Anxiety, pressure, overwhelm, life transitions, and grief have characterized my counseling practice for years. They still do, but increasingly there is another issue that keeps popping up, not just in my office but in modern culture. Interestingly, if it were a tangled ball of yarn and we pulled the strings to make sense of it, we would see these same five issues wrapped up together in one. That issue is enmeshment.
I most often see enmeshment between moms and their teenage or young adult child. It’s not always readily apparent because they appear close. You might even call them BFF’s. But when emotions, decisions, or identities between two people become overly intertwined, enmeshment is at play.
To better understand how enmeshment might start, imagine with me: your teenager is nearing college or career, and you’re having a hard time accepting his/her growing independence. Does that feel familiar? As a mom of three twenty-somethings, I know well the heartache that comes with kids growing up and leaving the nest. On one hand, watching our kids blossom into adults brings a sense of great pride. On the other hand, it is tough not to be needed in the ways we once were. To have once been our child’s everything to now feeling unsure of our role, wondering if we still have purpose, and what the future has for us, brings grief.
You can bet Satan loves to capitalize on these new insecurities we feel as parents. How about keeping us stuck thinking we must work hard to remain relevant and stay close to our child? To be sure, there are things we can do to stay connected; trying to control is not one of them. But out of fear of “losing” our child, control is where we so often go.
The Heart of the Problem
Parenting starts with the heart of the parent. So I often say, if we evaluate what’s going on in a mother’s heart in this parenting shift from manager to mentor, we will likely see love and fear. She loves her emerging adult desperately and wants to keep this child close, safe, and protected from any adversity. There is nothing wrong with these desires, unless—or until—they become things she must have at all costs. At that point, they become ruling idols.
Scripture tells us whatever rules our hearts, enslaves us (2 Pet. 2:19). In other words, it becomes our master. So, though as parents we want our children’s best, when fear overtakes us, driving the need to control, we are no longer pursuing their best. Rather, we are seeking what we think we need for our best, and they are caught in the crossfire of our ruling idols.
This may look like obsessively checking Life360, frequently checking in because we need to know every detail of their lives, and feeling hurt when we learn something they didn’t share with us. It can look like pressure put on them to spend even more time with family than they do, and resorting to manipulation and guilt-tripping when it seems their friends or a significant other takes precedence over us.
And while it is never easy for us moms to separate our emotions from those of our kids, in enmeshed relationships, there is nothing like their sadness or distress that kicks us into fix-it mode faster. We mean well, but in our need for them to be okay, so we can be okay, we can’t see how our control is crippling them and creating disconnect.
The Effect of the Problem
The more needy we are of our teens or young adults, the more they want to pull away. At the same time, they don’t want to upset us, so they may try harder to please us out of guilt. But over time, resentment will build, and what may appear to others to be a close relationship can begin to feel more like love/hate to our children.
A young person needs to establish autonomy to thrive as an adult. This can’t happen when he or she feels tethered to mom, trying to keep her happy. Instead of growing in self-confidence, the young adult perceives that he must run every decision by mom for her input or approval. Instead of learning to cope with adversity, he depends on mom to intervene and console. It is likely that instead of forming healthy relationships, this young person will struggle with people-pleasing. And instead of setting boundaries when needed, he can become co-dependent on others.
No parent would ever wish for their child to struggle in these ways. The fact that it happens without a parent realizing what is taking shape speaks to sin’s enslaving power. Our idol is now theirs.
The Relief for the Problem
If you fear your relationship with your child may be enmeshed or you identify with some of these tendencies, do not fear. It is never too late to enjoy a genuine closeness with your child. The first step toward any change is recognizing the need for it. So, though it’s not fun to see our sin, we can’t repent of our idols until we name them.
In the case of enmeshment, we can acknowledge our fear and ask God to help us turn from our control to trusting God in his. But to trust him better we need to illuminate who he is and his promises.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he prays that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened so that they would know three things that we too need to remember (Ephesians 1:16-20):
- The hope God has called us to
- The riches of being God’s inheritance
- The immeasurable greatness of God’s power
In other words, our hope as believers is found in God’s eternal love, and by his power (which is unbreakable), we belong to him forever! His love is certain. We are secure.
When we know our security is in him, we can let go of trying to find it in our children, our role as a parent, or anything else. We can be free then to love them unconditionally as God loves us without feeling threatened by their newfound independence. And when we rest in his power, we can let go of our control and trust him better with our children and the story he is writing. This is freeing!
But there’s something even more—when we loosen our grip on control and relax into our special status as God’s children, our children will feel it. The pressure put upon them to be what we “need” them to be for us will be lifted. Out from under any burden of trying to measure up or please us, they, too, can live free, knowing they have our smile, period, just because they are our children.
And I’ve got a hunch that when we let go of trying to control and keep them close, we will actually get more of them. May it be!
For more gospel-centered wisdom and support in parenting, consider using Rooted’s Family Discipleship Curriculum with your church or small group.
