Emotional Dependency & Enmeshment Podcast Episode

What tends to happen is sometimes there is one person who feels very anxious in the relationship and the friendship, and it depends on the other person to manage that anxiety. And sometimes the other person is completely drained from all of the care and support they’re giving the other individual. 

Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent as always, to have you along Matt Kaufman is my name, Kathy Knochel and Brian Sutter are here with me today. Good to be with you Matt. Yes. We’re going to talk about emotions and connecting with people emotionally. 

Okay. So, I had Kaleb here sometime back, and we talked about emotional affairs, and I waxed a little scientific and talked about vector forces are within people. The point is that we have an attraction of force that’s directional towards people on an emotional level. 

Sure. Think of it as gravity. Okay? There’s a gravitas, right? Some people feel that more or less than others, but this idea is that we can slide into relationships, and we can go deep. God has created us really beautiful ways. We have not been created to be alone. 

We’ve been created for relationships. And I suppose we could pontificate and wax eloquent about the animal kingdom that doesn’t have this same draw of emotional attachment. Now all the dog lovers out there, like, really? Yeah. So, there is this really holy, really divine within us with this emotional connection. 

Now this topic actually came by the way of a listener that said, hey, I would like to hear more about emotional attachment. And she mentioned emotional affairs but also expanded beyond just the marriage to outside of the marriage. So, if you think about an emotional affair, you have to have a binding commitment in order to have an affair, right? 

What does an affair mean if there’s not a marriage? So, we’re clearly talking about emotional connection outside of the marriage bounds. Okay? That’s what Kaleb talked about. And so, I would like to push into this space now about unhealthy emotional bonds between people where there is no offense in a marriage. 

Sure. You see my space here? Yeah, I think so, yes. Okay. Because I think that’s what the listener was asking for, and I think it’s really good because there are clear bounds like in the marriage covenant. But you’re out of bounds without the marriage covenant. What is too much emotional attachment? I don’t know.  

So, there’s the setup. Okay. Exactly. Yeah. Which puts us in this position of, wait a second, is this even a thing? Unless you’ve actually thought about it or found yourself out of bounds, you might be thinking, wait a second, I can’t even imagine what this space might look like. 

Right. But this is something you see. Am I right about that, right? Oh yeah. And it has some psychological names that we could use. So, let’s just go right into it. You probably have some categories in your head. So how do you want to talk through this? In a family system, we would call that enmeshment. 

When everyone is in each other’s emotional worlds and there aren’t clear boundaries of like, where do you start and I stop? The word is enmeshment then. Right. And when you’re thinking of a family system, in one sense, it is one organism. In another sense it’s lots of different parts that make up a whole. 

And so, when those different parts that make up the hole are totally lost and it’s just the hole, that’s where, at least from a psychological or a counseling perspective, we’ve seen lots of challenges rise out of that. So, I think you’ve taken a fork in the road. One is you’ve mentioned family systems. 

Okay. So, would that be one category we think about unhealthy emotional connection? Yeah, for sure. In the family context. I think outside of that, we would also say there’s this space of emotional dependence, which wouldn’t necessarily have to be in a family setting. That could be just between friends, and that would be another category where those boundaries are lost between two people and can create some problems in that end. 

Sure. Okay. Well, let’s go with this family system then. Can you give us an example of what enmeshment looks like? Characteristics? Well, when you think of the picture of a mesh and things being too fused or too meshed together. I’m actually thinking of green and yellow Play-Doh mixed together. Which is like all of our Play-Doh at home. Yes, enmeshed. And they have these sets like you’re supposed to play with Play-Doh and after you make the spaghetti, how do you actually get it back? Oh, it’s really messy. Yes, have I digressed? 

No. But I would say what we see with this is the emotions in the family system are the green and yellow Play-Doh mixed together. Sometimes it is parents’ emotions with kids’ emotions, siblings’ emotions. And then it’s so fascinating as those emotions get blended, a lot of things get blended. And so, just the idea of making a decision or having preferences within the system as far as like what you would prefer versus somebody else. 

So, what would decision making look like in an unhealthy enmeshed family system? Well, I think for, for a lot of us, we would think, okay, what is it that I’m interested in? You know what are biblical principles that I might be thinking about? And so, you’re starting to think through these different categories, but when you’re in an enmeshed system, those categories take a back seat to what the family would say or what mom or dad would say. 

So, you lose independence, right? Yeah. You lose independence and you lose some of those categories, and it’s just thinking about what the system itself would say. And that’s the primary driver, which then is really hard because if you get it wrong, then that’s really scary. There might be big consequences from that. 

