TOOLS: Dealing with Enmeshment and Codependence

[an0ught]

Thanks Sarah  ,

this is a good point. It started on the staying board but I will rotate it into the coping with parents board where similar dynamics are ongoing in the mother child relationship.

a0

[blackandwhite]

I recently read this on detachment and it definitely resonated for me in terms of family relationships:

What is detachment?

Detachment is the:
* Ability to allow people, places or things the freedom to be themselves.
* Holding back from the need to rescue, save or fix another person from being sick, dysfunctional or irrational.
* Giving another person "the space" to be herself.
* Disengaging from an over-enmeshed or dependent relationship with people.
* Willingness to accept that you cannot change or control a person, place or thing.
* Developing and maintaining of a safe, emotional distance from someone whom you have previously given a lot of power to affect your emotional outlook on life.
* Establishing of emotional boundaries between you and those people you have become overly enmeshed or dependent with in order that all of you might be able to develop your own sense of autonomy and independence.
* Process by which you are free to feel your own feelings when you see another person falter and fail and not be led by guilt to feel responsible for their failure or faltering.
* Ability to maintain an emotional bond of love, concern and caring without the negative results of rescuing, enabling, fixing or controlling.
* Placing of all things in life into a healthy, rational perspective and recognizing that there is a need to back away from the uncontrollable and unchangeable realities of life.
* Ability to exercise emotional self-protection and prevention so as not to experience greater emotional devastation from having hung on beyond a reasonable and rational point.
* Ability to let people you love and care for accept personal responsibility for their own actions and to practice tough love and not give in when they come to you to bail them out when their actions lead to failure or trouble for them.
* Ability to allow people to be who they "really are" rather than who you "want them to be."
* Ability to avoid being hurt, abused, taken advantage of by people who in the past have been overly dependent or enmeshed with you.

From: http://www.livestrong.com/article/14712-developing-detachment/#ixzz1Qlo8ii2d

One of the issues I see with adult children as well as siblings of pwBPD is that since we've been in these relationships all or most of our lives, we have to untangle our identities from that of the pwBPD. We're so busy coping with the drama or the after effects of the drama of these relationships that we don't always have the energy to discover who we actually are. Detachment is a way to gain a foothold on yourself.

Might be worth going down the list of elements of detachment and see what hits you (if anything).

B&W

[justMehere]

uBPD bf NEEDS the enmeshment. He is tolerating, but not happy about me pulling out of it. It is so hard to do. It is not 100%, maybe only 50%, but it is freeing and I feel so much better. I had to realize that getting out of the enmeshment and getting better is my stuff. I cant control him and his stuff. It is his.

[bethanny]

useful quote for enmeshment fighting:

"Love without honesty is sentimentality and honesty without love is brutality."

Enmeshment provides no room for true love that encompasses honesty.

[hotapollo]

Hi Everyone,

I have been working on my r/s with my wife for sometime and most of the members here have been aware of what I am going through...

things have been really good for us after I realised that it was AS MUCH MY FAULT as it was her in this relationship being dsyfunctional.

The biggest hurdle that we think we have overcome is transparency of feelings. I have realised that she has a problem of her emotions overwhelming her and then her behaviour results as an action of the overwhelming emotions...I see her behaviour and get emotionally hurt...which in turns makes my behaviour go bad. Since we both are sensitive...we un intentionally both hurt each other and damage the r/s which a period of time takes its toll on the bonds...

We have taken baby steps to express our emotions to each other and that helps each other understand us better as well as signals when the other person is feeling vulnarable. however I still have not been able to get over my emotional enmenshment with her as a person.

When she dsyregulates I do not let that affect me to a large extent, neither do I get too worked up with her crazyness which helps my sanity. But at the same time I do run to her when I feel emotionally vulnerable and I need to express my feelings to her and vice versa...we have landed up being our own mutual shrinks!

Im not sure if this is the start of something bad..but so far is suits me and us well!

