This week: "What If We’re Angry with the Wrong Person?"
Enmeshment runs rampant in families. If you grew up in a family with enmeshed issues, you have likely continued that pattern in your adult romantic relationships. Dr. Kenneth M. Adams is a clinical psychologist specializing in enmeshment, addictions and covert incest. He is the author of Silently Seduced: When Parents Make Their Children Partners and When He’s Married to Mom.
In this episode, our host Jamie Yuenger speaks with Dr. Adams about the following topics:
- What enmeshment is and how it plays out in our families of origin
- Why enmeshment is harmful to our relationships
- How enmeshment later effects our adult, romantic relationships
- Why enmeshment often leads us to feel angry with the wrong people
- How you can overcome enmeshment
- How you can spot if you partner has an enmeshed relationship with his/her parents
Visit our website for a full transcript of this episode (# 25).
Read more about Dr. Adams' work on his website Overcoming Enmeshment
Content: enmeshment, covert incest, emotional incest, addiction recovery, sex addiction
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This episode was produced by Jamie Yuenger and Piet Hurkmans.
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
Host Jamie: Hello, I'm Jamie Yuenger. And this is 'If You Knew Me', a podcast about the inner lives of women. Most weeks on the show, we walk into the heart and mind of one woman. Some weeks we offer interview based episodes with experts on themes, relevant to women's lives.
Today's episode is with Dr. Kenneth Adams. I came across Dr. Adams' work through his book, 'Silently Seduced - when parents make their children partners'. Dr. Adams began his professional career in the early 1980s, treating children, adolescents, and their families. While working with adults who had grown up in alcoholic families, he began to notice that many of his clients had developed addictions and enmeshment issues.
Those two topics, enmeshment and addictions are his primary specialties today. I was interested to talk with Dr. Adams about enmeshment, how it can play out in our families of origin, and then later in our romantic relationships, and then ultimately how people can overcome enmeshment. This episode is entitled 'I'm angry with the wrong person'.
So Dr. King Adams, I'm thrilled and honored to speak with you. So thanks for joining me in this conversation.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Yeah. I'm delighted. Jamie, happy to talk about enmeshment. Uh,
so I'll, uh, I'm all ears and ready for your questions.
Host Jamie: well, I wanna start by having you define enmeshment and possibly also covert incest and explain how. Enmeshment can play out in our families of origin. So the families that we grow up in.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Yeah. So those are related, but separate, labels. Okay. So let's start with enmeshment as a broad umbrella and covert incest as a subtext or subheading underneath them. One does not imply the other. so enmeshment comes from the family system literature in which, clinicians and researchers over the years have observed the levels of functioning and dysfunctioning in families.
around certain variables, levels of closeness and, uh, disengagement for example, as well as issues of authority and, and so forth. How do families respond to transitions changes, you know, births of children, marriages, adult, children leaving. And so on one end Of the variable that has to do with levels of closeness. You have families that are very emotionally disengaged and there's no warm fuzzies in those families. And those families produce their own problems. And we have too many of those families and certainly in our culture here in the states, uh, but on the other end, our families that we refer to as enmeshment in which.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Too much involvement, too much closeness, and there's little regard for independence. So you have these two extremes, you have one end, everybody's independent and nobody's dependent and anybody else, and there's not a lot of closeness. And on the other end, you have little independence, a little respect for autonomy or independence, and you have an enmeshed system.
People overly involved and dependent. there's levels of loyalty that have. On guilt and obligation. In other words, I love you, but only if you return it to me, right? So you are obligated to love me because I love you. Well, that's not really how it works, right.
Host Jamie: All Right
their job of their parent is to love the child, uh, the best they can and hopefully good enough, but that it isn't the child's job to obligate themselves to the parent at a cost to their own journey.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: It's just a biological. Journey, whatever culture you're in. And certainly Western cultures have a different set of value systems that are built into, you know, financial systems like capitalism and so forth. That require a level of independence if you wanna survive in the system. Right. but it's biologically hard driven than every.
