Maybe I agree, maybe I remember being a child
and not feeling like I was important enough.
And I go right back into that story
because it's comfortable, I know it well.
I know all the words, I know how I'm suppose to feel.
Do you see what I mean?
And it's so easy to get stuck in those.
And part of healing is often just recognizing the stories.
And knowing that we're the authors of our own stories
and we can change them.
A random thing I learned from Alexa,
who's a colleague of mine and she's a trauma specialist,
is that when we're going back to process a trauma,
we can often do it from a perspective of watching a movie.
And you can tell yourself that I'm the writer
and the director of this film and I have the ability
to change the outcome, so maybe in the story of our abuse
we felt completely helpless or hopeless.
But because now we're the author and the director
we can go in and be like, no, she's super strong,
she's been like working out.
Has this bat and she beats the shit out of the person
who's trying to abuse her and runs away.
We can totally change that.
Because the reason that we're continuing to struggle
with the trauma or continue to get stuck
in these old stories, is cause we're telling them
just the way we remember them.
We're not giving ourselves the opportunity
to change the narrative, and change our perspective on it.
And I know that can seem kinda like woo woo
but just trust me, it's really really healing.
And so just start to notice what stories
you might be telling yourself
that aren't serving you anymore.
Or you feel like it's holding you back.
Like that example when I went home for Christmas
of for the summer,
the story I was telling myself was my parents are my enemies
and I'm annoyed with them
and I want to do what I want to do.
It's that teen dynamic.
But I was getting stuck in that story
instead of realizing, hey, now that I've lived on my own
I know what it's like to have someone wake me up
in the middle of the night.
That's not really respectful of my space,
therefore that's not respectful of their space.
Just seeing things from a different perspective
and changing the narrative that I tell myself about it.
And I know that's kind of a silly example,
a lot of us are dealing with bigger issues,
but just taking the time to consider
which ones we're telling that are holding us back.
It could even be that we're always playing the victim,
maybe that's a story we tell ourselves,
that everyone's out to get us.
Or it could be that I don't have any power
or I'm not important.
Just try to think about it.
It's almost like that negative voice
that I talk about all the time.
Tracking those negative thoughts.
Those are all part of those negative stories,
so don't think these are two totally different things
they kind of work together.
And another thing that I just want to talk about
is the fact that we don't have control
over other people, at all.
We can't stop our parents from saying shitty things to us
or people in our lives from doing things
that we find hurtful.
We can only change ourselves and how we respond
or react to that.
And this is something that I've been working on
in my own life for years, and it's hard.
It just takes some time and patience.
I just want to tell you that so you don't think
that, I'm not getting this, it's so frustrating,
I'm trying so hard.
I'm doing the same thing and I still struggle.
But I just do my best to notice when I'm trying
to control someone else.
And this doesn't come in the regular form that you think.
I find that the way I do this most
is if they would just do, insert thing,
then I could do insert thing.
For instance, an example would be,
if they would just apologize then I could move on.
I can't control them.
Whether they apologize or not, it's not something
that I can actually make happen.
But you know what I can do?
I can choose to forgive them.
I can choose to not engage in that toxic relationship.
I can choose to keep the space and the boundaries up
that I feel are healthy, happy for myself.
There are things that I can do,
but I can't make them do anything.
So just trying to recognize that is really really beneficial
because going back to this question,
how do you let parents not dictate who you are,
when you're an adult?
They don't have control over you
and you don't have control over them.
You can't make your dad stop being an asshole
and saying that you're worthless.
That's just not something that we have the capability to do.
And that's just life, but we do have the choice
to engage with that person, or not.
Parent or not, it actually doesn't matter,
those are still relationships.
Even though they're our parents, when we're both adults
it's an adult relationship.
And there has to be communication, mutual respect.
There are things we need to have in relationships
in order for them to continue and be healthy.
So don't think that just 'cause they're a parent
you have to put up with them being a total garbage person.
You don't.
You can't control them, they can't control you.
And having those healthy boundaries is really
what will stop you from getting pulled back into
childhood you, like I was saying, teenage Kati.
The only way I can do that, is through mutual respect
communication and understanding of where my mom and dad end
and where I begin.
And overall just know that it's gonna take practice
and patience.
Recognizing those old stories can honestly be
some of the hardest parts of this recovery process.
Trust me, like I was saying, I've been working on
recognizing I don't have control over other people
for years and it's still difficult.
Also just paying attention to what we say to ourselves,
can be hard, because we often don't slow down
and tap in, we're just so busy going about our lives
that we don't recognize all the nasty things
that maybe we're telling ourselves and believing it's fact
even when we don't have the evidence to support it.
