Development
To properly understand enmeshment, it is necessary to understand both human development and human evolution at a basic level. This is essentially because enmeshment is a pathology of a particular stage of normal development in human life, which is driven by evolutionary forces that are millions of years old.
Psychological developmental unfolds through a series of stages, the first of which is a state of symbiotic union with our mother before we are even born. We are first dependent on our mother’s literal body for survival as we grow and develop inside the safety of her womb, fused to her through an umbilical cord. After birth, we physically differentiate from our mother’s body. We become a separate physical being capable of self-sustaining bodily functions on our own, such as breathing, eating, and digestion.
However we remain highly dependent on our caregivers for our physical and emotional needs, and for our psychological development. We are psychologically and emotionally undifferentiated from our family attachments, depending on them for our development of emotional regulation, cognitive processes, mental models, belief systems, adaptive behaviors, and much more.
Unlike many species in nature which are born ready or almost ready for life out in the wild, human beings are altricial, meaning we come out of the womb with with much of our development left undone. We depend on our social environment to help us finish that development throughout the course of childhood and adolescence. We are born highly dependent and remain dependent for a very long time, more so than any other known species. This gives our brains ample time to explore our physical and social environment and learn how to be a human being before we are launched out into the wild as an adult.
This is presumably an incredible evolutionary adaptation which gives us ample time to develop a certain degree of complexity that’s adaptive to whatever environment we are born into. Childhood and adolescence offer young human beings a safe environment where they can experience, test out, and simulate the world around them as their brains develop and prepare for life out in the wild as mature adult member of the species. During this time, our social environment passes on information to us about how to be in the world. They help us develop our sense of self. They socialize us.
As such, development unfolds slowly over time, as we pass through many of its stages, facilitated in the context of our family, social, and cultural environment. As a note, genes play a fundamental role in who we become. However, we are both nature and nurture, both hardware and software. In fact, more so than any other known species, who we become in the world is very much shaped at the software level. We are not blank slates, but we are the blankest slates in nature.
For much of recorded scientific history in the psychological sciences, we’ve studied developmental processes a great deal, but only in childhood up to and just slightly past adolescence. We assumed, therefore, that development ends after a person has reached, the age of 18 or so.
But as we are starting to see through the work of developmental psychologists like Robert Kegan and Susanne Cook-Greuter, psychological development can continue throughout our entire adult lives if the individual is aware and motivated enough, or if the environment that surrounds them calls upon it. As it does, we become more complex in the ways we understand ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it all.
Stages
Stage 0: Symbiotic Fusion (Physical dependence in mother’s womb, “fused” through umbilical cord.)
Stage 1: Sensorimotor-Undifferentiated
Stage 1/2: Emotional-Relational
Stage 2: Magical-Impulsive
Stage 2/3: Opportunistic-Self-Protective
Stage 3: Mythic-Conformist
Stage 3/4: Conventional-Interpersonal (Enmeshment normally manifests here.)
Stage 4: Rational-Self-Authoring (Self-Differentiation leads to here.)
Stage 4/5: Relativistic-Sensitive
Stage 5: Integrated-Multi-Perspectival
Stage 5/6: Ego-Aware-Paradoxical
Stage 6: Absorptive-Witnessing
Non-Stage: Non-Dual Identification
Embeddedness
Research suggests most humans live within the stage 3/4 - or the stage of embeddedness with others - for most, if not all, of their adult lives. This means they live by rules, standards, norms, and expectations of the groups they belong to. They are defined by the views others have of them and look to others for approval and direction in their life choices and everyday decisions. Difference is not tolerated well and whatever falls outside of the norms, expectations, and standard scripts of the group is seen as other or experienced as threatening and is often criticized, shame, rejected, and oppressed.
The identity and sense of self of individuals in this stage rest largely on their group affiliations and their relationships. They are their relationships and their relationships are them. There’s little to no sense of individual identity that differs from the group, difficulty with setting boundaries and making decisions that will disappoint others, a sense of responsibility for the problems and emotions of others, and a reliance on the group for acceptance, reassurance, soothing, and emotional regulation.
Demands of Environment
For much of human evolution, we operated from the stage of development from which the pathology of enmeshment emerges. You could call this tribalism, group-centeredness, or the embedded self, but it is a stage of development that all humans must pass through to get to the stage that comes after it - the stage of individuality, self-authorship, and differentiation.