Young adult wants to find their own footing in the world, whatever culture they're in. And families that function well permit that. They celebrate that ,they honor that they welcome outsiders. even in cultures where there's a lot of closeness that we might say, the culture is enmeshed, but that's normal.
Even in those systems. you find parents who are respectful of their adult children, uh, their own independence. They know they have to have their own families, even though the families may be close. In an enmeshed system. You're obligated to me first son and daughter, and your partner, wife, husband, second.
And furthermore, you come to me to deal with your most important decisions and you have to take care of me cuz I'm lonely because your father is never home. Right? And so the, in the enmeshed system, there's a currency of obligatory guilt and loyalty that drives the attachment. Regardless of the culture and it, it produces adults who are conflicted about their own sense of longings, and dependence for romance, for unfolding of the self, my own interests and so forth.
And so if you're not free to leave the system, it's hard to gather yourself on your own behalf and commit yourself fully. To, a relationship say a marriage, for example,
Host Jamie: And that brings me to my next question about this, which is this is happening in our families of origin, but what effect does enmeshment and thank you so much for such a beautiful definition of that. What effects does it tend to have on a person's sense of self in adulthood?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: So let me, finish the definition. So covert incest, you asked about. Covert incest is when it's between. a parent and child and the child is, uh, their orientation is towards, uh, the opposite sex parent or the same, whatever sex the parent is.
And the parent sort of turns the daughter or the son into the sexualized boyfriend or girlfriend. They flirt, they, Talk about their bodies as an incestuous sexualized entanglement, without any physical sexual touch. That's covert incest. Sometimes that exists in enmeshed systems. Sometimes it doesn't. When it does, you have a lot more sexual problems, you have sexual compulsivity.
other words, sexual addictive disorders, in which people oversexualize relationships, people break boundaries. People who have covert incest issues tend not to know where the line is sexually. And so they might act out with somebody at work or they might approach somebody who is kind of shocked.
And, they might compulsively use porn. They might have affairs, or they might sexually shut down, right. So all of a sudden the person I'm in love with, uh, that I was thrilled with erotically and romantically, you know, six months into the marriage. Now they feel like my father or mother. And what's happened is in that relationship of enmeshment, I've transferred the feelings from my parent onto my spouse.
Now I'm shut down. I don't want get anywhere near you. So, We get sexual problems. We get ambivalence around commitment. We get withdrawal. We get what's commonly called codependency, which I focus on you all the time at a cost to myself. We tend to see eating disorders. Um, this is overstated, but,
more sexual disorders wiith men, more eating disorders in women. but I have to be careful there because that doesn't really hold true, but we do see eating disorders in women. In other words, you're gonna control me, but I'm not gonna let you tell me what I want to eat. I'll eat what the heck I want to eat.
So we get rebelliousness built into the identity rather than a mature sense of. I'll do what the hell I wanna do and no one's gonna tell me otherwise. So then I get married to somebody and that feels entrapping like my enmeshed parent. And pretty soon I'm rebelling against the wrong person. I'm betraying the wrong person.
I'm angry with the wrong person. So we get a lot of transfer of inappropriate feelings and anger towards the spouse or partner in these relationships in which then the partner gets the fight. They get rejected, they get dismissed, they get back seated because the. The adult who's enmeshed or in this covertly incestuous.
their loyaltie is to the parent. So the partner now is the one who bears the brunt of that anger and rejection.
Host Jamie: and is that because you can't really express that anger at the parent for the way they treated you as a child. And you're acting that out on your partner?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Well, it's that, and it's also what we call the download, right? Is that your parent can be dead and gone. You no longer have The dynamic in the here and now between you and your parent, but the internal representation of your obligatory assignment to that parent, hasn't gone away just because they've died.
And so now still my wife or my husband feels intrusive cuz they want too much. So I'm quick to anger. I'm quick to dismissing them. So the internal attachment style has now. complicated and, uh, contaminated by that enmeshed relationship. So you're gonna take that with you internally, and you're gonna have to divorce.
the contractual arrangement internally with that parent who's still alive in you. No, no, no. Mom and dad, you don't get to say anymore, I'm gonna do what I want. And I'm gonna be fully committed to this person that I married. Right?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: You're not getting involved here and they can be dead or you can live across the country. I've got people who haven't seen their parents in years, or their parents have passed and they sound no different than the man sitting in the workshop or the woman sitting in the workshop whose parent is still alive.
