Outgrowing Enmeshment: The Higher Purpose of Self-Differentiation Work

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.

Enmeshment is a Developmental Pathology and Self-Differentiation is the Antidote

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.

How to Manage Emotional Contagion in Enmeshed Family Systems

Humans Evolved for Emotional Contagion

Emotional contagion is the process by which one person absorbs the emotional state of another. Humans evolved for this ability. It’s is an adaptive mechanism that has helped us survive throughout our evolution. As a social species, we are wired to emotionally affect each other for good reasons:

• Babies communicate their needs to their caregivers through emotions. Caregivers must be attuned in order to respond quickly and appropriately to the baby’s survival needs.

• Humans in groups emotionally bond and band together to take care of each other and collaborate in their survival.

In a family system, emotions spread from person to person like electricity and influence its members as to act in unison. One person’s emotional state in a family activates every other member to one degree or another.

Emotional contagion is the essence of empathy, or the ability to attune to, ‘feel’ the emotions of others, and connect with them. It’s how we experience shared joy, parent-child bonds, and mutual love. This is a wonderful thing.

However, there is a dark side to this process when it’s not managed with healthy boundaries…

The Consequences of Emotional Contagion Without Healthy Emotional Boundaries

Gone out-of-whack, this important evolutionary mechanisms can lead to a lot of suffering in families, relationships, and even society at large.

• We get stuck in cycles of drama and overwhelming emotions.

• We sacrifice our well-being and authenticity to protect and soothe the emotions of those we acre about.

• We get caught up in group reactivity and mob mentality, then end up acting out in destructive ways.

One family member’s emotional state can activate the whole family. This is often a result of poor emotional boundaries due to the family’s enmeshment. This often leads to reactivity, drama, conflict, and acting out. The helpers and fixers then jump in to emotionally caretake and bring the family back to balance. This also often leads to family members walking on egg shells or not being authentic and honest in order to protect from triggering an emotional reaction in the family.

This then leads to a lack of authenticity and true intimacy in family relationships. People become afraid to share the truth about who they really are because of an oversensitivity to the emotions of others. They protect others from discomfort as a way of protecting themselves from taking on the upset of others.

Emotional contagion can become problematic when it leads an individual to become overwhelmed and affects their physical and mental health. It can also be problematic when emotions spread across a group of people like wildfire over perceived — not real — threats. This is because people generally lose some ability to think properly and make good decisions when our emotions are highly activated.

Empathy and compassion without healthy separation can quickly become self-destructive. Emotional contagion without healthy boundaries can lead to emotional fatigue and exhaustion, distorted thinking, emotional decision-making, and even emotional burnout and dissociation.

If you grew up in a family system where you were the helper, fixer, peacemaker, or emotional caretaker, you might go through life being extra sensitive to the emotions of others and taking on the responsibility to help them feel better. This can lead to sacrificing your own needs in order to focus on others.

How to Keep Emotional Contagion At Bay

So, what do we do with such a paradox? The paradox that we evolved to emotionally affected and be affected by others, yet too much of it becomes maladaptive?

The best way to prevent the negative consequences of emotional contagion is to practice four simple steps: emotional awareness, discernment, healthy boundaries, and self-regulation.

1. Emotional Awareness

Simply being aware of how this plays out in our relationships with others can help us introduce a pause and reflection. Oftentimes, emotional contagion happens unconsciously and reflexively. Our instincts are programmed to do it naturally, so it often happens without us even knowing it.

However, by practicing the skill of emotional awareness, or becoming aware of emotions in ourselves in others, it becomes possible to interrupt the instinctual reaction.

2. Discernment

It’s important to ask ourselves in the moment of the pause whether or not it’s worth us getting caught up in the turmoil or not. Sometimes, it’s adaptive to do so because the situation is an emergency and it calls for reflexivity. Most of the time, however, staying calm will be a more strategic move. Discerning this in the moment will help you decide how to move forward.

3. Healthy Boundaries

If the answer to number 2 is no, we must set emotional boundaries with ourselves and others. Having boundaries does not mean that you need to block the emotions of others out. It simply means that you become thoughtful of when and how much you do let them affect you. In essence, the process is now drive by your conscious choice than your unconscious instincts.

