Untangling Enmeshment's Influence on Your Relationship with Food
In part one of our Attachment Wounds and Food Struggles series, we explored how attachment wounds from our childhoods can manifest in our adult lives. In this article, we’ll dive deeper into enmeshment, a specific type of relational trauma and emotional wounding. It gets the spotlight in this second installment because it’s one of the most masked, covert types of trauma. It takes time for my clients to “see it,” understand how it played out in their childhood experiences, and fine tune to all the insidious layers of impact it’s had in their lives.
Enmeshment can occur in entire family units or between either parent and their daughter or son. In this series, however, we’ll focus on the mother-daughter enmeshment dynamic in North American culture. It’s the dynamic I see the most and the one that carries a unique burden in our patriarchal society due to the expectation that daughters, specifically, remain loyal and attentive to their family of origin. Keep reading to learn more about the intricacies of mother-daughter enmeshment and how this nuanced type of emotional wounding can play a role in your food struggles as an adult.
Enmeshment as Trauma
Enmeshment is disguised as an abundance of love, care, and attention, which can feel safe and secure for young children. But at some point, this excess of love surpasses nurturing and becomes suffocating, restrictive, and invasive. An enmeshed parent lacks boundaries with the child and severely limits the development of the child’s independent sense of self. There is no emotional space for the child to be their own person. Differentiation — a healthy developmental process where a child is allowed the freedom to separate their thoughts, beliefs, choices, and personhood — is undermined, sometimes in subtle, unconscious ways and other times in deliberate ways.
In her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” Jennette McCurdy, a writer, director, and former actress describes the enmeshed dynamic with her mother extremely well, though I don’t recall her naming it as such. Her mother likely had an untreated mental illness, and the level of enmeshment Jennette endured throughout childhood is extreme. But the underlying emotional burden of expectation and obligation Jennette felt to be her mother’s everything — and the damaging consequences to her mental health and self-perception — is a universal experience I see too often. If you want to learn more about what enmeshment looks and feels like, I recommend this book as well as the other resources listed at the end of this article.
Below, I share some of the common signs of enmeshment.
Signs of Parent-Child Enmeshment
The relationship lacks boundaries, which could look like emotional overdependence and very little alone time or space at home.
The parent is over involved in the child’s relationships, activities, and problems.
The parent’s life centers around the child.
The parent doesn’t see the enmeshed dynamic and fails to recognize how their words and actions contribute to its perpetuation.
The parent feels threatened, hurt, or angry when the child tries to set boundaries.
The parent fears conflict and views the child’s dissent as betrayal.
The child feels guilt or shame when they try to take care of their needs.
The child must adhere to the spoken or unspoken rules about the parent’s beliefs and values.
The child does not feel they can be themselves because they’re worried about following the strict rules about what is acceptable.
The child has a desire to be rescued from uncomfortable emotions or feels the responsibility to rescue others from their difficult emotions.
The parent tells the child that they play a significant emotional role in their life. The message the child internalizes is that they are the source of their parent’s happiness.
The parent’s needs intrude on the child and the child feels emotionally burdened or stuck because they feel responsible for their parent’s well-being.
The child exhibits an unclear identity and sense of self outside of family settings.
The parent exhibits an unusual level of closeness with adult children (e.g. an expectation to spend holidays together).
The child feels pressure to live near the parent as an adult. If they do not live in close proximity, the parent may have a sense of entitlement or act on an intense desire to frequently be in touch in order to bridge the gap and maintain closeness.
Enmeshment and Your Food Struggles
As Gabor Mate says, “Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside of you as a result of what happens to you.”
Trauma disconnects us from ourselves. As infants and children, we rely on our primary caregivers for survival. We are biologically wired to stay connected to them. When the connection is threatened, we will choose connection over trusting our own instincts. For example, when we experience repeated misattunement, we learn to read parents’ cues (such as their sighs, facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice). When the parent’s attentiveness is unpredictable, inconsistent, or anxious, we learn to be on guard — looking out for clues and patterns to tell us whether we’re safe or not — and posture ourselves in such a way that will earn their love, acceptance, and approval. In doing so, we learn it’s better to rotate around their needs and ignore, dismiss, and doubt what we see, feel, think, and sense. This insecure attachment teaches us the skills for hypervigilance of the people and environment around us. We don’t learn to attune to and trust our perceptions, emotions, desires, inherent worth, or need for boundaries because we’re more preoccupied with doing what it takes to stay connected.
In her book “Emotional Incest Syndrome,” Dr. Pat Love describes the above dynamic:
If a parent represses the child’s anger not just once but over and over again, a deeper injury occurs. The child will eventually dismantle her own anger response. Ultimately it’s safer to cut off a part of her being than to battle the person on whom her life depends.
This dynamic gets messy when enmeshment is involved because there’s no true freedom to develop a separate sense of self without someone next to you wanting to be a part of it all the whole time. The blueprint of enmeshment teaches us that love from our primary caregiver looks like receiving a certain level of over involvement, blending of identities, and reciprocity in the mother-daughter relationship. (Though before we see it as enmeshment, that overinvolvement doesn’t feel “over” —it’s all we know as love.)
