Did you grow up in an enmeshed family? Here are a few signs you might recognize. For instance, were you ever made to feel like it was your responsibility to keep mom or dad happy? Did you often feel guilty if you weren't constantly attuned to a parent’s emotional needs? Even now, do you feel pressured to conform to what other family members expect from you in terms of your actions, thoughts, or feelings?
Fortunately, there's a way out. You can break the cycle and avoid creating an enmeshed family environment for your own children. Let's start by understanding how this dynamic develops.
What is an Enmeshed Family?
An enmeshed family is one where individual members lack clear, healthy boundaries. Instead, the boundary lines between the parents' needs and the child's needs get blurry. In such families, your parent or caregiver's emotions and needs became the priority, leaving little room for you to develop a solid understanding of your own emotions and needs.
In contrast, families with healthy boundaries respect the individual needs of each member, teaching everyone to take responsibility for their own emotions. It's vital for parents to primarily focus on helping the child to understand her own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. By doing so, they act as a mirror, helping you to understand your unique God-made design as you mature into adulthood.
For example, healthy parents help their children:
- Learn how to care for and honor their body
- Identify their own thoughts and feelings
- Ask for support or advocate for what they need
- Set healthy boundaries with other people
- Respect the boundaries other people set with them
It's a parent's job to help a child develop a strong sense of self—as a unique individual created in the image of God. However, an enmeshed family does the opposite. An enmeshed family blurs the boundaries between individuals, often causing a child to feel responsible for a parent’s emotions, which hinders personal growth and autonomy.
6 Signs of a Toxic Behavior
If your parents did not have a healthy understanding of their own boundaries, they likely violated yours. For instance, you may have received these types of damaging messages as a kid:
- You exist to meet my needs.
- You can’t do it without me.
- Don’t be like those other people—do it the way I do it.
- It’s selfish to have your own dreams apart from our family.
- Don’t trust yourself.
- You need me to rescue you.
These toxic messages can be extremely hard to shake. If you don’t address them, you might find yourself struggling with feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or an extreme need to please other people. All of this chaos makes it extremely difficult to establish healthy boundaries in your adult relationships or with your own children. Here are six signs of an enmeshed family and the boundaries that they violate:
1. Parentification
Parentification is a harmful role reversal where the parent gets the child to take care of the parent. Instead of caring for you, your parent raises you to care for their emotional needs. This inversion deprives children of the attunement they need to grow into healthy, well-rounded adults capable of understanding and meeting their own emotional needs. As adults, parentified children often feel overly responsible for the needs of others and struggle to care for themselves.
2. Criticism
Constant criticism demeans a child rather than uplifting them. Instead of helping you recognize your potential and areas for growth, a critical parent consistently highlights your weaknesses and flaws. Children need to understand their intrinsic value and feel cherished. Exposure to incessant criticism, whether through subtle remarks or overt verbal abuse, hinders the development of a fundamental sense of self-worth. As a result, you might find yourself second-guessing yourself and constantly seeking approval from others.
3. Blame- Shifting
Instead of taking responsibility for their own behaviors, blameshifting parents constantly shift the blame onto their child, another family member, or someone else. Children may doubt their own perceptions of reality, leading to a sense of helplessness and emotional distress.
4. Rescuing
Rescuing is when a parent doesn’t allow natural opportunities for a child to learn resilience. As a result of their own anxiety or unhealed wounds, the parent overprotects and rescues a child from any form of pain. When a child isn't equipped to face obstacles, it’s difficult to move into the emotional maturity that adult relationships require. Instead of facing challenges with confidence and skill, you might tend toward a victim mentality, unrealistic expectations, or even entitlement, a mindset in which you expect others to do your work for you.
5. Unpredictability
A parent who struggles with mental illness, addiction, or who can’t manage their own emotions creates an environment of unpredictability. A young child doesn’t know how to make sense of a parent who is happy one day but can’t get out of bed the next. It’s
not that a parent can’t ever struggle. But healthy families help a child feel safe and secure, even when the parent goes through challenges.
6. Control
An overly controlling parent undermines a child’s need for autonomy. Control can take many different forms. It might look like possessiveness, in which the parent tries to stop a child from growing close to other people. A controlling parent might dictate a child’s friends, interests, or choices, instead of teaching her to grow in wisdom and discernment. Or they may hold rigid “family rules” that stifle curiosity, creativity, and play.
This list of six harmful parenting patterns is not meant to lay blame. Many parents who engage in these behaviors are dealing with unresolved wounds within themselves. But the fact is that these toxic behaviors pass down wounds to children. Your parents may have provided you with food, shelter, clothing, and educational opportunities. But that doesn’t mean they helped you develop a strong sense of self.
The good news is that you can heal from childhood wounds. Your parents didn’t destroy you. They just created some roadblocks. You can uncover the beautiful God- bearing self that was lost, reclaim it, and learn to live from the best of you more authentically each day.
