Enmeshment

PRESENT

I’m thinking and reading a lot these days about enmeshment.

“Enmeshment” is a term used in psychology for relationships with a special brand of unhealthy. In a healthy relationship, I can be me, you can be you, and we can be us. 

In enmeshment, “We must be us,” is all there is.

I had a mentally ill parent with very shaky self-esteem. Growing up, I basically became her clone. I couldn’t like the kind of music I liked; all that was played in our home was country, and I got yelled and screamed at for liking Mariah Carey, because my mother didn’t like “all that screaming.” How wonderful it was to move to college and be able to listen to what I wanted to listen to! These days I’m always a little sad when one of those great 80’s hits comes on, and I realize I never got to enjoy it when it was a contemporary song. My mother dressed in cowboy boots and frilly country blouses, jeans, and denim skirts; that was what I wore in high school. Her favorite color was red; my favorite color was red. Everything she liked, I liked; everything she didn’t like, I didn’t like. We agreed about absolutely everything.

That kind of thing may be harmless when it’s western-style blouses and favorite colors; when it’s your career, that’s something different. 

(Actually, it is NOT harmless, no matter WHAT it’s about. It just looks like it is. “I’m so proud of my daughter; she gets her love of fill in the blank from me!”)

I grew up talking about what I was going to be since I was four, and I got a lot of pride and reinforcement from my family for that. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be a good fit for me, and I struggled and struggled and struggled in it for many, many years. I’m glad to say that things have changed; after more than two decades I have stable employment, work doesn’t feel like such a strain anymore, and I’m finally earning what I should. But the years I could have spent working at something that didn’t feel like such a struggle, work I might have enjoyed, are long past. And the college loans I took out will pretty much render me just next to homeless in my old age, because I wasn’t doing well enough for so many years to pay down those loans as I should have. I remember the years I worried about being unemployable and homeless, the years I looked around me with suspicion, sure that all my coworkers were better than me and were talking about me behind my back. I remember all the years I woke up depressed about what I had to do that day. How much I wished I had pursued work I would have liked.

Years before, when I started applying to professional school, I knew I didn’t feel the way I should about it. I did stop, I really did, and try to think about what I would like better. And the sad fact is that I did not know. I could not tell. When I asked myself what I liked to do…there was no answer. 

There was no answer when I needed an answer, and this is why the liking of western style blouses and other people’s favorite colors WAS NOT HARMLESS. This was the rest of my life I was deciding, and I had no idea what I liked. 

All I knew was what I had said I would do for almost all of my existence, and what I had spent the past three years in college preparing myself for. Now it was time to do what I needed to do to support myself, and I didn’t know what it should be.

And the other thing I knew was the reaction I got when I tried to talk to those who said they loved me about my life. I remember talking to my mother in the car about another career I was thinking about, and sounding somewhat enthused about it.

And my mother…well, she said the right thing. I guess I have to give her that.

But the way she said it. Think of the nastiest, meanest, most frustrated tone you can imagine when you read this next line:

“Well, I guess you should just go ahead and be a doctor then, if that’s what you want to do!”

I sank back into the back seat, feeling that it was absolutely the wrong thing to do, and that if I did that, my mother would be mad at me for the rest of my life.

I had a fantasy of quitting school, moving off somewhere in town by myself, getting some piddling little job, and just living life for a year. Maybe after that year I’d have a clue what would really make me happy. But I could never do that. What would my mother, stepfather, and grandparents have said?

I remember my favorite college professor, bless him, asking me one day, “Well, every little girl says she wants to do this career at some point in her life. Haven’t you thought about it beyond that? What do you want to do?”

In my freshman year of college, I didn’t even know what he was talking about.

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I remember the terrible, terrible time I had once I got into the coveted professional school I had chosen, how stupid I felt, how I wasn’t enjoying it, how worried I was about even graduating. I’d come home and cry on vacations from school. I once sat in church crying. In full view of my parents.

What I needed then, and didn’t have, was a family who cared enough about me to say, “Why are you crying? Does this upset you that much? Are you really that unhappy? Come home. Take a semester off. Think about your life. We don’t want you to do something for a living that is making you so unhappy already. We don’t want to see you crying, we want to see you happy. If it’s this bad, something is wrong. We’ll support you while you think this out, because you are our much-loved child and we want to see you become happy in your career and in your life.”

But I didn’t have that kind of family. Oh, they loved me, or they said they loved me, all right, but more important than my tears was their right to brag: “MY daughter is in X school, studying to be a Y!” They had strong feelings toward me that they called love and perceived as love, but concern for my welfare and the overall outcome of my life was not one of them. Concern for their welfare and how I reflected on them was, instead.

This, my friends, is enmeshment, and who paid the price for it? Me. Who is still paying the price for it? I am. I don’t even have my parents in my life anymore, because over time more and more problematic behavior ensued, and I realized I simply could not afford to go on any more in that family.

But I will pay the price for those years and that enmeshed decision I made long after my grandparents, my parents, all of my family are gone, because the financial repercussions are going to be around long into my sixties, seventies, and eighties.

This is what I mean by enmeshment.

Enmeshment can operate in romantic relationships as well. When I was with Chi, just about all of our courtship took place online, for obvious reasons. I have saved almost all of it, nearly four hundred pages worth. About half of our relationship consisted of us discussing his wife’s behavior and trying to figure out why on earth any sane human being would behave as she did toward the man she consistently called “the love of my life.”

And enmeshment is there.

I can see it in how she decides every little thing about their life as a couple. I can see it in how denigrating she is when he tells her he’s going to step back from a hobby they’ve done together since they were in their early twenties, because he needs to concentrate on another hobby, something he’s always wanted to do and has mostly neglected for almost twenty years. “Why do you need to do that?” she snaps.

And I see it in the way he scrutinizes her every word, every inflection of her voice, every little twitch. She must be acting this way because I’m not good enough. Because if I were good enough, she wouldn’t treat me this way. She’s the only person who will ever love me. So if she’s treating me like this, I must be unlovable. I need her to treat me differently, because I can’t feel okay if she doesn’t. And if she won’t, I need Ridley to make me feel better about that.

Enmeshment.

And I see it in myself, as I try to make him see how I feel about him. How sweet, how smart, how sharp, how droll, how funny, how original, how talented, how eminently lovable he really is. If I can effect this badly needed change in how he sees himself, my life is worth something. The rest of my world may have fallen down around my ears, but this I can do successfully. This is the one thing that will work and make my life worthwhile.

Enmeshment, enmeshment, enmeshment, enmeshment. 

What it really is, is that crying child voice inside that says, “I can’t feel okay, in myself or in my life, unless and until you do this!”

That, friends, is enmeshment.

And it isn’t good.