If you're at all involved in the field of psychology
or self-help, or even spirituality
chances are you have heard the term enmeshment
or at the very least, enmeshment trauma.
Today, in this episode
I'm going to explain to you what exactly enmeshment is,
and also explain to you
some of the most common effects that enmeshment trauma causes.
Enmeshment
I want you to imagine a child who's sitting in a high chair;
when mom is trying to feed this child,
this child is not hungry,
but mom is not going to accept the truth of:
"I'm not hungry",
and so she takes that spoon and just shoves it in the child's mouth anyway.
Now I want you to imagine a father;
This father really wants significance and status,
but, by proxy.
He wants his daughter to go to an Ivy League school
and to become a doctor.
So, he puts incredible amounts of pressure on her to do just that,
and so she does.
She ends up getting all straight A's
she ends up going to an Ivy League College,
she ends up a doctor, and not very happy at that,
because she doesn't even know
if that's what she wants to do in the first place.
Now I want you to imagine
that a woman's husband is absent emotionally and physically,
but she's got a son,
so she decides to make this son her surrogate husband;
She leans on him emotionally and tells him all of her secrets,
and calls him her best friend.
Suddenly, he feels torn because he finds himself in a situation
where he's filling a role
that's both threatening and feeling all wrong to him.
Only, he feels he has no way out of it,
but he also loves that specialness
and importance that being in that role guarantees him.
There are so many examples I could sit here and give to you
on top of the ones I just gave you,
but what they will all have in common
is that in this family dynamic,
there is no recognition of self within this family.
There is no healthy autonomy.
Autonomy, which is having a sense of self versus other,
is an important part of physical existence
for a person within a social group.
What people need is to be able to have themselves
and have other people too at the very same time.
Most people like to think of boundaries
like a fence in between themselves and others,
themselves and the rest of the world.
This is not a really great way of thinking about boundaries.
It's better to think about boundaries like a definition, right?
So, I want you to imagine that we are floating in this sea of energy,
everything is energy.
It looks sort of like static on a television screen.
And all of a sudden,
you start to see definition within the static,
so that images start to appear within the static.
When an image starts to differentiate itself
from the rest of the static,
then that is essentially, what a "boundary" is.
It is a "self" being defined from "other".
Therefore, it's better to think about boundaries
as that which defines you relative to everything else.
A boundary is the imaginary line that uniquely defines
your personal happiness,
your personal feelings, your personal thoughts,
your personal integrity, your personal desires,
your personal needs, and therefore most importantly,
your personal truth from the rest of the universe.
If you want to understand boundaries on a deeper level,
you can watch my video titled:
Personal Boundaries vs. Oneness (How to Develop Healthy Boundaries)
In an enmeshed relationship, personal boundaries are permeable,
undifferentiated and unclear.
an emeshed family or enmeshed relationship
does not recognize boundaries.
There's no real recognition or honoring
of a person's or any members within this type of a dynamic
personal feelings,
personal thoughts, personal wishes,
personal desires, personal truth.
In fact, in an enmeshed dynamic
differentiating yourself
from the other person or the other people in this circumstance
creates consequences.
Consequences such as punishment or abandonment.
So, the result is:
you either choose those consequences and allow yourself to be controlled,
or in order to maintain harmony in the relationship and closeness,
you have to give yourself up,
and mirror the other person.
What I mean by mirror the other person,
is you give yourself up
so that your feelings, or your thoughts,
or your desires, or your personal truth
either is the exact same as theirs,
or is what they want those things to be.
The payoff that happens in these enmeshed relationships
is often an enhanced sense of belonging in the relationship.
But that enhanced or intensified sense of belonging
comes at a serious price.
Most parents who are alive today
have children because they imagine that having a child
is going to meet some need of theirs.
The problem is, is that a child
is born with an autonomous self, right?
They're born with their own thoughts,
they're born with their own feelings,
they're born with their own destiny, even.
They're born of their own personal truth.
And so, the child very rarely
conforms to meeting whatever need
the parent thought the child was gonna meet
when they had the child.
To be completely honest with you,
this is a recipe for disaster.
To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled:
The Defective Doll
If a person is enmeshed in their adult relationship,
that adult relationship isn't really where you need to be looking.
You need to be looking at their childhood relationships,
because this is a style of relating to other people
that they have learned in their childhood.
Enmeshment is almost always an element of dysfunctional families.