As a social species, one of the primary mechanisms we’ve used throughout our evolutionary history to both survive and learn how to navigate our environment is social learning and connections to others. Call this family, culture, or tribe. Our social connections are key to our survival and functioning, especially in childhood and adolescence.
Our environment placed high demands on us as a species, and banding together, caring for each other, sacrificing ourselves for the group, and transmitting important learnings socially from generation to generation is arguably why we are even still here in the first place. This stage of development is an achievement in the evolution of consciousness. It was an enormous feat.
But consciousness can and does evolve. Our physical and cultural environment has evolved even more so.
Enmeshment
Enmeshment is essentially the pathological version of embeddedness. Enmeshment is a result of the togetherness force impairing the very thing it evolved to do - promote our survival, growth, and adaptation. It is what happens when a given individual’s growth, development, and well-being are impaired by their need to abide by what the group wants and expects of them. Of choosing the group’s needs and demands over the individual’s need to chart and walk one’s path, to grow into him or herself, to develop agency, to learn to think and choose for oneself, to live according to one’s nature, and to pursue the development of one’s consciousness.
Symptoms
Enmeshment can cause or exacerbate conditions like anxiety and depression by impairing our ability to fully grow into our own agency and authenticity. We can’t express the truth about who we really are, what we want, what we need, what we believe. Out of fear and obligation, we can’t set boundaries or say no to things we don’t like or don’t want. We can’t express our thinking if it’s different or disagree with the groups perspectives and beliefs. We look to them for constant validation, approval, and reassurance.
We fear what they think of us and live in a way that tries to shape and protect their image of us. We feel responsible for the happiness, their pain, their loneliness, and their problems. We feel responsible for making them proud and living up to their expectations. We can’t choose ourselves, think for ourselves, decide for ourselves, otherwise we’re riddled by guilt and fear.
By consistently trying to live out the expectations of others, gain their approval, and avoid their disapproval, we either experience overwhelm and chronic stress (anxiety) or feel come to feel stuck, depleted, and weighed down by it all (depression).
Coping Mechanisms
We often resort to coping mechanisms to deal with the symptoms. Sometimes these coping mechanisms are an attempt to soothe the chronic stress and counteract the feeling of being down or numb. Sometimes it’s an unconscious attempt to rebel against the sense of authority controlling our life trajectory and gaining back a sense of our own agency. Coping can be anything from substances, food, and sex, to lying, hiding, affairs, and living a double life in the shadows.
The Antidote
The marker of the stage of embeddedness is that the authority for our sense of we are and how we should live lies outside of us - in the external environment. Differentiation allows us to begin bringing some of that authority inward. Where before, we live according to the scripts authored by those in our external environment, we now pick up the metaphorical pen and begin authoring our own lives. We start to see where we are separate and different. Their emotions don’t have to be mine, I can have my own. Their beliefs don’t have to be mine, I can question them and decide which I will keep, and which I won’t. Their values and principles don’t have to be mine, I can bring those into question, reflect critically, and consciously decide through my own thinking which values and principles I will live by.
The Pain and Confusion of Differentiation
Differentiation often leads to a lot of pain and confusion because we are so deeply attached to the social environment we come from. Parents, especially, are the primordial bond. We are literally wired to our parents’ nervous systems, and their’s wired to ours.
When we grow up in a family system and culture that live within the stage of embeddedness and we start to feel the pull for our own differentiation, it can be scary to feel like we’re putting such powerful emotional bonds at risk. In our evolutionary history, going against the group was a recipe for emotional chaos and disaster at best, an alarming threat to our survival at worst.
When we initiate the differentiation process, we will more than likely experience resistance from the relationship systems we’re a part of. We must be ready to face the pain of this process. Which brings me to my last point.
Increasing Autonomy and Authenticity as a Natural Life Process
Embeddedness is state and stage of comfort for most human beings. In some cultures and society, most people will be able to live within this order of consciousness for most of their lives. However, human life on earth and the demands associated with it are becoming evermore complex, and the development of consciousness might be necessary for all human beings, all cultures, and all society. The capacity for differentiation likely evolved for adaptive reasons. Some will choose the arduous path of differentiation and beyond, of lifelong learning and self-development, of undergoing the infinite process of maturation and complexification.
And, in my humble view, to truly become the best version of oneself in the world, to experience deep purpose and meaning, it is necessary to attempt to develop the full extent of one’s consciousness, and that requires first that we differentiate and emerge from our embeddedness with our family and culture.