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Enmeshment and Differentiation · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Welcome to System Speak, a podcast about Complex Trauma and Dissociation.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: It's our story, our learning, and the ideas we've been working with as they've unfolded over time. Earlier episodes give context for where we are now, and current episodes may engage more advanced material, harder content, or reference earlier conversations. A few things to remember as you listen. The podcast is education, reflection, and storytelling. It's not therapy, and listening doesn't create a relationship.
• 0:45
  Although I am a therapist, I am not in that role here, and nothing that I share is individualized clinical advice. Every system, every internal world, all of your own stories are all different and you take up your own shape. What we share about ours won't translate directly to yours. It isn't meant to. We are all different, and all of our stories matter.
• 1:09
  As always, take care of yourself during and after listening, and we are so glad you're here.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: I wrote two things that I wanna read together here to share. If you listen to the seaweed episode, you already know the image of the seaweed growing beneath the waves, beautiful and resilient, but also the thing that can wrap around your ankles and pull you under. This week, I want to sit with what that seaweed represents in our relationships because there are two very different things that can look almost identical from the outside, and learning to tell them apart has changed everything for me this year. I'm talking about enmeshment and differentiation. One feels like love but quietly starves it.
• 2:09
  The other feels risky but is actually what makes real closeness possible. Enmeshment is what happens when the boundary between you and another person blurs until you genuinely lose track of where you end and they begin. Their bad day at work becomes your inability to function. Their mood sets your mood. You feel responsible for their feelings, and they come to depend on you to manage theirs.
• 2:40
  There's no clear you operating inside the relationship anymore, just one merged emotional system reacting to itself. This is the Enmeshment we named in the episode. Your well-being becomes contingent on someone else's, and you keep the connection alive by handing over your autonomy, walking on eggshells, fawning, making excuses for behavior you would never accept if you could see it clearly. Family therapist, Murray Bowen gave us language for this decades ago. He described a continuum he called differentiation of self, the capacity to balance our emotional and intellectual functioning rather than getting swept away, and to stay autonomous while still connecting closely to the people who matter to us.
• 3:33
  At the low end of that continuum, Bowen said we operate from a reflected sense of self. We need constant contact, validation, and agreement from others just to feel like we exist. That's Enmeshment. This self is borrowed on loan from whoever we are closest to. And if they go away, it feels like we don't exist anymore.
• 3:59
  And if they leave us, we have to find someone else to borrow their self because we think we don't have one. Some of this even came from Henry Stack Sullivan before him who talked about mirroring before we had language for attachment. He wrote about it as reflected appraisals. The idea that the self is built out of how others appraise us. That as children, we come to see ourselves the way significant others see us.
• 4:29
  Sullivan coined the term in 1953 when he published the interpersonal theory of psychiatry. Though Charles H. Cooley had described the same process earlier through his concept of the looking glass self in nineteen o two. More recently, the actual term of mirroring as a technical term comes from a different lineage. It's most associated with cod and self psychology, the mirroring self object, where a caregiver reflects the child's worth back to them.
• 5:01
  And with Winnicott's idea of the mother's face as the mirror in which the infant first sees themselves. Sullivan's reflected appraisals is the interpersonal psychiatry cousin of that family of ideas, but he framed it as appraisal rather than mirroring. Borrowing from George Herbert Mead, Sullivan saw the self as composed of reflected appraisals, how others come to validate and recognize or invalidate and ignore an emerging sense of self. Differentiation then is the capacity to stay connected to another person while remaining yourself, a distinct self from them. You can be close to someone, feel deeply with them, and still know that your thoughts, needs, and values are your own.
• 5:55
  You can let someone be upset without absorbing it or rushing in to fix it. You can hold your own position even when the other person wants you to merge into theirs. Differentiation is not coldness. It's not stonewalling, and it's not detachment exactly. As Bowen framed it, it's well differentiated person.
• 6:22
  A well differentiated person can be intensely close and loving without feeling swallowed up or dependent on a partner's approval. Enmeshment says, we are one, so I have no self. Differentiation says, I am me, you are you, and we choose to be close. Enmeshment feels like intimacy. It can even settle us neurologically where our bodies feel better together because our bodies are reflected back, which means they exist.
• 6:58
  It feels better because it's evidence. But when two people merge fast and deep, the kind of thing we joke about as U Hauling with lesbians, the kind that can tip into limerence, especially if there's parasocial layers involved. It produces an overwhelming sensation of closeness. It feels like being known, but real intimacy requires two separate selves who can actually know each other. If there's no distinct you present, there's nothing real for the other person to connect to.
• 7:37
  I said this about nourishment in an earlier episode already. If you give yourself away so you can feel connected, eventually, there's nothing left for them to connect to. Enmeshment also makes intimacy fragile. When you're functioning as one merged unit, every disagreement threatens the whole thing. A minor conflict starts to feel like a relationship ending threat.