Reciprocity means:
The daughter understands the unspoken rule to remain loyal to her mother’s needs, beliefs, values, and ways of showing up in the world.
The daughter’s sense of self and security forms around this blending of identities.
The daughter loses out on crucial years of development to explore and experiment.
The daughter doubts her capabilities, and she’s afraid of failing, messing up, and not getting it right.
In short, to remain loyal to her mother and the enmeshed dynamic is to sacrifice the daughter’s personhood; to give her power away and remain small.*
When we give our power away, it creates a vacuum, and we are compelled to fill it somehow, usually by processing it or projecting it. — Bethany Webster, “Discovering the Inner Mother”
Daughters who experience enmeshment trauma lack a genuine rooted sense of self which sets the stage for that vacuum — the void of self, I like to call it. This is a ripe environment for developing food and body issues or disordered eating behavior. Without a true sense of self, our self-esteem is crippled, superficial. It’s easily swayed by fear, anxiety, and doubt. And it leads us to seek validation, regulation, guidance, and soothing from the outside world (in the form of food, substances, relationships, etc.). Bingeing or impulsive eating is an attempt to fill that vacuum. Restricting pretends there is no vacuum and we don’t have needs. If it’s not food, we fill this vacuum by other means, such as people pleasing, self-sabotaging, substance abuse, staying in unhealthy relationships, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies like perfectionism or control.
*Whether you’ve experienced enmeshment or another type of attachment trauma with your mother, Bethany Webster’s book, “Discovering the Inner Mother,” is an essential read to fully understand all the pieces at play in these mother-daughter dynamics and the wounding that occurs.
Who’s Susceptible to Enmeshment?
Patriarchy has deprived women to such a degree that when they become mothers, women often turn to their young daughters, starving and ravenous for validation, approval, and recognition. This is a hunger that a daughter could never possibly satisfy. — Bethany Webster, “Discovering the Inner Mother”
Mothers carry their own unresolved wounds from childhood and beyond. If they’ve lacked the honoring, cherishing, and acknowledgment of their goodness, dedication, and abilities, they too will experience this vacuum. Mothers may additionally be susceptible to creating an enmeshed relationship with their daughter if they:
Have been treated as inferior or burdened by the limiting expectations and obligations as the daughter in their family of origin or a woman in our patriarchal culture
Have unprocessed trauma (e.g. a loss, illness, or betrayal) they unknowingly project onto their daughter by acting on an intense urge to physically or emotionally protect her
Experienced rigid rules and boundaries or emotional distance and aloofness from their own parents and wish to break that pattern
Are single, divorced, or in an unhappy or abusive relationship, or have a mental illness
Lack adult resources for emotional support
Have not processed grief over their own unrealized potential or dreams
Any of these examples further deepen the mother’s own wounds and sets the scene for enmeshment. She too will be compelled to fill the vacuum and may not realize she’s acting from the unhealed wound. This type of behavior is her “shadow” — when she acts on the urges, impulses, and compulsions to fill the vacuum without understanding the unresolved emotional trauma that created the vacuum to begin with.
The mother may fill this void by putting all her energy, love, and longing for worth, belonging, fulfillment, and acceptance into the relationship with her daughter. The daughter then comes into the world saddled with the adult responsibility of catering to her mother. (When this shadow is at play, the child feels it, whether or not the expectation of reciprocity is explicitly communicated by the mother.)
Eventually, the daughter will start to explore and differentiate. When this natural and crucial developmental stage is clipped or suppressed in an enmeshed family system, it’s incredibly damaging to the daughter. This differentiation may feel scary or threatening for a mother who is enmeshed. She may interpret her daughter’s self-expression as personal rejection, abandonment, or betrayal, or she may find it offensive. Alternatively, the mother may encourage the differentiation as long as she and her daughter can explore together and the mother doesn’t feel left out or left behind.
Steps Forward
A core injury to a child who has endured enmeshment trauma is their stunted emotional development and a clipped evolution of their personhood. Disruption to a child’s psychological development can lead to a deeply embedded, internalized shame of who they are as adults. This impacts their self-perception, self-worth, and adult relationships.
Enmeshment is a quiet, insidious type of attachment wound that reveals itself one layer at a time. If you identify with patterns described in this article, know that it is absolutely possible to heal this trauma and develop a solid, rooted sense of self. The first step is to get a clear picture of the enmeshed patterns that were at play in your childhood and explore the impact they’ve had on you as an adult. At first it can be difficult to get closer to the truth of your pain. But getting closer ultimately liberates you and defuses the power this trauma has over you. Use the below resources to help you start this process. And tune into the final two installments of this series to learn how to address emotional wounds at the root.
Resources for Enmeshment Trauma
Read
Listen: The Self Work Podcast by Dr. Ruth Rutherford (clinical psychologist)
Watch: Dr. Kim Sage (clinical psychologist)
Enmeshment Trauma (TikTok)
How to Heal Enmeshment (TikTok)