Here's the sad part:
We're living in a day and age
where actually most families are dysfunctional.
Not functional.
In fact, our current definition of "normal parenting"
is actually dysfunctional parenting.
Most parents today still see a child
as something that belongs to them.
"It's mine!"
Rather like a child is a ball of clay
and it's up to the parents
how to mold that clay into what they want that clay to become.
Most of the time this is really more about their best interest,
than their child's best interests.
I know that that's going to trigger a lot of you when I say that
and it's probably going to elicit a lot of defense from people
who want to defend their family,
or people who want to defend their own parenting,
but the reality is that the majority of the time
when parents are trying to mold a kid
into what they want the kid to become
it's actually for their best interest, not the kid's best interest.
No parent who is creating enmeshment trauma for their child
will actually know or even admit to the fact that they're doing this,
instead, they're going to think and say
that everything that they're doing
they're doing for their child's best interests.
Now this becomes an active gaslight for the child.
Why?
Because the parent is doing things that are hurting the kid.
All these things don't feel good,
and yet I'm being told as a child,
that they're for my own best interests.
Right? So, any child who's put in that type of a situation
is gonna feel gaslit.
And not only that,
they're gonna learn two things;
The first is:
"Love must mean pain",
and the second is:
"To love means to give myself up".
Right? "It means sacrificing my needs and wants and truth for another person".
At a certain point in childhood
it is absolutely critical to step into the empowerment
of a sense of autonomy.
This is really what a child's doing
when they go through that "NO!" phase.
Right? They're exercising their own personal boundaries.
They're sorting through the contrast in the world
to figure out how they are feeling,
as opposed to how mom is feeling,
or how the dog is feeling.
Right?
They're sorting through the world in order to figure out
what they like and don't like.
That's a really critical element in a personal development.
So when we're dealing with enmeshment trauma,
what we're actually dealing with is developmental trauma.
It's that autonomy was not allowed
to develop in a healthy way within this person.
If a parent does not recognize and mirror
and work with instead of against that process of differentiation,
a child has to try to establish a sense of himself or herself
despite the parent.
The problem is that human beings...
we're a relationally dependent species.
I mean, completely.
That means the number one need we have is actually
closeness with the social group.
So is a kid going to maintain a sense of autonomy
despite their parent?
Usually not.
Usually what's going to happen
when the parent makes autonomy an enemy to himself or herself,
is the child will opt to get rid of themself,
or their autonomous identity
and they will not differentiate
specifically to maintain rapport and closeness with the parent.
At a biological level,
we know that what we risk for upsetting our parents
is our actual survival.
This means that if a parent does not see,
or sees but turns against a child's self,
most children will abandon the self in favor of closeness to that parent.
But this child never goes on to develop a core and a sense of self.
This child becomes an adult who loses himself or herself in relationships.
As a result, this person experiences a deep need for relationships
but at the same time he or she pushes people away,
because having no strong sense of self and therefore autonomy,
he or she feels rather like he or she is disappearing
or being consumed by the other person.
That she or he is in a relationship with.
It's a very emotionally claustrophobic experience.
When a person has not actually developed a healthy sense of self,
what happens to them in their adult relationships
is really one of two things;
All people who have no real strong sense of self,
gravitate towards people who have a strong sense of self.
Now, these people can fit into two categories:
Dangerous & Not So Dangerous.
If a person who experiences enmeshment trauma
gravitates towards the not so dangerous category
of strong personality people,
they're still going to give away themselves
even though, nobody including this strong willed personality person
or person with a strong core, didn't ask them to give themselves away,
they're going to do it anyway.
Because they've already learned to do that.
So, let's say that this person who had enmeshment trauma
gets into a relationship with somebody who drives harley-davidsons;
Maybe that person isn't really a mean person,
isn't really a narcissist,
doesn't really care whether they are really into harley davidsons or not,
this person is still going to get into a relationship with them,
get into harley-davidson's,
drop everything else that they're doing,
and then later, get mad about it.
They're going to be like:
"Well I gave up everything that I was for you and for motorcycles",
when it was never actually something that they were asked to do.
So, that's one path.
The other path is:
They're going to find their way back into a relationship with a narcissist.
With somebody where the actual expectation in that relationship
is "you do give yourself up in fact".
And then, they're just expected to do the same thing with that person
that they did in childhood.
