I always caution my clients, be careful what you Google. With AI advancement and the glut of computer generated content online, things are even trickier. You can be searching for serious answers and find them staring at you, cold-hearted “truth” and believe you have found your destiny or identified a mortal wound. Trauma-bonding is one such phrase. In its orbit are words like “abuse” and “attachment”, words that are more disturbing when they appear together.
Just as there are individuals with very real flashbacks and nightmares from their recent car accident, most of us who have walked away from car accidents may have challenges that don’t rise to the level of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. I would argue that trauma-bonding is similar. It’s more often called “enmeshment” and does not rise to the level of abuse or such intensity as trauma-bonding. However, it can describe the potentially sticky side of family.
Enmeshment is when the lives of people become so deeply involved that personal boundaries can disappear and individuality is compromised or lost. If each of us took a temperature on our family of origin we would probably place it somewhere on the spectrum between estranged and enmeshed. Yes, that does imply that “healthy” might be somewhere in the middle. In some cultures more focused on the collective, that value family as a powerful source of identity, enmeshment would be more of the normal expectation. Some family systems can function well in the stasis of interdependence and sharing identity.
Other times, an pattern of enmeshment, it can start to erode the independence and power of individuality. Just as any individual has weaknesses in their personality that will flourish under stress, families and other systems under stress can operate in extreme ways that can become a patterned or “stuck” imbalance.
Resonance Within a System
A family or relationship that is already deeply enterwined is vulnerable to things that echo the natural resonance of connection and interdependence. Stress and trauma create primal responses in an individual that can, at first glance, appear to be compassion or loyalty. However, when the response comes out of a sense of life and death, survival of the person or the family, it becomes nearly impossible to resist or find any exit.
Imagine you’re pushing a child on a swing. Each time the swing comes back toward you, you give it a push. If you time your pushes correctly—pushing at just the right moment when the swing is already moving away—you add energy to the motion. The swing goes higher and higher because you’re “in sync” with its natural rhythm. This is resonance.
The idea of trauma-bonding and weaponized enmeshment is that too much of a good thing becomes too much of a good thing. There is a vice grip that now requires certain responses and disallowes individual need and action. In fact, what is good for the individual can even be viewed as a threat. What was the joyful addition of each unique person now is overwhelmed by group think, emotion-driven decisions and inability to tell one persons emotions from another.
Fear is the Driver
When a family has come through difficulty or is in the middle of life-threatening challenges, fear and anxiety insist that closer proximity is even more necessary. Family members can become over-protective and limit the freedoms of individuals in the family in efforts to “maintain safety”. Decisions about daily life can become dictated by fight-flight responses. This can make it hard for individuals to move past a difficulty in their own time, making them disloyal or rebellious for choosing to move forward or take “risks” that the family is not comfortable with.
Grief is a good example. A family can be rocked by loss of an important family member. Healthy grief says that time must be spent recognizing the loss as well as building a new life. A healthy family heals by sharing memories, hopes and building new memories. When a family is traumatized by an unexpected loss, perhaps one that brings guilt and blame into the equation, it can lock down on what is acceptable for grief. What is talked about, decisions to move forward or live life, all can become loaded with the same guilt and blame. Individuals are asked to give up their feelings and thoughts, which might be seen as “wrong” and are denied their own path to grieving in a healthy way.
Guilt and Blame
When difficult things happen, we look for explanation. Guilt and blame are natural ways that we internalize or externalize responsibility for something. Families that rely on each other are no different. When something horrible happens, an enmeshed family may look to someone in the family to be responsible. There may be a collective sense of shame, after all isn’t family supposed to stop bad things from happening? In reality, horrible things can overpower a family just as easily as an individual.
Defaulting to guilt and blame can prevent family from validating individual battles and how each person is struggling in their own way. It might be that people are asked to take sides or one person is marked as responsible. This takes energy away from the supportive aspect of a family and weaponizes the loyalty; somehow, someone must be responsible and it becomes a hot-potato situation.
Sometimes there is a person who takes on the responsibility as their own. This has been their role in the family. This is why therapists often look at the depressed or anxious family member as a barometer of what is a family-wide issue. There can be an “identified victim” or “Identified culprit”, but often it is so much more than that. The pressure to deal with a difficult thing has thrown guilt and blame all over the place.
Difficulty Expressing Emotions
Other times enmeshed families struggle with expressing emotion. The chronic loss of individuality becomes a handicap when something unspeakable and horrible happens. If we are not used to identifying our feelings and boundaries on a regular basis, things become even more confused under stress. Family members can feel things and be unsure if it is their own feeling or if they are simply frustrated by the feelings of another. Sometimes the game is hide-from-the-feelings, the person who dares express their feelings becomes the “the problem” for not managing their emotions.
What is amazing about individuals recognizing and owning their emotions is that it creates space for members to care for each other. While it might feel fatal or dangerous that everyone feel sad or angry or hurt at the same time, it is rare and the amazing balance of individuality is that we offer each other perspective and learn from each other when we share.
Increasing Healthy Individuality
So how do enmeshed families and relationships start to unpeel themselves? How does this ultimately impact the family? The great thing is that the healthier the family members are, ultimately the healthier the family can become.
Seeking professional help from a counselor can provide guidance and start the process of unraveling complex emotions and dynamics in the family. It is always great to have individuals start with their own therapists. In an enmeshed system, family therapy must come later, after the individuals feel stronger and healthier.
Goals of therapy should include learning to set healthy boundaries, respecting the boundaries of others and identifying personal needs. It can seem obvious, but for an enmeshed family finding out what each person needs can be challenging. The individual can be disconnected from themselves and find it challenging to recognize their own needs.
Open-communication is another great treatment goal. Helping each persons voice to be heard can be a lengthy process and need a neutral party to help. Learning your own needs first is critical or it is impossible to communicate them, defend them or even feel confident that you should ‘rock the boat’. The family norms are powerful and it takes time to build trust that you can be an individual without damaging the family.
Self-care is another goal for treatment. Self-care is popular right now and might even feel very “selfish” or impossible in some family systems. A good reminder is that self-care is not about “wants” it is about needs. A therapist can help you identify that time alone as a parent is critical to being a good parent, that saying “no” is necessary as a human, not a failure in your role. The patterns that have caused individuals to ignore themselves drive feelings of anger, helplessness and martyrdom. Paying attention to them can actually help you feel closer to others without resentment or feeling overwhelmed by them.
Enmeshment and trauma can result in long-term patterns of suppressing individuality, intense emotional responses and even driving family apart as they desperately seek to find oxygen. The good news is that it doesn’t mean that you or a family member intend to harm each other or to hold each other back; we do not have to be monsters or abusers to have made mistakes and need to learn.