Boundaries can be set two ways. The first is the emotional boundary you set with yourself. For example, if your partner comes home really frustrated from work, you set a limit with how much of that frustration you will allow yourself to take on. Your ability to remain calm in the situation and not take on her frustration might actually help her calm down as well.

The second is in setting a physical boundary where you choose to remove yourself from a situation. For example, if you’re at a family dinner and one of the family members start yelling angrily at each other, you might choose to leave the situation altogether.

4. Self-Regulation

The last step in this process is self-regulation. This is about the ability to calm yourself down once you know that you have become overly ‘energized’ by the emotions of others. There’s so much power in being the one who can stay balanced and clear-headed amidst the chaos and turmoil.

Understanding Enmeshment in Relationship Systems

What Is Enmeshment?

All human beings are driven by the balance between two fundamental life forces: individuality and togetherness. We all have the desire to be an autonomous individual in our own right and the drive to belong and connect with others.

Healthy and mature relationships balance these two drives well. In enmeshed relationships, however, togetherness is favored over individuality. There is too much closeness, which often impacts the healthy and development of the individuals in the relationship. 

In enmeshment, there’s often a lack of psychological and emotional boundaries between people. They find their sense of self in each other versus in themselves. This results in an unclear distinction of self — too much “we” and not enough sense of “I” to counterbalance it.

Signs of Enmeshment

You’ll know you experience enmeshment in your relationships if:

• You experience insecure attachment or lose your sense of self in any of your close relationships.

• You struggle identifying who you are outside of those relationships and/or feel uncomfortable doing things alone and making decisions for yourself without the input or support of others..

• You struggle with setting boundaries and/or with understanding and respecting the boundaries others set with you.

• You fear the rejection and disapproval of others, so you tend to censor yourself or bend the truth to appear a certain way to others.

• You find yourself taking responsibility for the psychological and emotional problems of others, or expect others to take responsibility for yours.

• You find it difficult to regulate and soothe your own emotions and often reach for others to help you do so.

• You find yourself often sacrificing your own wants and needs to meet the needs and demands of others.

• You get swept up in groupthink and group reactivity, catching the emotions of others, taking on their thinking, and joining in automatic behaviors.

• You seek validation, approval, and reassurance from others more often than providing these things for yourself.

• You find yourself unconsciously copying the choices, appearance, actions, or approach of others instead of charting your own way.

• You look to others for guidance and direction in life more often than trusting your own inner voice and wisdom.

How We Inherit Enmeshment

Enmeshment can be caused by a number of different experiences. Some of this is just part of being human because we evolved for a strong sense of togetherness as a social species. 

So, all humans experience enmeshment with their closest connections in one form or another. What really matter is the degree of that enmeshment and how much it’s affecting the individuals in the relationships.

Enmeshment is inherited from our evolution as a social species, but also gets passed down from previous generations of our family lineage, is learned in our nuclear family, and is also influenced by our culture and society.

1. Evolutionary Context

The togetherness force evolved in our human history for a reason. Social bonds were vital for our survival in our human history. Our ability to form strong emotional bonds with each other helped our ancestors band together, share their emotions with each other as a form of communication, and react automatically to their environment. 

2. Generational Transmission

Levels of enmeshment and maturity pass from generation to generation. The family you are born into has an entire legacy of enmeshment and maturity that they inherited from many generations before them. Hence, you are born into a family with a certain degree of enmeshment and a certain degree of maturity that was inherited from their own parents.

3. Nuclear Family

As babies, we are naturally born enmeshed. As we develop throughout childhood, we begin to mature and outgrow some of that enmeshment with the help of our families. However, our families can only take us as far as they have gone in their maturity.

For some of us, we can outgrow a good amount of enmeshment in our original families. Our parents were mature enough to help us leave home with a good degree of our own maturity. These are people who go on to have a healthy sense of self, and create secure attachments and balanced relationships with others.