People with enmeshment trauma
have learned a codependent style of relationship.
They're at war with themselves,
because all at once,
they want to be the same as the other person
so as to establish closeness with them,
but also to push them away and define themselves as different
because they crave a sense of self and independence.
They are constantly trapped
between the thoughts and feelings of others,
and their own thoughts and feelings.
The wants and needs of others,
and their own wants and needs.
The personal truth of others,
and their own personal truth.
They see intimacy as deeply needed but also as a serious threat.
So, it's quite common
that when you're involved with somebody who has enmeshment trauma
that it's going to feel like a constant push and pull.
So like we said before,
enmeshment trauma is in fact a developmental trauma, right?
It's that a person was not able to develop,
in a healthy way or a normal way,
a sense of separate self.
If you are somebody who has experienced enmeshment trauma,
it's going to be a process,
because it is a developmental issue,
to learn what you actually should have learned early in childhood,
but now in your adult life,
to learn how to have a relationship where you can have yourself
at the same time as being in relationship with other people.
Because chances are,
if you came from this type of a situation,
you can only feel a strong sense of self
in one or another scenario;
Here's what it looks like:
Either you can only feel yourself when you're totally alone,
or you can only feel your self when you're in a relationship,
but, opposed to someone.
Meaning, you've got to be in conflict with them,
or setting yourself apart from them,
or pushing against something, to even feel like you have a boundary.
Now, both isolation so you can feel yourself,
and opposition so you can feel yourself,
leads to suffering.
In order to heal from enmeshment trauma
you must do what you were never able to do in childhood,
which is to actually develop a healthy sense of self.
Or what we would call "a core".
This means, developing boundaries,
learning how to have the self within the context of relationship,
without resorting to either codependent or narcissistic strategies.
Obviously, this process goes much better
when the entire family is involved
in altering the way that each member relates to the other,
so that each can have a sense of self
and maintain closeness with each other too.
To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled:
Family (The Truth About Family)
But when this is not possible,
this can be done within a friendship or within a partnership.
Again, if you're doing this within a friendship or a partnership
it's best if the other person is involved in this process too.
It's pretty important that they understand
that you've got some developmental trauma.
Right? Because they're going to be participating and helping you
to have a sense of self within the relationship.
This process of working to define yourself,
means figuring out what you feel and think and like and dislike
and need and want,
and then, making changes
to determine the course of action that best suits your needs
and communicating effectively with the other person too.
Don't forget that healing from enmeshment
which is really an extreme form of codependency,
doesn't mean swinging the pendulum all the way to the opposite side
and becoming narcissistic, where it's all about "me and I".
That's not what it's about.
What it's about is really powerfully learning to define
your personal feelings, thoughts,
needs, wants, preferences, truths...
Right?
At the same time as recognizing
that other people also have their own feelings, thoughts,
needs, preferences, truths.
And everything that you do impacts them,
the same way that everything they do impacts you.
So, it's about there being two in a relationship,
not just one.
If you have enmeshment trauma,
it's always been one person in a relationship.
That's whoever you had to enmesh yourself to, right?
We don't want to swing the pendulum
where all there is in the relationship now, is you.
It's about two.
The scary reality if you have suffered from enmeshment trauma,
is that you're not actually living an authentic life.
If you were not allowed to develop a healthy sense of self
and you didn't really know what your personal feelings
and thoughts and desires and needs
and purpose and truth was,
then how can you expect yourself to have made the right decisions
for you specifically, up to this point?
The reality is, you probably made a lot of decisions
and changed a lot about your life
based on something that's not actually real about you
or true to you.
You could have chosen relationships
with people who are not actually compatible to you.
Now, this is both terrifying for you and other people in your life.
It means that becoming authentic
may imply many many changes to your life.
Changes that will affect you and everyone around you.
But, life satisfaction
which could be the only reason you're watching this video right now,
is really only possible
on the other side of deciding to live an authentic life.
It's on the other side of you powerfully figuring out
what your unique feelings, thoughts, needs, preferences, truths... are,
so that you can make the right decisions for you
in your life.
The good news is,
the life that you've always been looking for
and missing out on,
is on the other side of doing this.
Have a good week.
If you liked this video,
be sure to share it, like it and also subscribe to my channel
so you can see more content like this.
But I want to personally thank you for taking the initiative
and having the bravery to step into the space of awareness
not only for yourself,
but for the benefit of those around you.