[Cordelia]

B&W, I really like that list of definitions of detachment!  It's incredibly helpful.  I think I should print it out and have it by my computer.  They are all things I struggle with, and need to work on.  Today I'm especially struggling with the second to last, "ability to allow people to be who they really are and not who you want them to be."  Since my mom, the one who really was a drain on my life-energies, is out of my life, what I struggle with the most is people who remind me of her by recreating dynamics in our relationship.  There's a person in my life who I feel drawn to even though I don't really like them, and I crave their approval, which they are very reluctant to grant.  It's all very reminiscent of my relationship with my mom, and so today I'm struggling to separate out my own anxieties about whether I'm really worthy of love from this person and their own personality, which happens to trigger me.  It's really hard. 

[Nutts45]

Skip I wanted to respond just to thank you, I have been trying to talk to my son about healthy relationships.  I had been looking for information to refer too (not sure about my judgement) to talk about what a healthy relationship entailed but could not pull up what I was looking for.  I am not sure what I click on but this post came up.  Your post on interdependency was the term I was trying to pull up from the depths of my memory.  The dynamics of an interdependent relationship made more sense than any thing I read in my past about health relationships.  There was actually a book that gave the difference between a dependent relationship versus a interdependent relationship...but as the term it seems to be buried in the depths of my mind.

Also to validate those...who didn't get a bunch of flags in the beginning...I think it fits with anyone who has unknown... underlying issues..

Most people don’t act co-dependently when things are GOOD! (When life and others are supplying their needs). Most people act CODEPENDENTLY when the going gets tough! (When life and others aren’t supplying their needs).

We can all blame life and situations for throwing us into turmoil – but the truth is these challenging times are only EXPOSING the lack of self-resources and self-belief we had on-line in the first place. If ‘other people bring you down’ – your state of ‘down’ was lying just under the surface before the event occurred!

THEREFORE – the number ONE priority is to stop being just a ‘fair weather person’ and know that you can ‘hold it together in a storm’. These stormy times are inevitable (they are a part of life) and through these times we gain enormous confidence and resources to become self-empowered. These times are a gift. The irony is the more we deal with them, the fewer storms come.

 

Sorry I lost the website this came from.  

[zoso80]

This is an amazing post. I read it three times and kept saying "yup...yup...yup."

I'd never experienced enmeshment before. It took me a long while before I understood it. During my time with dxBPDgf, I felt like I was losing who I was. I'd even had friends comment to that effect. I finally understood it as one of the subtle and cancerous forces that really making me unhappy. I'd always been independent and self sufficient.  With dxBPDgf I felt smothered, like a lid on a pot. I couldn't go to work without my phone exploding with texts; there were always subtle things to get my attention. I had a hard time focusing independently on the things I wanted to do, because I was always being pulled in the direction that dxBPDgf wanted me to go in.

DxBPDgf would say to me, 'I don't know where you stop and I start.' At the time I thought it was the wierdest statement I'd ever heard. Once I understood enmeshment, I had a lightbulb moment.  She WANTED that overlap that intermixing. She had created that in her children to where that was the norm and expectation. Her children, her son especially, was having a bad time functioning in relationships that weren't enmeshed (school, peers etc.). He was very angry when people wouldn't fall into this relationship structure. Boundaries? Oh my, that was a fast way to get his wrath.

In subsequent introspecting, that was one of the subtle battlegrounds - independence vs enmeshment. I kept pushing towards healthy independence by both parties - dxBPDgf was pushing for enmeshment. It fueled many a fight.

Point #6 is important, because deep connection and intimate sharing was never achieved. There was the initial pull towards one another (in the idealization and mirroring phase which I fell for). However, when the transition started out of that to a more deeper connection - nothing was there. It was like being in a funhouse full of mirrors - distorted images, strange things going on etc. Alas, that was the disorder.  DxBPDgf was trying, but the underbelly of the disorder was coming out because she was letting her guard down.  I knew that I wanted that mature love of depth and of connection - I knew something was off 3 or so months in. I stayed because I wanted to try.  Try I did, and learn a lesson I did. A disordered person whom you are now the trigger for the likelyhood of them improving is slim because they turn it on you. It became a cycle. Once the the walls came down of all the lies and the twists of the truth as well, I had to go.

What I had wasn't even in the same galaxy as Point #6.

Thanks for posting this Skip! A little introspection and further understanding on Sunday is a good thing!

What does it feel like to be "interdependent"?  I'm not suggesting that this is an easily acheivible state with a partner with BPD - but as the emotional leaders its important that we know what the ideal is.

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