And therefore, a lot of times you get paralyzed with decision making. Okay. And we’ve talked before about the need for exploration of identity. There is no exploration of identity in an enmeshed family system because if someone explores and goes a different way than the other sibling or what the parents thought was appropriate, then it feels like the system is going to collapse. 

And like you mentioned earlier, Kathy, emotions get blended up. So, in the background you’re always thinking, if I do this, how will that emotionally impact somebody else? And you can’t always predict that, but it’s like, oh man, I don’t want to do the thing that might make them upset. 

And then again, it just makes everything really complicated, so now you take responsibility for another person’s emotional reaction. Yep. Is that right? Yes. And again, you can see that sometimes in, if I do this, which can be something very healthy and okay, but this causes mom or dad to feel this way. 

So, I have to not do it, or I have to make sure and do it in order to keep this person emotionally healthy. Right? Yeah. Where a parent is responsible for their own emotions, and I appreciate it, which sounds healthy. You know, there is a level of view that sounds like good social awareness, being able to read the room. 

Yes. Which is healthy. But what I heard you say there, Kathy, is you are then taking responsibility for another person’s emotional wellbeing and now there’s a dependence. Yes. Unhealthy dependence. And I think you’re right there, Matt, that it is a little bit nuanced and it’s a little bit hard to put your finger on, but I think one of the other factors that comes into play here is that in a healthy system, it’s like, okay, yeah, I’m going to make this. That’s probably not going to be the other person’s preference, but I think we’ll be able to work through it and it’ll be fine. But in an enmeshed system, it’s like, if I do this, it’s going to blow the whole system up. I don’t know if we’ll recover.  

And what I see is sometimes in enmeshed family systems, it looks like love. It looks like they are so close. They do everything together, but it’s not because that is the preference. It’s that we’re locked into this. We have to do the same things. We have to be on the same page with things or else it’s chaos or we can’t exist. It’s not a free right to give myself to the family system in terms of free love. It’s binding love, right? Yes. And then it’s really fragile and it feels really risky. And so, there’s a lot of anxiety and even bitterness or anger that can be part of the system and it gets scary. 

So, what blows things up? I mean, I’m sure that’s probably what you see. It doesn’t come into the office until something’s really going off the rails. Am I right? Yeah. I think I see a lot of anxiety within someone, and as you peel back the layers, you realize that some of the anxiety they’re holding is everybody within their family system’s, opinions, needs, and fears of are they okay? Is it okay if I do this? Are they going to get mad? So, I think one of the things is anxiety that you see overwhelm someone. Yeah. And I think for us, a lot of times that’s how we see it. It’s not necessarily that there’s been a big blow up, but as we start to dig around underneath the anxiety, that’s a very tired person. 

Exactly. That’s a good word. Yeah. On the other side of things, certainly there are times where all of a sudden there’s been this big fight in the family or a big blow up that that can certainly be a catalyst. Let’s say somebody decides, oh, I’m going to go to college when the family system has been, nope, you’re just part of the farm. That’s what you do at this stage in life. Somebody breaks the family rules, so to speak, and that certainly can happen as well.  

How do you coach an enmeshed family to become not enmeshed when you have multiple players here? Right, because you’re probably seeing one person. Yep. It’s hard, and I think the goal of it is not to try and get the family to a place where there are super rigid boundaries where it’s like we don’t interact at all with each other. 

The end goal is still a connected family, but it’s a connected family where each person can be their own individual. Because I think in many ways enmeshed is on one extreme of the spectrum. The other would be detached. So, you’ve got a family where everybody’s totally independent. They don’t think about the other parts of the family at all. And so, trying to figure out what a healthy family looks like is really the idea. Is there a tendency to whiplash going from one to the other? Oh, I think so. I mean, that’s almost always the tendency when we’re talking about the concept of boundaries in general, which is a big part of the work here. 

When somebody comes in and they don’t have any boundaries and they hear the concept of boundaries and they’re thinking about, oh, okay, I need to have limits on what do I think and what do I want. And I get to say no. You can have a strong swing to the other extreme and say, well, actually let’s figure out what this looks like over time to settle in. 

I think one of the other core elements is if only one person in the family system is recognizing, hey, there’s enmeshment. Some of the work is helping each family member arrive at that, which if you’re only working with one part of the system, then that doesn’t always happen. It’s different if you’re doing a whole family counseling piece, but if it’s just one part of the system, some of it is first, helping them recognize it. Secondly, start to talk about boundaries. And then as the person sets boundaries, there’s going to be a natural guilt feeling there or unsettling. And I think there the need is to just slowly utilize good distress tolerance as boundaries are put in. Slowly would be the recommendation I have for the person. 