The only exception is, is that there's a current conflict with the parent sometimes. So it's the internal representation of mommy or daddy's hold on you, that has to go.
Host Jamie: I wanna talk more. that aspect of recovery that you just touched on of creating a new contract, or breaking the earlier one. but before we do that, I'm really curious because I've read your book, 'Silently Seduced - when children make their parents partners', and what I found so interesting in that work is that you say it can be hard for adults to recognize and realize that their parents' behavior was destructive and abusive, Why is it hard for we as adults when we, have problems, to not recognize that they stemmed from the parent's behavior and.
can think that they're about our fight with our current partner,
for example. why is that so hard?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that there's a monolithic one, single answer to that. Uh, but I think,particularly in enmeshed systems, the level of loyalty is so strong that I don't dare criticize the parent I'm angry with. Right. even that internal reflection that I'm angry with my parent, because of the way they treated me or the way they're talking about my spouse.
I'm so loyal. And I'm so obligated that it feels disloyal to even think about being critical. So I immediately dismiss any reference to my,uh, critical reference to my parent, either from myself or my spouse now. So I get, I get stories all the time from spouses and partners of these enmeshed men and women who say, if I bring up even the slightest comment or criticism about their parents. They get so angry and dismissive and they gaslight me. They dismiss me and pretty soon it's just not worth it because what it does is it puts that enmeshed adult in a bind. They're gonna have to turn and look at themselves. So usually. They've spent a lifetime in what we call denial, right.
So denial is a real defense, right? that's the mechanism that allows us to continue. They make excuses. Oh, my mother didn't mean that my father didn't mean that he was just joking and I'm really not his girlfriend, you know, even though. I get over there and he calls me his girlfriend and you know, and my second wife and whatever the case is, you know, he didn't mean this.
So the adult has learned to dismiss, minimize and deny a painful or unacceptable reality that they're dealing with with the family. And then when the spouse brings it up, I attack the spouse because she's put me, or he's put me in a bind by being critical. So the spouse becomes an adversarial interjection into my story and I have to push him or her away
mm-hmm
mm-hmm so minimization, uh, rationalization, excuses, and denial, all organized around staying loyal and protecting myself from having to face a reality. I don't want to deal with,
Host Jamie: mm-hmm
Dr. Kenneth Adams: that means I'm gonna have to realize I really don't want to go see them this Christmas.
I don't wanna see him for a year. I can't face that because it feels too disloyal. So they don't want to be pushed into the truth by themselves or anybody else. So denial then minimization rationalization, excuse, making becomes the routine that is used to distract themselves and other people from facing that.
And unfortunately, as the adult, who's enmeshed makes these excuses, it puts the partner, a spouse in the position of being the bad guy, because they're the one who gets angry and says I've had enough of this stuff.
So the number one problem that we find is problems in romantic relationships. Absolutely. The number one problem.
Host Jamie: And since, our show is about the inner lives of women and a lot of our listeners are women. I'm curious if you can talk about really common, patterns that show up for, behaviors that women take on when they've come from. families that they grew up in where they were um, enmeshed with one or both of their parents.
And then I assume they also tend to kind of choose partners based on that wound maybe you could speak to that because I assume there's tends to be some differences when we're talking about sexuality here of how things might show up for women.
Um, even though
there's probably a lot of overlap for both men and women.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Yeah. I think there is a significant shared overlap and variance about symptoms, you know, commitment issues and care taking and so forth, but you're right.
There are some differences and probably the number one issue that we see with women. Um, and I have to be careful here cuz when I think back to all the men in the workshops, they also have this, but women particularly are culturally reinforced to be caretakers at a cost to themselves. so the enmeshment just feeds right into that cultural reinforcement.
