Enmeshment
Family relationships so close and porous that individual boundaries, privacy and difference are not tolerated; members are expected to feel and think alike.
What drives it
Manages anxiety about separation and difference; a parent's need for closeness or control is met through the child.
How it shows
Work
Takes the team's mood as their own; struggles to say no; is drawn to companies that call themselves a family and then feels betrayed by them; may treat disagreement, including from reports, as disloyalty.
Relationships
Parents involved in an adult child's choice of partner, money and daily decisions; calls several times a day; the partner of the enmeshed person feels outnumbered; guilt follows every limit set.
Self
You can't tell where your feelings end and your parent's begin, and distance feels like betrayal.
What tells it apart
Fusion versus intimacy: Intimacy tolerates difference; fusion and enmeshment treat it as a threat. Ask what happens when someone disagrees: in close but differentiated families, it's allowed.
Emotional cutoff: Cutoff is often the other face of enmeshment: escape from fusion by distance rather than by differentiating.
A test
Ask what happens in the family when someone disagrees or makes a choice the others dislike.
Questions to carry
- In this family, what happens when someone disagrees or makes a choice the others dislike?
- Which of my feelings do I check against my family’s before letting myself have it?
How strong the research is
clinical. A core concept in structural family therapy; measurement has been inconsistent, partly because cohesion scales confuse closeness with enmeshment.
Where it comes from
Salvador Minuchin, 1974
On the family tree: Salvador Minuchin
Sources
- Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (1975)