Yeah. But I appreciate you mentioning there’s that guilt phase. Yeah. And in that part of the work we do, we try to figure out what the meaning is that we put to things and to be able to say, actually, we want the other people in the system to see that you’re doing this. 

Not because you’re trying to be mean, not because you’re trying to totally distance yourself from the family system. It’s more like, no, this is maybe more where God’s created you and thinking about the picture and the Scripture of the body that you’ve got the foot and the hand. And we don’t need everybody to be a hand. And sometimes if everybody’s a hand and you say, no, I think I’m going to be the foot. That can be really scary for the family or feel like, oh man, we’ve done everything wrong, or they don’t like us at all. Or they don’t value us at all. And be able say, wait, no, that’s not what we’re saying. I’m not abandoning the body. I’m looking for my place. Exactly. Okay.  

So, that’s interesting. You mentioned guilt, and that makes sense to the person who understands the enmeshment and says, we need to step out of this. One of the light bulb moments that I had with Kaleb is when he mentioned that in an emotional affair, there needs to be a grieving process of the spouse that went outside. 

Okay. Because that is a relationship that is a loss as much as it needs to be cut off. I’m wondering what the other perspective looks like and maybe it’s grief on that side too, right? There’s the guilt that I’m pulling out of this, and that’s going to really put Mom in a bad place and. What does health look like for mom? Is there a grieving that mom needs to do? Is that part of it? She’s not going to feel guilty necessarily. Is she going to feel grief? Do you understand what I’m saying? Yeah, I think so. There’s certainly going to be loss there because of the vision of what you think family is, or what you thought this was going to look like as children age and things that. That’s going to look different if somebody starts to step out of that.  

And there is going to be a loss in trying to work through that and grieving that and for them to see that. I think over time, hopefully as an opportunity for them to learn how to recognize their emotions and process them in healthy ways for both individuals would be an important part of the journey. And I would see grief like guilt, and I think fear is the other emotion that you have to make room for because if how things have been is not healthy, what is it going to look like?  

Or who are we as a family and so I think a fear response doesn’t mean it’s a bad response, but it has to be stewarded. Well, if you go back to the situation, making decisions by myself can be fearful. Yes, absolutely. When now all of a sudden, the system is not doing that, then you don’t have the protection of, oh, this is just how we do it. And then if it doesn’t turn out we’re in this together, you’re deviating from that, which is like, boy, if I get this wrong, or it doesn’t go really well, they’re all going to be able to say, I told you so. 

Yeah, that’s tricky. Okay. Family systems, enmeshment. How about non-family systems? Right? As sovereign human beings, we have this force within us towards relationships being emotional connections with people. What does it look like? I mean, here again, there’s this gray area from increasing health to all of a sudden increasing ill health on that spectrum of being connected with another person emotionally. So, I’m picturing friends, you know, really tight and close friends. Is there ever a warning? You know what I mean? And I think that actually is the question of my listener. 

Yeah. I would certainly say there is Matt, because a healthy friendship is two people are in an equal relationship, like we enjoy being with each other. If I’m having a bad day, I’ll ask, can we talk? And that friend can support, right? There’s an equal level of support when it turns unhealthy. 

What I see is possibly one of the two is overly dependent on the other one. I’m having a bad day, and this person needs to fix it. Or both are overly dependent on the other, on each other, on the relationship. Yeah. And one of the things that makes me think of is one of my kids tends to be pretty empathetic and relational so they would have a pretty strong tendency towards recognizing what their friends are feeling through the day and then feeling responsible to make sure that they’re having a good day at school. And so that would be a personality that could pretty easily move into being emotionally dependent or letting everybody be emotionally dependent on you. 

Both sides of that are really hard. Yeah. There’s something interesting you said there, Kathy, about dependence on one another and how you mentioned friendship is, I forget how you said it, but the picture I had in mind is beautifully free. Friendship is free. 

Friendships are unique. Even a beyond marriage. Friendships are unique in that there are no strings attached. It’s like, I’m here because I want to be here and you’re here because you want to be here. We get together because we both want to be here. Yeah. And there are no strings keeping you here. Which actually makes for a really beautiful friendship. Right. It sounds to me strings start to get attached. And that might be a sign. Yes. Yeah, because the more two people get to know each other, the more friendship grows. It’s easy for conversations to get deeper and deeper, and then the level of intimacy between the two people increases. 

And then there’s always a risk of dependence based on how the level of emotional intimacy is between people. Yeah. And I think it’s interesting too when that happens and it’s kind of each individual or one or the other has a difficult time making space for that. A healthy relationship, a deep relationship is going to have disappointment as part of it is going to have disagreement. 

