"No Mind of His Own" - Enmeshment in Toxic / Dysfunctional Family Systems

Notes on Family System Theory

Where there are poor ego boundaries between members of the same family, we use the term ‘undifferentiated family ego mass.' Individual family members often feel overly responsible or blame themselves for the happiness of all the other individuals in the family. Members of these family structures are highly emotionally reactive to one another. Everyone is caught in the same emotional structures and tone and context. Where very weak boundaries exist, what happens to one emotionally happens to all the others emotionally as well. Family System theorists view these families as enmeshed, co-dependent or dysfunctional family systems. In enmeshed family systems, forces of togetherness are represented by the belief that children are an extension of the parent and vice versa.

Forces of togetherness create what family members do to define them as being alike regarding how they feel and emote. All groups do the same thing. Self-definition is better or wholly established though group identification. Therefore your identity is determined by the larger group through your submission to the group leaders out of your need to belong and as well to be protected from other potentially hostile groups. The forces of belonging come into play here. The need to belong is, of course, a defense of loneliness and mortality, two of our greatest fears. To belong, each member will over time come to believe and rationalize anything to keep the family/group system going and thus their sense of belonging. This then has a conserving effect on the members of the family, following the party line, doing and saying what ‘my Daddy told me.' The forces of needing to connect and belong are the instinctual beginning of with the mother or earliest most powerful adult.

The children from a poorly differentiated parent who themselves have achieved little separation from there own parents, (the child’s grandparents), in turn, will experience a similar degree of undifferentiation unless the child of these poorly differentiated parents gets help to resolve this conflict of emotional fusion. Together with his parents and siblings, he has “no mind of his own”.

Often there is triangulation between the parents against the child to show a united front adding to only convince the child they are wrong and the parent is right.  If there is disagreement between the parents, there is usually concealment of this, so the parent is not implicated. The real purpose is to stop the child from a triangle with one of the parents. The child is encouraged to believe that all family systems are based on the same style of communication

Familism or co-dependent families, or enmeshed emotional families, encourage individual members to put themselves last to create and sustain the sense of belonging to the original family group. Everyone is caring and sharing with everyone else. Selflessness is promoted as a virtue as putting individual needs first is met with hostility and accusation of selfishness. To risk differentiation is risking exclusion from the family.

 This creates greater inwards, regressive, conserving forces emotionally towards the family of origin first, leaving little emotional energy for relationships outside and forward-focused on the original family system. This dynamic would weaken the bond between one’s spouse and their children in the individual’s second family as there is still a lot of emotional energy invested outside the second family.

The parents within these dysfunctional family structures view/ treat the child as a project:

1. Each child is simply a blank sheet. The parent simply designs a life for the child.
2. The child (from the parent’s extreme envy as a child and later as an adult) is given that which the parent wanted but never had
3. The child is forced to experience the same suffering as the parent. This justifies the parents own past suffering.

In all situations there is parental projective identification: the parent is living out his or her own life goals through the child. The child is denied the opportunity to develop self-will, self-determination. The child is being used in an attempt to heal the parents past emotional pain, humiliation and narcissistic injury.

Some examples of parental goals imposed on the child: sports, academics, career, toys, holidays or other activities that the parent never had, choice of partner and spouse. The parent devotes a massive amount effort to support the child’s ability to meet these goals. This, of course, puts pressure on the child to show gratitude for the “sacrifices” the parent has made to support the child. The parent may react with indignation if the child does not meet parental expectation and “disappoints” the parent. These pressures impose immense pressures on the child to please the parent instead of exploring and developing individualization, his own life goals, autonomy, and independence.

The “stage parent” who lives in the reflected glory of a child’s success. The child compensates for what the parent could not achieve or never tried to achieve from its effort.

Projective Identification is the borrowing of self from other members of the family. Instead of forging their own identity, a poorly differentiated person derives a sense of self from being associated with another member so the family. This can be termed ‘collusion of narcissists”.

This type of person, in the end, is completely “other focused”. Talks excessively about the others in the family.  Self-identity shrinks as the need to borrow from others increases. This creates a negative loop as the self-esteem system is lowered forcing the individual to borrow more and more from the others.

Some cultural forces that perpetuate dysfunctional family systems:

Within family systems, there is an example of special language to maintain and promote bonding of the members into common belief, philosophies, and emotions, which blurs individual identity one from the other.

Politician, religious organizations, and media heavily promote respect for parents and the survival of the nuclear family. To challenge is considered a deviant act.

There are always very high levels of emotionality and emotional neediness when the individuals within a family system lack self-knowledge. Therefore the lower the self-knowledge is, the more enmeshment, resulting in sustained identity diffusion and confusion by all the members and hence even greater enmeshment.  Preserving the emotional fusion is where all their resources go. They feel they always lack in love, caring, and security. They need constant reassurance from other family members of their loyalty and love. There are often frequent acts to reassure loyalty, to test the others love.

These types of family systems always have high levels of avoidance of problems. Members collectively will always try to conceal, minimize or outright deny, as they are terrified of being found out which results in humiliation. As well as the family simply doesn’t know how to deal with the problems within their family as they have already well established an elaborate system of avoidance and anything that might humiliate them. Denial, rationalization and projection defenses are their trademarks coping strategies.  

Denial of the reality, of course, leads to the development of the ‘pseudo-self,' an entirely False Self, the  Phoney Self, the Self behind the Mask, the Con Man, the empty Actor, the Pretender.  Their social image/ status then becomes all that is important. The complete opposite of developing a true self-hood.  They simply have 'no-self'. They only truly exist in the center of a 'dark void'. Everything else about them is a lie, false, a cold, calculated, fabricated shell to hide behind in their void.