Outgrowing enmeshment can be long and challenging journey. For this reason, I find that it’s important to have a higher purpose for doing the hard work and regularly coming back to this purpose throughout the journey.
Understanding and staying connected to the long-term benefits of this work can help us keep going, even when the going gets tough. Over the years of doing this work, here are some of the concepts that kept me grounded and pushing forward during the hardest parts of the journey.
Self-Differentiation is the Natural Process of Life
First and foremost, I think one of the higher purposes of undergoing the process of working through enmeshment is honoring the natural course of development of a human life. Those of us who are engaged with life and find meaning and growth will resonate with this higher purpose. It’s simply what it means to become one’s own person, to grow into a mature adult, and to pursue becoming the best version of yourself that you can be in your lifetime. So, that’s one reason to work through enmeshment: to self-actualize.
Self-Differentiation Leads to Better Mental and Emotional Health
Secondly, it’s important to understand the impact that enmeshment can have on our long-term mental and emotional well-being. It’s absolutely draining to keep putting up with our family’s drama and emotional mess. It can leave us feeling bogged down, stressed, overwhelmed, burnt out, the list goes on. When we work through that enmeshment, we learn to not get caught up in the emotional chaos, we learn to set boundaries, and we learn to calm ourselves down. We free ourselves from taking on the emotional burden of others. We develop coping skills, emotional regulation skills, and relational skills that carry over into other areas of life. This, over time, can significantly improve our mental and emotional well-being.
Self-Differentiation Improves All of Our Relationships
Third, working through enmeshment in your family of origin will change how you show up in all of life’s relationships. Your relational patterns were learned and maintained in your family of origin. Inevitably, you then carry your learned relational patterns into other relational contexts — marriage, friendship, work relationships, parenting, and so on. Addressing your enmeshment in your family of origin will change and improve the way you relate to others in your adult life.
Self-Differentiation Helps Future Generations
Fourth, we heal for future generations. Enmeshment patterns are transmitted and inherited unconsciously from generation to generation until one generation decides to break the cycle. So, by working through this, you save your kids the pain of experiencing it, but even more than that, you significantly reduce the chance that they‘ll be enmeshed with your grandchildren, and your grandchildren with their own children, and so on from there down your genetic line.
Self-Differentiation Helps Us Move Forward in Life
Fifth, you’ll free up more energy for your personal pursuits and life priority. This is important, as to become the best version of yourself you really have to channel your time and energy wisely. We have limited attention spans as humans, and we wake up with a limited amount of energy each morning for the day. We have to be mindful of where we choose for that energy to go if we want to become the best adults we can become in our lives.
Constantly getting caught up in our family of origin’s drama or attending to emotional care-taking of adult parents (who should be taking responsibility for themselves) can be quite an energy suck. It can leave us feeling depleted and take away from other important areas of our adult lives that need our time and attention, including and especially our relationship with ourselves and time for self-care.
In adult life, you create your own family, with a new family culture. You pursue your own dreams and professional achievements. You choose your own friends (sometimes even a chosen family) that help you grow and contribute to your values and long-term goals for yourself.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your family your time and energy, but there’s a difference between having a mutually beneficial adult relationship with your family members and just getting sucked into their emotional drama and having a one-sided relationship with them where you must constantly attend to their emotional needs or play emotional caretaker and validator.
When we work through enmeshment and learn to set boundaries with our time and emotional energy, we free up a ton of energy to focus on what’s most important in our lives, and we choose to move forward with our adult lives. We choose to give ourselves over to our spouses, our children, to work we care about, to friends that reciprocate, to hobbies that invigorate us, to our health, to our values, to our long-term goals, and to working toward becoming our highest selves.
Self-Differentiation Leads to Better Decision-Making
Lastly, we live with more emotional maturity and objectivity. We are more calm and less caught up in other people’s madness. We learn to control our emotions. We learn to extract ourselves from the emotional reactivity of others. And this makes us more capable of observing situations objectively making wise decisions over emotional reasoning and acting out.
You develop the ability think for yourself instead of getting caught up in group beliefs.
You can tolerate the emotional discomfort required to hold the tension between multiple perspectives instead of taking sides in a polarized emotional argument.
You can recognize emotional reasoning in yourself and others and take a step back before acting on it.
So much of what you see happening in society — the polarization, the emotional reactivity, the mob mentality, the acting out, the public display of adult temper tantrums — is a product of people just being enmeshed with others, having a poorly defined sense of individual self, and getting incredibly caught up in group emotions. Working through enmeshment helps us move out of this contagious emotional reactivity into being more objective, self-possessed, grounded, autonomous, and wise adult.
Final Thoughts
I like to write these points down in my journal and reflect on them from time to time. Sometimes my partner and I will remind each other of them when we’re struggling with doing something hard, like setting an important boundary with a loved one. This has kept us going throughout the years, and as I look back and see how far we’ve come, we realize how rewarding the hard work has been. How much it’s given us that’s immeasurable - more peace, more calm, more health, more confidence, deeper connection, more purpose, and more life.
I hope you’ll also find these useful on your journey. More importantly, I hope you’ll find your own self-defined reasons and motivations for doing this very challenging and rewarding work. Whatever you find works for you, I hope you’ll stay connected to your higher principles as you do the work, as that’s a huge part of the work itself.