As part of it, there’s going to be some conflict. If those things can’t be part of that emotional depth, then that sets the relationship on a really shaky foundation. Because as you grow in emotional intimacy, those sorts of things are going to start showing up too. And if you can’t trust that they’re going to be okay. They can navigate through this. Yeah. We’re in a little bit of disagreement here, but we’re going to come out on the other side. If we don’t have that, it gets really uncomfortable and set up for failure. You both used this word intimacy, which I think is a great word and it’s a great God word to me. 

You see in this vulnerability and intimacy is a whole spectrum and it looks like a lot of things, and we’re talking about emotional intimacy. Is this emotional, intimate intimacy one of the hallmarks of healthy intimacy? Does that emotional intimacy blend and move into physical intimacy? 

Is that a thing that could happen? It certainly can. Yes, and I would say that the physical part comes from too many strings attached and this is my person, and we need each other for our emotional wellbeing. And I think that it doesn’t always, but it can certainly lead down a path of physical boundaries being crossed. 

Which I think brings up another point there, Kathy, that as you move into an emotionally dependent relationship, one of the characteristics of that is you look to the other person to fill every need that you have. And so, it moves beyond just emotional support into physical and so on. 

So, I’m just going to throw this out there because this is in my head. We live in a world right now that is naming everything. And one of the names that we throw out in terms of sexual orientation to say if you are oriented this way, that means you must be gay or a lesbian or bisexual. And I’m wondering if this is conflated in this natural human interaction. Right. I have two girls who are great friends, right? They have an emotional connection. They’re on an intimacy spectrum. Is there a place for confusion in misunderstanding ourselves in moments like this to say, oh, I must be gay when no, I’m just inappropriately emotionally connected. 

Is that a fair observation? Oh, absolutely. I think you’re exactly right. I think it even shows up even in just the natural development of kids. If we’re talking about younger kids who don’t even know what physical attraction is, or sexual orientation and you’ve got this really good friend. Like, oh, well maybe that means that I’m homosexual or whatever. That is a very common thing in today’s world that kids get confused because they confuse close friendship with, well, that maybe means something, and then as they move into young adulthood and those relationships expand. 

And if you’ve got that category, oh, this means this, that connection gets made and then a lot of confusion comes. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that emotional connection is happening in our growth much earlier than a physical one. Yes. I think that’s important. Yeah. Right. Oh, did you recognize that about what being human means and the human experience? 

Oh, yes, I think so. Okay. I think this is fair to say, but I’m going to say this, and you guys correct it. I think too, this can get especially tricky with females, with females having a strong desire to have emotional needs met. I can see this in middle school girls, right? Like middle school boys are not meeting any emotional needs for girls. 

And so that confusion can happen there, but then all the way up into young adulthood. I would say specifically if marriage is not happening for someone, I think that it is easy to find a person that can appropriately meet emotional needs for you. Right? So, their friendship is very needed and appropriate, but it can so quickly become too attached, too close. 

And then that is where the fear of physical boundaries lies. I appreciate you saying that, Kathy. And I think if we were to look at bell curves and norms, females tend to be more emotionally astute and emotionally connective than the male counterpart. And I think to that point, and correct me if you would feel otherwise, Kathy, but I think sometimes with females in those relationships and connecting with another female who is more emotionally astute, there’s something really enjoyable and preferred. And then they get into this relationship with a male who’s focused on the physical piece. That’s really off putting. And then it’s like, wait, why wouldn’t I just come over here? And that dynamic can really fuel some of this. That’s really interesting.  

I imagine, as we talked about the family system, the off ramp was boundaries. It was experiencing guilt and also some grief and working through that to find your appropriate place in the system. I imagine there’s something somewhat corollary here. To get to what place? Maybe I’ll say that to reorient it into a friendship. Is that the end? I think it depends on maybe how unhealthy it’s been, or how many boundaries have been crossed. 

Sometimes it is just getting to a more boundary place to be able to manage just a friendship. Again, sometimes it is the loss of that because there’s just been too much collateral in the relationship. Yeah, it’s painful. Thanks both of you. I think this is really, really healthy. 

I think it’s really helpful to think through some of the categories that you’ve supplied and also appreciate you bringing this concept to the forefront so that we can see it and I trust that to our listeners this has been helpful, enlightening, or perhaps put some words to some of the things you’ve experienced or seen, but also most importantly, seeing the repair that can happen. 

Yeah. Am I right? There’s repair here, right? Yeah. To again, position ourselves in healthy relationships, right? Yeah, which is our goal. So, thanks everyone for being on. God bless you all.