So they have an extra burden you know, I remember when we, we ran our first in person workshop for women, I had done a number of ones for men and, you know, the men came in and they had had a sort of. Uh, of their intrusions by their mothers or fathers or whoever, but the women were really entangled
And I remember once I, I usually take a walk around the conference center and I pulled up and, uh, I walked in and somebody pulled up one of the women and I U Uber. And she was on the phone with her mother. walking in, walking into an enmeshment workshop. And I thought, well, I, I'm not quite used to this. So the level of entanglement in all the.
All the women, a number of the women had lovers outta state. They wouldn't even have lovers in state. they wouldn't let them get close to the involvement they had with their families. So there seems to be a greater, role of caretaker obligation that I'm the last one to take care of my parents.
I can't leave. I can't be my own woman. I can't have my own romance. Sure. I can have an affair outta state, but I can't really be committed to anybody. So that's an issue. we also see, uh, women who are in these entangled relationships sometimes get involved with partners, men, or women, um, who are very exciting and offer sort of this, uh, spirit of independence and, uh, freedom.
Right. And they might, oh boy, this is, I'm gonna ride this bus outta here. Right? Let me get entangled with the bad boy. And he's gonna get me away from this family of mine. Well, what she's done in many cases is she's wedded herself and attached herself to somebody who's gonna be trouble. In many cases who may not remain loyal and who might injure her with betrayal, sexual betrayals, or so forth, possibly not.
I mean, this is an overgeneralization, but sometimes the women can get drawn to a partner who looks like they offer freedom. But what they're really looking at is in some cases, somebody who can't hold a commitment to fidelity and they've mistaken. immaturity for freedom.
And so sometimes they'll get bonded to, uh, relationships or men or women who are hurtful and who betray them. And then they try harder because that's what they learned in their enmeshed systems is to be more loyal and then they become more loyal to the people who hurt them. So that's another thing that we see with women, uh, somewhat more than men.
And then the other thing that we can see is that sometimes the women will repeat the story and get involved with a man um, who he too is a enmeshed. So we get, you know, a lot of the men, for example, who come into our workshop, um, are pushed in by the women in their life. And I'd say probably. Mm, maybe 15 to 20% of the, and this is just offhand.
I have no science to prove this, but this is, uh, anecdotal in my observation, we've had over 500 men come in and, or, and women come into the workshops over the last handful of years. And, um, probably 20% of the women have enmeshment issues, but they don't want to face it easier to focus on their men's issues than their own.
But they too. Are not disentangled from their families, but they've picked a man who is even worse in their enmeshment than they are. So it's easier for them to focus on them and say, well, my family's close, but they're not enmeshed, but yours is. And so then they can displace some of their lack of wanting to look at their own family system onto the man in their life.
So those are the three areas we see caretaking, or picking somebody who looks spirit and free, but really is immature or picking somebody who reenacts the enmeshment and then focusing on his rather than their own.
and, eating issues and sexual issues as well. So we also see women. I I've skipped over this.
I'm sorry. We see women with sex and love addictive issues as well. Women who say the heck with this, I'm never gonna be confined again. I'll have one lover after the other. I'll have multiple lovers, but I'm not getting committed. So we have women who have similar patterns as men sexually that come out of those systems.
And we have women who have eating disorders, cuz I'm, I'm not gonna let anybody tell me what I can eat. I'll be darn if you're gonna control all of me, cuz remember enmeshment in this entanglement, it infiltrates the body. It in infiltrates my sense of my own self and my own body. And, somehow I've gotta break free from that.
Right. You can't have all of me. So if I have to oversex or overeat, that's what I'm gonna do so it's a rebellious identity though. It doesn't really work, but it is a defensive and coping strategy.
It's a coping strategy. Right? Right. I. I'm curious at this point, if you could talk about how you got into this work, what drew you to it? What your personal connection to it is?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Well, it's personal and professional. It's not just personal. I mean, my mother's family was Hungarian and, she was first generation so I was sort of accustomed to a close family, um, you know, when my grandmother or grandfather would show up, or her sisters, you know, my father would come second and he'd be on the couch and they'd be in the bedroom. You know, I was odd situation, but he was fine with that. Cuz he was, he had his own affairs and everything.
