Why It's Painful To Realize Your Family Is Enmeshed

reasons why and how to handle those feelings

Welcome to Good Enough, a weekly subscriber newsletter where I help you work through your family drama to create more meaningful adult family relationships. This is Week 4 in the Family Enmeshment Series. You can catch up on Week 1-3 here:

• Can A Family Be Too Close?: 10 Signs You Grew Up In An Enmeshed Family

• Why Enmeshment Happens In Families And Who Can Help Prevent It

• How Childhood Family Enmeshment Can Negatively And Positively Impact You In Adulthood

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This Email Is For You If:

• You want to change your family patterns, but you have trouble going from awareness to change

• You’re the one who notices the enmeshment in your family

• You want to understand why being this close with your family doesn’t feel good

• You want to normalize the complicated feelings you’re having about your family enmeshment

What’s In This Email:

• Why it hurts to discover your family is enmeshed

• How to begin overcoming those distressing feelings

• What to do when you’re the only one who notices the enmeshment

• An invitation to join me May 29 at 10:30AM ET for a live and recorded Q&A about Enmeshed Families

(5 min read)

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I was scrolling TikTok this afternoon and came across a video (sorry I can’t find it now…) of a woman talking about her childhood. She was reflecting on family parties from her childhood and how it seemed like they were all having fun. Her perception of these parties is so different now that she’s an adult. I went straight to the comments section and saw hundreds of adults saying some version of, “I thought every one was drinking and having fun and now I realize they were all incapable of dealing with their own lives and not paying attention to any of us kids.” Adults shared stories of childhood memories that they simply couldn’t comprehend when they were children. There was clearly a lot of pain in this comment section.

Realizing things about your family is hard. It’s so hard that most people will spend their entire lives trying to avoid it. This is why people who were hurt by their parents are more likely to say “I was a bad kid,” than they are to say “my parent hurt me.” It’s why generations of adults continue to repeat the same patterns over and over, despite being hurt by those same actions in their childhood. If we want to change something, first we have to admit that we were harmed. That hurts and it’s hard.