For others, we left our families with a high degree of enmeshment and often go on to struggle with insecure attachment and imbalanced relationships in our adult relationships. 

4. Culture and Society

Enmeshment can also be influenced by the different social groups we belong to throughout the course of our lives —schooling, religious communities, cultural groups, friends, and so on. Enmeshment is perpetuated by any social group that promotes togetherness over individuality.

If we belong to a culture that perpetuates enmeshment, for example, it will be even harder to develop an individual sense of identity and choose yourself over the group when necessary. But it’s possible to do so, for those who want to go on the journey.

Consequences of Enmeshment

Although some people can live fairly functional lives in enmeshed relationship, for others, it can become problematic. This can look like:

• Having less energy for your own life and pursuits. You sacrifice energy and attention needed for your own pursuits.

• High levels of stress and overwhelm from taking on the problems and emotions of others.

• Having an unclear sense of individual purpose, personal meaning, and direction in life.

• Being more susceptible to life’s stressors or to emotional decision-making.

• Unstable or stagnant adult relationships and difficulty with attracting quality relationships.

• Perpetuating enmeshment to future generations. What you don’t heal in yourself will inevitably be passed onto your children.

How to Work Through Enmeshment

Because enmeshment is ultimately a state of imbalanced togetherness in our relationships, the way to start working through it is to bring more balance back by nurturing your individuality and sense of self. You can do this by beginning self-differentiation work on your own, or with a coach or therapist who specializes in Bowen Family Systems, enmeshment, and self-differentiation work.

Common Patterns in Enmeshed Family Systems and How to Counteract Each

In my work as a therapist, I find that many families relate through emotionally immature patterns, often unconsciously. Children suffer the consequences of these patterns and go on to repeat them in their own families as adults. That is unless they become aware and intentionally practice breaking the cycle.

With awareness and practice, each generation can become more mature. As parents practice more emotionally mature ways of relating, children go on to have a stronger sense of self, greater emotional well-being, and healthier relationships as adults.

Here are 4 things emotionally mature parents work on not doing…

Emotional Parentification

Parentification is when parents rely on children to fulfill their emotional voids and needs. This can sometimes manifest as placing children in roles that another parent or adult should be in. This pattern is often driven by a parent’s unmet emotional needs in their present lives or from their childhood.

Parents are not doing this intentionally, but the children become a target for the parent’s emotional hunger nonetheless. This puts a lot of demands on children and limits their ability to fully emotionally develop.

How This Manifests:

• Parents expect children to help soothe and regulate their difficult emotions.

• Parents seek constant attention, validation, approval, and displays of affection and love from children.

• Parents make children their confidant, surrogate spouse, hero, or little helper.

• Parents expect children to save them from their loneliness, especially in later stages of life as children go on to have adult lives and commitments.

• Parents expect children to be responsible for taking care of the emotional needs of other family members when the parent can’t or doesn’t want to.

To Practice Instead:

• They work on understanding and evolving their emotional voids so they don’t act out their emotional hunger on their children or other people.

• They have emotionally fulfilling relationships with their spouse and other adults.

• They have several different sources from which they get their emotional needs met such as work, hobbies, friends, artistic practices, spiritual commitments, self-care routines, and personal development pursuits.

• They have a part of their identity that’s separate from the children and spend time away from the children with people and projects they care about.

• They practice self-validation, self-regulation, and self-love, and therefore liberate the children from having to help with those things.

• They have a healthy understanding of their own emotions and ability to manage their emotional connections with other family members on their own.

Parental Projection

Projection is the process in which parents work out their fears, insecurities, unresolved attachments, and unlived lives on their children. By anxiously worrying about the children, parents avoid turning toward the things inside them that need attention. I talk about this pattern in greater depth here.

As a result, children often feel trapped by their parent’s pressures. They don’t have room to be their own person, learn how to function well on their own, or live out their unique dreams and life choices.

How This Manifests:

• Parent unconsciously use their children to work out unresolved attachments with their own caregivers.

• Parents anxiously focus on what‘s wrong with their children and unconsciously avoid acknowledging their own insecurities and fears.

