Up in Each Other’s Grill: Enmeshment in Family Systems

My two daughters playing in the summer snow on an epic cross-country road trip over 20 years ago. While they have always been very close, they are also very different little monkeys. What a privilege it is to be part of their journey.

Summer is the season of family vacations. It’s when parents herd their brood into planes, trains and automobiles to visit extended family, force feed culture or nature’s wonders on unsuspecting children or to isolate themselves in cabin in the woods.

As such, I thought it might be a perfect time to review some common family patterns that may be causing stress or distress to one or more members.

I introduced the basic concepts of Bowen’s Family systems in my post about The Legacy of War on Family System, but I think each concept bears a little more scrutiny.

Enmeshment

Let’s start with enmeshment. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, enmeshment is  “a condition in which two or more people, typically family members, are involved in each other’s activities and personal relationships to an excessive degree, thus limiting or precluding healthy interaction and compromising individual autonomy and identity.”

Enmeshment in family systems is a result of trauma, either in your generation, or in past generations. That means it may require looking at previous generations to see when the family system began to close in on itself.

Gentle Reminder: I invite you to investigate these patterns through the lens of compassionate curiosity. Enmeshment is just one strategy that families use to deal with stress. Like all protective strategies born out of trauma, it works until it doesn’t. Then we are faced with the terrible gift of having to dig deep into the genesis of the enmeshment to break old family patterns.  

How to Spot Enmeshment

Though it can appear in as many different ways as there are families, here are a few examples of how enmeshment can manifest in families. They are all separate concepts in Bowen Family Systems and will be covered in future posts.

Cut off

Your sister just got engaged to the guy you hoped would take a long walk off a short pier. You don’t like him and don’t think he’s good for her. You tell her so and she accuses you of jealousy and disinvites you from the wedding. You don’t speak for ten years.

Lack of Differentiation

The younger sibling goes along with whatever the oldest sibling says or does. They’re constantly monitoring the older siblings: If someone in the family system is anxious, so will they be. They have no idea what they like or want for their life. (see White Lotus season 3 for an extreme example of this)

Your family has high expectations of you. Everyone in your family is a doctor and they expect that you become one too, despite the fact that the sight of blood makes you faint and you’ve spent all leisure hours since you were five with your fingers deep in paint. When you tell them you want to be an artist, they get very angry and threaten to cut you off financially and not pay for your schooling.

Triangulation

Your parents are always fighting. After the fight, your mom comes to you to rant about how terrible your dad is. Sometimes she tells you intimate details you’d rather not know. Still, you feel for her and try to comfort her the best way you can. You feel resentment towards your father for always causing your mother such pain.

Lack of Clear Roles in the System

Your mom likes to say she’s more like your best friend than your mom. You’re so close you share clothes and do everything together, including talking about romantic relationships. She never disciplines you or calls you out on anything.

You dad is an alcoholic and barely functional. Mom is always at work trying to pay the bills. It falls to you to take care of your siblings and make sure Dad doesn’t do anything foolish.

Examples of Enmeshment on TV

 Stories are how we make meaning of our own humanity—sometimes they mirror our own lived experience. Other times, they give us a window into the experience of others’: how it feels to be a refugee from a war-torn country (The Brutalist), or a high school football player (Friday Night Lights), or a small Maori kid living in a small reserve in rural New Zealand (Boy).

Immersing myself in these stories allow me to expand my understanding of what it means to be human. It shows me that even with our considerable differences, we all face the same existential givens of wanting to feel love, belonging, freedom and meaning in our lives.

Stories also provide really juicy examples to illustrate certain psychological concepts and dysfunctional behaviour patterns and dynamics. I mean, who wants to watch a story where everybody behaves perfectly all the time? In that spirit, here are a few examples I could think of off the top of my head that illustrate ways enmeshment shows up in family systems. If you have other good examples, let me know!

Sibling enmeshment

 Bad Sisters: The five Garvey sisters are hopelessly entangled in each other’s lives, to the point of plotting the death of the second eldest’s abusive, sociopath husband.