So they, they kind of had a little tantrum, right. She was emeshed and he was the bad boy she was attracted to. Right. The trouble was, was that I got stuck taking care of her. Because he wasn't around when my grandparents weren't around. Right. So I sort of learned about this along the way, and eventually found my way and she, and I made some peace over it.
and that took years to do. And I had to, you know, at some point just emancipate from her and say, no, I'm not taking care of you anymore. You're on your own here. but along the way, you know, and, and certainly I suspect that drove, my curiosity and my interest in this topic, but it, by no means defined it,
Dr. Kenneth Adams: you know, I started out actually working with children.
In adolescence. I was trained as a child psychologist and of course that just prepared me to deal with adults who had been injured as children. one of my first, uh, so I had two early professional experiences that really. Woke me up around this one was when I was working with kids. And I, worked in Detroit, I'm from Michigan and we worked down at children's hospital in Detroit, and there were a lot of schoolfobic children.
And I said to my supervisor, they're not afraid of school. They're afraid of leaving their mothers and their mothers are worried and they're taken on their worry. He said, 'how do you know that?' Well, I, at the time, I didn't know that it was because I, I knew what that was all about. so I was able to observe this early symptom.
issue in children that really was a systemic issue from the parent. And it really intrigued me from a family system standpoint that a child could have a symptom like school avoidance that was related to the family system dynamic. In this case, the mother's anxiety over the child leaving because of the emptiness from her marriage.
So that was a early professional connection that really got me curious and I'm sure my own personal background may be tuned into it, but the, the second one. And so I moved into working with adults and I was working with adult children of alcoholics at the time. And I had a man who I was working with, who, had a compulsive, addictive pattern of picking up sex workers, prostitutes, street walkers. And he would do.
And so he lived , outside the city and he would work in the city during the week or the weekend. I can't remember which and stay with his mother. And he would only pick up these sex workers when he was with his mother. And he said, what do I do? And I said, you know, I sort of instinctively, I, it was early in my career.
Just stop living with your mother for God's sake. and he did to my surprise. And immediately I saw a precipitous decrease in his compulsivity. And it was stunning to me. and so I wrote my first professional article based on that observation, that there was a connection between sexuality and too much entanglement with the parent.
So really. I would say that professional early experience had a lot more to do with my work than my personal, although my personal life I'm sure played a role there. So I've been passionate in writing about this since the late eighties. I was in graduate school still at the time, trying to finish my dissertation. , and then the book just 'Silently Seduced' just came to me in a dream one night. And, um, I saw the chapter titles and I saw the title of the book and I went to the graduate library or I was supposed to be working at my dissertation.
I started writing the book 'Silently Seduced', and as I say, the rest is history. So that's really, , it really, isn't just my personal story. It really is a combination of my professional exposure to what I saw, as a young professional in the field and enlightened by family therapists and all that was just very exciting to me.
Host Jamie: Yeah. And I imagine, that a big part of the excitement is, seeing this complex thing, but then also. How people find their way out of that and what sort of the solutions are, and I wanna talk about that. What, you have seen in the workshops that you've done around restoring the correct boundaries in a person's life, in their relationships, in their current romantic relationships.
what's that journey look like?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: , Yeah, it's a good question. So let's start with a, with a premise. , Emancipation is not a negotiation. So I say that for your listeners, because they need to understand that the moment they move to try to negotiate with their parents, they lose.
and emancipation must be a declaration of self. Now having said that emancipation is not amputation either, right? So nobody's proposing that you amputate your family. In fact, the irony is if you look at the literature and family systems, and I've seen this, that what family systems observe is that the permission to be separate.
ironically reciprocates the desire to be close from the adult child. In other words, if you get outta my way, stop making me feel guilty. I want to visit you mom or dad, but if you make me feel guilty, I don't wanna visit you. So access to separation actually breeds closeness. interesting. that has to be the first step.
