Enmeshment
We all want to feel close to the people we love. We want healthy and intimate relationships with our partners or significant others. We want to be close to our kids if we have them, caring and protecting them and wanting them to look up to us for guidance and support. Most of us want a good relationship with our elders, so we maintain a connection to our heritage and our past. On some level, we want to connect and get along with everyone that comes into our lives, be it briefly or long term.
While many feel distant and disconnected these days, our relationships separated by distance or defined by technology more than at any other time in history, there seems to be a backlash that is driving some relationships to become unhealthily attached, almost as a protective factor. When people become overly attached to loved ones, this is known as enmeshment.
Enmeshment is defined as a relationship with certain characteristics that reject the notion of the individual. In our increasingly individualistic and self obsessed culture, it is healthy to focus on community and collective care and action. However, for some relationships this idea has morphed into an over correction.
Enmeshed relationships are those that have extremely blurred or non existent boundaries. They are marked by over sharing, a lack of physical, psychological or emotional space and separation, and an unwillingness to encourage autonomous decision making and identity development. The ideas, behaviours and feelings of people in enmeshed relationships mirror and dictate each other’s without examination or opportunity for making self-determined decisions.
Enmeshment prevents people from developing their own identity, which becomes shaped by the most privileged and powerful people in the relationship. Or they lose whatever identity they do have. For example, children are sometimes shaped so strongly by their parents and caregivers, they don’t learn how to think critically or make informed choices. They avoid taking risks and making mistakes, and learn to be told what to do rather than take responsibility and be accountable for their own independent thoughts and actions. This isn’t guidance, it’s control.
Adults in enmeshed relationships learn to appease others. They become conditioned to ignore their own intuition and preferences, and instead focus more on being liked and accepted. This isn’t belonging, it’s people pleasing, conformity and submission.
When relationships become enmeshed, there is a strong sense of obligation to abandon the self and assimilate into the group, or at least the ways of the most dominating forces in the group. When there are signs that this has not occurred and a person has asserted their independence and autonomy in any way, there are consequences. These can manifest in feelings of guilt and obligation, but sometimes they can also result in actual punishment like being castigated or excluded from the group.
Enmeshment can happen intergenerationally and can be the result of persecution, adversity and a lack of privilege. Group think is a survival skill that humans have evolved over millennia, to ensure collective care taking, resource distribution and equity. Enmeshment is tipping the scales too far, ignoring the needs and wellbeing of the individual to prioritise the success of the collective.
While community and collective care taking are immensely important, it is vital to allow people to develop into autonomous individuals too. A consequence of enmeshed relationships is that responsibilities for care taking and decision making fall on a small number of people which can result in an authoritarian culture. Eventually, people tasked with “ruling” become exhausted and make poor decisions for the group anyway, their choices becoming more reactive, less considered for collective benefit, and increasingly self serving.
Those in the group who are too enmeshed in the relationships with dominant members can experience decision paralysis. They not only lack opportunities to make autonomous and informed decisions, when they are required to do so, lack the skills and motivation to care.
There are many ways to counter enmeshment in relationships to achieve a healthy balance between closeness and independence. The first step is identifying when a relationship is becoming or has developed from the start as enmeshed. Signs like a lack of privacy, regular instances of coercive control and a vivid hierarchy that gives one person or group more power than others in the relationship, can indicate that enmeshment exists.
Once this has been identified and all members of the group have been made aware, steps can be taken to unravel the entanglements that have become destructive, oppressive and unhealthy.
Counselling can support you to address the existence and impacts of enmeshed relationships. It is beneficial to have an objective observer to witness the dynamic of unhealthy relationships and support members to experience and express their concerns so all parties are accommodated.
The priority of a therapeutic Counselling alliance is to ensure safety and care taking when sensitive processes are taking place to facilitate a transition marked by growth, mutual benefit and preservation of the relationship through that change. This means that rupture and repair can take place. Rupture or dissolution of the toxic version of the relationship, and the repair, evolution and creation of a new way of relating that maintains the whole while promoting the wellbeing of all of its parts.
Couples (intimate or other) and group Counselling is available at DHM Counselling for the cost of only the duration of the session. It is not charged per person. If you require support around a relationship you believe has become enmeshed, that you want to preserve and evolve, I will be happy to support you.
I look forward to meeting you.
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