• Parents live vicariously through the adult children or expect the adult child to be the things they did not get to be.

• Parents put a lot of pressure on a child to get things right and react to their shortcomings. They fear the child’s failure, rejection, disappointment, or pain because they experience it as their own due to the lack of emotional and psychological differentiation between parent and child.

• Parents unconsciously expect children to live in their shadow or become the same as they were.

• Parents unconsciously compete with their children, or feel envious or resentful of their children’s successes.

• Parents believe their children owe them for the sacrifices they made as a parent to raise the child, demand loyalty and favors, and resent the child for what they didn’t get to live.

To Practice Instead:

• They acknowledge and work through their unresolved emotional attachments with their family of origin and other adults in their lives on their own, potentially with the help of a therapist or other means.

• They focus on processing the roots of their own fears and insecurities own their own, potentially with the help of a therapist, and free the children from this burden.

• They chase their dreams, keep doing their own inner work, keep learning, and keep developing new parts of themselves.

• They allow children space to be different, take risks, learn from mistakes and failure, have their own messy emotions, and trust children to be capable resilient, and grow from their experiences.

• They celebrate their children’s successes and happiness even when children have accomplished more than they ever have or will.

• They understand that children are not born to fulfill the parent’s dreams, expectations, and ideals, but rather to be their own person and live their own unique life.

Emotional Contagion

Misdirecting emotions can manifest in many forms, but the core root of the pattern is that parents struggle with acknowledging, regulating, and processing difficult emotions within themselves.

They end up putting them on the children through blaming, dumping, acting them out, getting defensive, or creating emotionally reactive drama.

How This Manifests:

• Parents emotionally dump or act out their emotions on their adult children.

• Parents blame others or play victim in emotionally charged conflicts.

• Parents emotionally reactive or highly dramatic over little (or even big) things.

• Parents defensive or turn it back the other way when adult children express dissatisfaction or hurt in the relationship.

To Practice Instead:

• As a parent, acknowledge, regulate, and process your own emotional issues instead of expecting your adult children to soothe you or fix your emotional and relational problems.

• Keep the focus on your own experience during a conflict or disagreement with an adult child and take responsibility for your part in the relationship dynamic.

• Understand that emotional reactivity is contagious and practice remaining calm and grounded in emotionally difficult times.

• Listen to your adult child’s feelings, needs, and wishes, which frees them to be authentic and honest in the relationship with you.

Boundary Negation

Enmeshment is a relationship with little to no boundaries and where people lose a sense of who they are as a separate person. Everyone gets pulled into everyone else’s drama and emotions spread like wildfire from one person to all members.

In enmeshed families, boundaries and individuality are experienced as threatening. Family members are expected to help save each other or at least make each other feel better.

How This Manifests:

• Parents pull children their children into their drama and conflicts with other family members.

• Parents get defensive or emotionally reactive when their children set or enforce a boundary.

• Parents feel threatened when their children express their individuality through independent beliefs, behaviors, social connections outside the family, and life choices.

• Parents overfunction for others and jump into save them when they are struggling with something.

To Practice Instead:

• Ask adult children regularly what their limits and preferences are and consider them in your interactions with them.

• Respect the boundaries adult children set with them without taking it personally.

• Enforce and model healthy boundaries with their adult children and other people.

• Encourage their adult children to think and make choices for themselves, even when it’s different than the parent’s beliefs or ideals.

• Encourage adult children to live their own lives, even if the parents miss them.

• They resolve their conflicts one-to-one with the other adults involved and model good conflict resolution skills for the children.

A Final Note

All parents will do some of these patterns to some degree or another throughout the course of parenting. All parents were likely on the receiving end of some of these patterns as well.

Patterns of relating pass from generation to generation. Some of them are perfectly adaptive. Some have room to be evolved. Most are unconscious and unintentional.

The practice of reflecting on these patterns is to help us a) develop greater awareness, b) interrupt the patterns that no longer serve our well-being, and c) continue evolving into more mature ways of relating.

One of the greatest gifts we can give future generations of our lineage and humanity as a whole is to continue our own personal evolution as parents.

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