 Shameless: I only saw the American version but I’m sure the British one is the same. It depicts how another five siblings figure out how to raise themselves and pay the bills while their feral, alcoholic father thwarts their attempts at safety and stability at every turn. What happens to one sibling, happens to them all.

Both of these examples feature an oldest sister who becomes the default parent when the parents are either dead or unavailable. The oldest sister tends to sacrifice her own life to make sure her siblings are going to be okay.

Parent-Child Enmeshment

Gilmore Girls: While many aspects of their mother-daughter relationship resonated with my own daughters and myself, there is not much space for independence and autonomy between Lorelei and Rory (Lorelei II- her mom named her after herself). Lorelei often exclaims how she and her daughter are “best friends” and that she’s never had to discipline her daughter. That works until Rory does something that threatens Lorelei’s idea of what is good for Rory and then the proverbial poop hits the fan.

Grey Gardens: Now going to non-fiction, another example of a mother who names her daughter after herself, Grey Gardens is a 1975 documentary (and then a 2009 Hollywood film) about Big Edith and Little Edie Bouvier, the aunt and cousin of Jackie Onassis. They lived together in a huge sprawling mansion in increasing squalor and poverty until they were both old women.

You’re Cordially Invited: I recently watched this light romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell on the plane. While the Reese Witherspoon character is a good example of sibling enmeshment, trying to make sure her little sister has the best wedding ever, the real prize for total enmeshment goes to the Will Ferrell  character and his daughter, Jim and Jenni Caldwell. Having lost his wife when his daughter was young, he has poured all his energy into his daughter. This, of course, comes to a head when she decides to get married and he is now not the most important man in his daughter’s life.

A Close Family vs. an Enmeshed Family

Many enmeshed families mistake themselves for “close”. But there is a difference between emotionally close and imitating the Borg.

An enmeshed family is one that tries to control each member’s individual growth, autonomy and independence (see above).

A close family is one supports each member’s individual growth, autonomy and independence. Parents want kids to reach their full potential, but don’t dictate how that looks like. If the parents have a disagreement, they don’t bring the kids into it, but try to resolve it between themselves. There are clear, set roles and boundaries between parent and child. Siblings respect each other’s journeys, even though their sibling’s choices may make them uncomfortable.

This is, of course, the ideal: no family is perfect. We all have a little enmeshment because, well, we’re human. Love means always being frightened of losing your loved ones and when we’re afraid, a typical response is to cling to the familiar. We try to control them so that we don’t have to feel the desperate fear of losing them or the discomfort of having the system’s homeostasis disrupted. Ironically, by trying to control them is how we often lose them and by attempting to avoid all turbulence we usually navigate ourselves into disastrous storms.

Exercise:

Go for a walk or use the following questions as journal prompts. Even better, sit down with a trusted friend or partner and ask each other these  questions.

• When you think about your family of origin can you recognise enmeshment? How did it manifest in your family? How did it affect you?

• Now think of your current relationships. How do those patterns show up in your present life? When did the fear of losing someone trigger a control response in you? When did it trigger a distancing response?

Now take a deep breath. Hand on chest. Give yourself some love. Loving people is scary business and it is natural to try to hold on in the only ways we know how.

Then take another breath and remind yourself that love means being invested in your loved one’s growth. They’re on their own journey and it’s a privilege to bear witness to it.

Then take another breath and turn your attention to your own life. What are your hopes and dreams? What do you need to pay more attention to make those come true? Draw a square and divide it into four. Label the 4 squares:

1.     Mind (learning, thinking, growing),

2.     Body (fitness, rest, nutrition, etc.),

3.     Heart (love, quality of relationship to yourself and others) and

4.     Spiritual (connection with essence, purpose and meaning).

 Write what you are currently doing to foster well-being in each quadrant. Is one quadrant less full than others? What can you do to ensure each quadrant is a priority?

 Enmeshment is another way we stray out of our emotional lane and into those of others. Learning to pay attention to our own emotional responses and our own well-being is a first step in breaking enmeshment patterns. Because if you can be okay when others are not, then you won’t feel the need to fix or control them— you can simply be there to hold their hand as they work their way through it.