• 8:03
  So you stop being honest, or you start masking, or you start managing the other person's reactions, or you fawn to keep the peace. That suppression of your true self is the exact opposite of being known, which is what intimacy is all about, what it should be. Differentiation is what makes deep intimacy possible. The psychologist David Schnark built much of his work on this, and he put it bluntly. What we often call intimacy is really our wish for someone else to make us feel acceptable and worthwhile.
• 8:42
  He argued that we have to develop and validate ourselves first, and only then can we experience the closeness we actually want because intimacy built on fear and neediness can never actually fulfill us. When you can self regulate, processing your own feelings before you bring them to someone, conflict stops escalating into shared crisis. When you can hold a boundary, the other person finally gets to meet the real you instead of the accommodating fawning version. The research bears this out too. Across nearly 300 studies, higher differentiation predicts better psychological health and stronger relationship quality.
• 9:29
  If we think about it, Enmeshment is being tangled in the weeds, pulled under, unable to find where you end until it feels like you are drowning. That's how I made myself a drowning whale. Differentiation is the whales lifting each other to the surface so each one can breathe on its own and stay in community. Both whales are still whole. They are connected without being fused.
• 9:59
  We are two different whales even if we're swimming together. Enmeshment usually is not a choice we make on purpose in the present. It's an unconscious pull to recreate a familiar fused dynamic, to restage an old wound hoping this time it resolves. It never does that way. It just adds to the wound.
• 10:26
  That's what makes it a kind of reenactment. Differentiation, though, is the conscious work that interrupts the loop because it asks you to stay attached to yourself precisely when the trauma pull wants you to dissolve into someone else. So that becomes the work, not pulling away, not building walls, but becoming whole enough next to another person that the closeness is real. Schnart called differentiation the most loving thing that you can do. If we go underneath that to the place where a lot of us first learned how to find out who we are, growing up with deprivation, with emotional neglect, we may have a self that never got fully reflected back to us at all.
• 11:20
  And when that happens and we add all the wonders of technology, online community may be the first mirror that ever works. And also, it can be a hall of mirrors that pulls you right back under. All of that is true. We do not arrive with a fully formed sense of self. We assemble it out of how the important people around us respond to us.
• 11:48
  We imagine how we appear to another person. We imagine their judgment of that appearance, and then we feel something about ourselves, pride or shame based on that reflection that was only imagined. George Herbert Mee carried it further describing how the self emerges as we learn to take the role of the other and see ourselves from the outside. If we go back to Sullivan's reflected appraisals, as children, we come to appraise ourselves the way significant people in our lives appraise us. We become who we are told we are in a thousand small moments or who we are told we are not.
• 12:37
  The psychoanalyst gave us the developmental close-up Winnicott wrote about the mirror role of the mother. The idea that when a baby looks at the caregiver's face, what the baby sees there is, in a sense, themselves. Babies don't have context for what mothers are going through. It feels like fact. That becomes implicit memory we carry with us, truths we tell about ourselves when it began with someone else's experience.
• 13:14
  When the face reflects the baby back with warmth and recognition, the baby gets to exist. Coet described the same need and called it the mirroring self object, the way a child needs someone to delight in them to reflect their worth so a cohesive self can form. Different words, same truth. A self is co created. We all need a face that lights up when it sees us, but we don't always get that.
• 13:46
  And even when we do, sometimes those faces disappoint us. Worse, sometimes we're betrayed. When we hold that idea against deprivation, when a child's emotional needs go consistently unmet, or when the mirror is flat or absent or rigid, that reflection comes back distorted and missing. And that becomes how we experience ourselves, distorted or invisible. Winnicott described exactly what happens when the caregiver's face doesn't reflect the child and instead stays blank or defended.
• 14:29
  The child's own creative capacity begins to atrophy, and they start looking around for other ways to get something of themselves back from the environment. Looking around in other places for other ways to get something of ourselves back, that's so many of us, and that's exactly what the online platforms, especially social media, feed off of. That is literally the part of the brain they are targeting to keep you connected, to keep you active online. The research on childhood emotional neglect maps onto this. When caregivers do not attune, comfort, or validate, children internalize damaging messages about their worth and the legitimacy of their own feelings, which can produce low self worth, shame, emotional numbing, and a constant pull toward external validation.
• 15:30
  And because the mirror was unreliable, attachment itself becomes the wound. And because the mirror is how we learn to read ourselves. If we feel good, we may think the world is good. If we feel bad, we may think the world around us is bad. It can reflect both ways.