And also know that I recognize it can be hard
to come up with a new version of a story.
And that's something you can do in therapy.
It can be something you kind of bounce around the idea.
Well what could I do that would be more empowering
in this situation?
I just felt so helpless, I don't have anything
that I can think of.
That's what a therapist can help you with.
They can help you come up with different words,
or what if you did this?
And you can say, "No that doesn't feel authentic to me"
You can talk it out.
It's almost like white boarding a story line.
Maybe it goes this way?
I don't like that, that doesn't feel right.
Okay, what if it went this way?
Talk it out because it can be difficult
to come up with an alternative version
of those old unhealthy stories.
But you will get there, the more we try,
the more we recognize and the more we change slowly.
Maybe it's just a couple of things at a time,
the better we'll start to feel.
And the healthier of a distance we'll have
between old icky versions of ourselves
and unhealthy relationships maybe we're still engaged in.
And I just wanna mention this one last time,
so that you all hear it, because the boundaries
are so vital to this process, to this separation
from our parents or our caretakers,
and unhealthy relationships.
They're really important because we need distance
between us and the people who potentially trigger
or support those unhealthy stories
we're trying to get away from.
And if we continue to engage in an enmeshed way
that why so we're gonna talk about enmeshment
with this whole video, is, when we don't have boundaries
and we allow people to influence
how we think about ourselves and our situation, meaning,
when they say something like, you're worthless,
we accept it, we take it in as fact,
we internalize that, for better for worse.
And if so we're enmeshed we have no separation
from other people, how they feel, we feel.
How we feel, they feel.
What they say, we believe.
And what we say, they believe.
That's just not healthy.
In any stretch of the imagination,
that's not a healthy relationship.
Because we all need to have some sense of self,
some boundary.
We need to know, who we are, and be okay
with being ourselves, even when we're alone.
And so boundaries are so important to set up.
This can come, I know a lot of people
are like "Well how do I start with boundaries?
"I don't even know how to create those."
And the truth is, our brain and body already tell us
when they're being stepped on, or pushed.
Someone's coming up close to a boundary.
We can feel really uncomfortable.
We can feel on edge, we can feel irritable.
Some people even tell me that they just wanted to leave
they were like "I don't want to talk about that.
"I don't like that."
You don't want to engage in that conversation
or this situation as a whole, but you do anyway.
But that urge to get away, like fight, flight or freeze
if we feel any of those things, I'm angry or irritable
I kinda want to start a fight, I wanna leave,
I don't like this, or I'm shutting down, spacing out.
We all do those things right?
Those are signals within our body and our brain
to tell us that a boundary has been crossed,
or someone's getting really close to it
and we don't like that.
And that's okay.
It's okay if we're not able to walk away right away
or we aren't able to say, "you know what?
"I'm gonna go to the bathroom and I'll be back"
And we take a break, remove ourselves.
We'll get better at being able
to put these boundaries in place.
Sometimes I think the hardest part is recognizing
where they are.
And knowing that telling someone, "I'm not interested
"in this conversation" or, excusing yourself,
"I'm gonna go to the restroom"
"I'm just gonna go sit down, I'm feeling kinda tired"
any kind of excuse or thing we can, in this situation
we can make to get ourselves out of that,
is gonna take time to feel stronger and safer
saying those words.
But it's okay and that doesn't make you rude,
it doesn't mean that you're being aggressive.
It means you're being assertive.
You're recognizing where your boundaries should be
and you're working to place them there.
And it's always, it's like a muscle.
It's like a work in progress, we're gonna keep trying
but in order to stop ourselves from absorbing
what other people say and taking it as fact
and letting it trigger us and pull us back to our past,
we're gonna have to, lay these down.
We're gonna have to put boundaries in place
and hold them up and I have a ton of
videos about boundaries.
If you were wanting to watch more,
like I said at the beginning you can put
Kati Morton into the search bar on YouTube
and put boundaries in.
All of the boundary videos I have will come up
and hopefully that will help you better understand
and navigate this because trust me,
having healthy boundaries in place when it comes to
any relationship in our life can be
completely life changing and give us the space we need
to create new and healthier stories about ourselves.
Hope you find that helpful.
And I know I can't talk about everything
and think of everyone's scenario, so I'd love
if in the comments down below, you share
what's helped you get distance from those
in your lives that are unhealthy.
Or how you found yourself, being able to helpfully
separate from your parents.
'Cause maybe they say things that just aren't very nice.
Let us know in those comments down below
and I will see you next time.
Bye.
(gentle music)