Enmeshment

You are enmeshed with someone if you cannot tell the difference between your own emotions and the other person in the relationship. It can also occur if you feel like you need to rescue someone from their emotional pain or suffering.

This occurs when you are operating with your energy interwoven with another energy field, and not keeping a distinct boundary. When we blend with another through the action of enmeshment, we make an unconscious link that starts from the posture of helping, caring, or loving and ends up being a draining, depleting experience for both people. Ironically, it is manipulative and disrespectful to enmesh with another person. 

The most respectful way a person can be present with a friend or loved one is with energetic boundaries; allowing them complete autonomy while, staying whole and awake to your own aura/energy field.

Once you are enmeshed it isn’t just that you are connected to another person it is that you are trying to clear their energies through your system– potentially taking on their issues, absorbing and identifying their physical pain and emotional distress as your own.

Unfortunately, once enmeshment has occurred it can be difficult to disentangle. People usually need to become conscious of the pattern they have connected in with first in order to start to separate.

There are 4 different levels of enmeshment. The easiest way to think about it is crossing someone else’s boundaries that you have a relationship with (partner/family/friend)

1. Physical enmeshment
2. Intellectual enmeshment
3. Emotional enmeshment
4. Energetic enmeshment

Physical enmeshment examples are as follows:

• Taking food off of your partners plate without asking.
• You use or take someones things in the household without asking.
• You constantly have to touch your partner to feel connected/love.

A few intellectual enmeshment examples:

• You take on the opinions of your partner without thinking for yourself.
• Attempt to control partner by looking at their phone, message, emails without their consent.
• Think you have to think for your partner/constantly remind them to do things b/c you don’t think they can think for themselves.

Some emotional enmeshment examples:

• You feel fear of loss when your partner would like to do something on their own.
• A parent may treat a child like an adult and lean on them emotionally.
• You often play victim.
• Suppress or swallow your feelings to keep the harmony. You e. g. don’t use your anger consciously to set clear boundaries.

Energetic enmeshment examples:

• You are always in the energetic space of the other person. Even sitting at a normal distance you encompass their energy.
• You feel a loss of identity apart from the other person.
• You have a feeling of scarcity or lack and grab at the other person for their energy.

If enmeshment is happening, it is most likely also happening energetically as well where there is energy being taking from or attached to the other.

Enmeshment can leave you unable to distinguish yourself from other people in your family, work and world.  Whether you are the one merging or the one being enmeshed — overwhelming others with your energy is a form of manipulation, one where the strongest energy wins.

Balanced Relationship

A healthy balanced relationship involves family members recognizing that they have different emotions and can make independent decision.  For example, a parent can see that their daughter is upset and anxious and can even empathize with her, but this does not get the parent into an agitated emotional state where they feel like they have to fix the emotion of their daughter.  They empathize and show nurturing concern for their daughter but allow her the emotional space to solve her own problems with their support.

Steps to take

If you feel like you are enmeshed with anyone or have been there are a few things you can start with.

• Start by observing yourself and being radically honest about your behaviors. Which enmeshment pattern do you do the most? (physical, intellectual, emotional, energetic)
• Pay attention if you catch yourself doing any of the above actions and ask yourself why it’s happening and ask others what they observe.
• Set boundaries with others and check in with yourself energetically. Slow down, get grounded, ask yourself: “Is this my problem or emotion?” If not, “Whose is it?”.
• Read my ebook on energetic cords and attachments. This will explain some of this on a more energetic level and in your chakras. It has exercises at the end to clear yourself of others energy and pull back your own.
• Try this meditation on clearing energetic cords. It is a good place to start in shifting the energy between you and someone else.

Some of the patterns may stem from your parents or early childhood behaviors. It may take time to dissolve the patterns and change habits– and probably feel uncomfortable and unsteady at times. If you feel they go very deep, work with another person to help identify and shift these patterns in a way that is best for you.