• 15:55
  That can be weaponized against us, and we can weaponize it against others. Emotional neglect is linked to those insecure attachment patterns, disorganized attachment patterns, especially when we crave the connection we never got and feel panic when someone actually offers it. This is the painful piece of deprivation. It is hard to know our needs when no one ever reflected us as real. It's hard to know who we are when the mirror was dark or never showed up at all.
• 16:35
  We did not get the early appraisals that build a solid self, so we are still as an adult looking around for the reflection. And that makes sense. We're not actually doing anything wrong. That is an actual developmental task. And also in the context of the online world, For people who grew up deprived, the online community can be the first place the mirror works.
• 17:04
  You can find others who share your language, your diagnosis, your experience for a thing that no one in your family ever even talked about. And for the first time, the face on the other side lights up. Maybe for the first time, your own face lights up. You feel seen, sometimes more accurately than you were ever seen in person. That feels real, and it is good, and we won't let anyone cheapen it.
• 17:34
  And also, the same mechanism that makes it healing is the one that makes it risky. If your sense of self was built on borrowed reflections because the original ones failed, then a comment section becomes a borrowed self too. Sullivan would say, our reflected appraisals are now coming from people we have never met. Cooley would say, we are imagining their judgment of us and feeling our worth rise and fall with it. Other people can't actually change who we are no matter how they interpret what we do.
• 18:13
  But when we feel that, the likes and the replies stop being connection and start being air, it feels transactional, which is why it feels like it matters so much or even feels life threatening. We already know what it feels like to be a whale who cannot get to the surface. This is the parasocial knot I've been studying over the last year. It may feel amazing when we are finally reflected, and we may even develop actual friendships that are entirely valid and very real. These can be super healthy with all the reciprocal care without being harmed.
• 18:58
  And, also, it can be too costly if it demands us surrender ourselves to other people's truths or too costly if it means losing ourselves in group think instead of practicing our own critical thinking, or too costly if it means masking so much we forget who we are. So what do we do with all of this? Those who are both healing in community and at risk of dissolving into it. We go back to differentiation. The work is not to leave the community.
• 19:33
  The whales need the pod. We are mammals, and we need each other. The work is to build enough of a self that you are no longer fully dependent on the crowd's reflection to know you exist. And in my writing, I put 10 tips of what can help us with differentiation or at least give us a starting place. So here are the 10 tips I came up with that can help at least get started with building differentiation.
• 20:06
  Number one, taking an inventory about myself, spending intentional time alone, not as a punishment or withdraw, but to rediscover what we actually think, want, and enjoy when no one else's preferences are in the room. You cannot hold on to a self you have not gotten to know. Number two, self soothe before you share. Practice processing your own big feelings first so you're not handing someone else the job of regulating you. This is what keeps one person's bad day from becoming a shared crisis.
• 20:44
  The goal is to arrive at connection already steadied, not needing the other person to steady you. Three, name the waving feeling early. Learn the specific body signal that means you're starting to merge, The off center, the DPDR, something is coming between me and my values kinds of feelings. That is the seaweed. Catching it early lets you pull out before you are tangled instead of after.
• 21:14
  Number four, set boundaries sooner, not harder. A boundary held early can be gentle. A boundary forced at the last minute after you've already fallen past your limit has to be harsh. The harshness is usually a sign you waited too long, not that you are too much. Number five, let other people have their feelings.
• 21:38
  Differentiation means tolerating someone else's disappointment, frustration, or sadness without absorbing it or rushing to fix it. Their emotion is information about them, not an emergency you are responsible for resolving. Number six, ask what feeling in me am I avoiding? When you have an outsized reaction to someone else, turn the lens inward. Getting caught up in a reaction to another person often is what keeps us from noticing the part of difficulty that lives inside ourselves.
• 22:13
  Number seven, hold your own position under pressure. The real test of differentiation is staying yourself when someone wants you to merge with their view, especially people close to you. Agreeing to keep the peace is fusion. Staying connected while still disagreeing is differentiation. Number eight, keep a life that is yours.
• 22:37
  Protect the hobbies, friendships, and goals that do not involve your partner or your closest people. Abandoning your own world to fold into someone else's feels like devotion, but quietly erases the self they fell for. Nine, distinguish slowing down from pulling away. If you are highly attuned, fast, deep merging can be limerence. Slowing the pace is not abandonment or avoidance.
• 23:07
  It is making room for two whole people to actually form before they fuse. Frame it that way to yourself and to others. And number 10, find mirrors you can trust and be one for yourself. Build a few steady reflections, therapy, consultations, real friendships, playtime so that your sense of self is not riding on any single person or any particular crowd, and include yourself in your own care so the mirror finally tells the truth. Thank you so much for listening to us and for all of your support for the podcast, our books, and them being donated to survivors and the community.
• 24:30
  It means so much to us as we try to create something that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and healing brings hope.