Overview
Enmeshment is defined by the American Psychological Association as
“a condition in which two or more people, typically family members, are involved in each other’s activities and personal relationships to an excessive degree, thus limiting or precluding healthy interaction and compromising individual autonomy and identity.”
It’s one of the signs of codependence in relationships, where someone becomes reliant on a person or an interpersonal dynamic to such an extreme degree that it harms them but they feel they cannot separate from it.
That being said, enmeshment is not a culturally neutral concept. “Western” ideas of a nuclear family with parents and children in a single unit until adulthood when the children acquire homes of their own are not universal. Cultures in Asia, South America, the Middle East, and Africa have long traditions of collective identity and strong interdependent dynamics between family and community structures. Some studies have shown that high interdependence actually correlates with better psychological and socioeconomic outcomes, particularly in immigrant communities that might experience marginalization. Co-regulation between nervous systems is a real phenomenon, and the scope creep of enmeshment, particularly in pop psychology and self-help, can lead to framing critical supportive networks as unhealthy enmeshments. In these cases, dysfunction might be better addressed by treating the family or network as a unit that has difficulty accommodating a member’s independent preferences rather than prioritizing the individual as a unit that must set boundaries or create distance from their community. That way, rather than pathologizing a structure of relationships that people might have long traditions surviving and thriving through, the focus of therapeutic work can be the reactions of members within those dynamics.