🤔 Is it support or enmeshment?
How to spot the difference between being supportive and over-functioning
Hello! I hope you and your family are doing well!
Today I want to talk about the fine line between supporting your child and becoming enmeshed with them. This is not a judgment of your parenting in any way. Supporting a child who is facing a mental health challenge is tricky, and most of us stray into over-functioning sometimes!
Supporting your child when times are tough is absolutely necessary and expected. However, like all good things, supporting your child can get a little out of hand sometimes and tip into over-functioning or enmeshment. If it takes over your life or accidentally reduces your child’s motivation and agency, you can make some changes to rebalance the type of support you’re giving.
In a parent-child relationship with healthy boundaries, parents support their children when they’re having difficult emotions. They recognize when their child is having hard feelings, validate their child’s emotions, and support them in processing their feelings.
In contrast, in an enmeshed parent-child relationship, parents take responsibility for the child’s problems and emotional state. They try to prevent the child from feeling negative emotions like loneliness, fear, and anger.
For example, if a child has a negative body image, the parent may encourage the child to exercise, wear certain clothes, or eat a certain way so they don’t feel bad about their body. While this approach seems to make sense, it backfires because the parent is trying to protect the child from feeling bad feelings.
Parents shouldn’t protect kids from feeling bad feelings. Rather, we should support our kids in feeling their feelings within a safe, secure relationship with us.
None of us wants our kids to be upset! Of course we don’t! But it turns out that if we protect our kids from feeling their bad feelings, they don’t learn how to process negative emotions, which are a normal and healthy part of being alive. Instead of learning to process their own feelings, these kids become overly reliant on parents and/or unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Teaching our kids to process negative emotions is essential if we want to raise kids who feel secure and as if they have agency over their own lives. It’s vital to their mental health… and ours.
Here are some signs that you might be enmeshed with your child.
Keep in mind that this is a spectrum. All parents do some of these things some of the time. But consider the frequency, intensity, and outcomes of these behaviors.
You feel as if it’s your responsibility to save your child from feeling bad feelings.
You live in fear of your child’s emotional fragility and try to avoid doing anything to upset them.
You regularly spend hours reassuring and talking your child down when they’re upset.
You’ve given up your own hobbies and interests because you believe your child needs you to be available for them at all times.
If your child feels sad, you can’t feel happy until they feel better.
When something goes wrong for your child, you jump in with solutions and try to fix it right away.
Other people who are close to you say that you are over-involved in your child’s life and that they’re worried about you.
You walk on eggshells with your child because you don’t want to trigger an emotional outburst.
You feel as if you can’t leave your phone behind, no matter what, because your child might need you and you feel as if you have to answer regardless of what you’re doing.
You interrupt things that matter to you, like a therapy appointment, a date with your partner, your work, parenting your other child, or a healthcare appointment to respond to your child’s phone call or text.
Remember: none of this is a judgment of your parenting! Of course you think about, talk about, and care about your child! This is all about weighing the truth inside of yourself: does your relationship with your child feel balanced and healthy, or do you need some help disentangling your own identity from your child’s identity?
It’s completely natural for parents to step in and try to help a child who is struggling with their emotions. The instinct is healthy and natural. But we need to ensure we’re supporting our kids in feeling their feelings rather than trying to protect them from feeling.
Kids who don’t learn to process negative emotions are more passive and take less responsibility for their own health and well-being.
I know how hard it is to watch your child struggle, and I want to be clear that the solution to enmeshment is not abandonment. It’s not that we need to stop helping our kids! But we need to learn how to help kids in a way that increases their ability to process negative emotions for themselves rather than trying to protect them from negative emotions.
We need our kids to take charge of their own lives, and they can only do this if they’ve learned that they can handle even the gnarliest, scariest emotions. With you by their side, they can!
If you’d like some help, let me know!
Ginny Jones Parent Coach / More-Love.org
Journal prompts for parents who worry they might be over-functioning
Set aside 15-20 minutes to write your responses to the following questions:
1. Do I frequently jump in and try to protect my child from feeling big feelings like anger, fear, and loneliness?
For example, do you tell your child things like “calm down, it’s not that bad,” tell them how to solve their problem, try to solve their problems for them, or avoid telling them things and doing things that might upset them?
2. What does it look like when I do this?
What do you do? For example: reassurance, lying, hiding, arguing, negotiating, etc? What does your child do in response? For example: yelling, shutting down, arguing, negotiating, etc.
3. Why do I do this?
For example, are you worried that your child can’t handle the truth? Do you believe your child is too weak to tolerate their emotions? Are you exhausted by their emotional outbursts and don’t want to deal with them?
4. Do I have evidence that my attempts to protect my child from feeling big feelings has a net positive effect? Has doing this reduced my child’s levels of anxiety, depression, isolation, etc. in a meaningful and lasting way?
For example, when you protect your child from feeling their feelings do they get better at handling their feelings overall, or are they becoming more stuck and/or less capable of processing their feelings in an adaptive way?
5. Do I need help disentangling my identity from my child’s identity? If so, who can help me figure out the boundaries and expectations that make sense given my child’s current situation?
For example, could your partner, friend, therapist, counselor, or coach help you understand what’s going on, set some goals, and keep you accountable?
6. What can I do to build my child’s ability to feel big feelings like anger, fear, and loneliness in the safety and security of their relationship with me?
For example, can you try validating your child’s feelings? Can you manage your own fear about your child’s emotions in order to support them in feeling what they feel?