The first step is to challenge the belief. because if you operate under the belief system that the family's given you, you're cooked, you're not gonna get anywhere. you'll be setting boundaries to the, to, to your eighth degree. And they won't make much of a difference cuz you'll keep compromising them.
Now, if you can challenge your beliefs. Okay. All right, I get this. I gotta challenge my beliefs. I gotta see this differently. Now you need some, you need a push. You need a emotionally cathartic shift inside of you. You need some space, right? And so that's the reason. For example, we set up the workshop. Some people take a break from their families.
Look at mom and dad. I'm going around the world for a year on a trip. I can't talk to you till I get back. Well, I'm really not going around the world, but I just need a break. Right. , So somehow I need to make this final break from you.
You need to tolerate my separateness and I need to tolerate too that I can't be your golden boy or golden girl, cuz that's the other issue. Is that a lot of these men and women they wanna do both. They want to be their own fully functional adults, but they want to be the good girl and the good boy still. It doesn't work that way.
, sothe, thing I've learned in the workshops over the years, I kept thinking it was just the parents who were gripping tight, but then I realized, oh no, it's the adults who are enmeshed who are also gripping. They don't wanna let go. They like the role of the golden boy and the golden girl.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: And so having to take that part of you by the hand and say, no, no, no. It's wonderful that you function there and it's really not appropriate time for us to let that go. So there has to be an internal divorce, an internal letting go. And so, we built the workshops- if you don't mind me saying - the overcomingenmeshment.com place where you go to look at the workshops, we, we specifically.
I wasn't getting this done in individual therapy. So I said, I gotta do something different. So I, we created this intensive long weekend experience where we shift people and it is wonderful to watch them shift. I remember a man who was ambivalent about his, uh, girlfriend for five years.
Couldn't make up his mind whether he was gonna commit to her, his mother had died and his sister had become the proxy of the mother. So a lot of times you see proxies, um, the siblings are proxies of the mother or father who were enmeshing the, the adults and they'll call up the person trying to be separate and say, Hey, you haven't called mom lately.
You haven't called dad lately. You better call him. And so the sister had become the proxy of the mother and he was living in the house that his mother had bequeathed to him and her upon her death. And so he left the workshop, put a, for a sale sign up on the house, married his girlfriend and moved out of state within six
Dr: months
Host Jamie: Wow.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Based on that emotionally cathartic shift. Now I could tell you other dramatic stories. couple of times I had, conversations with women of spouses of enmeshed men after the workshop and consultations. And they said, oh, that was the best sex I've ever had with him after the workshop. I can never promise anybody this, but what it told, what it, what it told me was that the men were reembodying themselves in their own sense of self and they could show up fully.
which confirmed my early observation as a young professional, that enmeshment impacts sexuality and you don't need any physical touch. So you need, to challenge your belief system. You need to have some catharsis shift. You need to get clear of this. and then you can renegotiate the boundaries around visitation.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: How often we see each other, mom and dad, what we talk about, but oftentimes people try to do the reverse. What they try to do is they try to set boundaries before they've challenged the belief system, or before they've gotten clear enough internally that they're looking through the right set of eyes and then the boundaries become.
Almost useless because they collapse. So the boundaries are the third phase of the treatment plan, challenge, the belief shift, the portal or the perceptual view of this and get clear on that and then renegotiate the contract.
Host Jamie: just to be clear, the challenging of the belief, just so that everyone is with us, the challenging of the belief is I, don't owe my parent anything.
what's the
Host Jamie: challenge.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: the belief is, my parents' obligation is to me to send me off into the world. even though, so let's back up a minute. Obviously. Obligatory love by itself is not pathological.
Right? Everybody has a degree of obligatory love in their relationships that they care about. Correct. You reciprocate sometimes because you want to, and sometimes because you, you know, that's what you should do, right. And, and so there's nothing wrong with that per se, right? Provided that currency of obligation and commitment is out of free choice rather than I owe you. So the obligatory assignment that I owe you outta guilt, and that I have to stabilize you because you're lonely in your marriage. Oh no, that has to go. I want to visit you because I love you , but not because I have to stabilize you because you're married to the wrong person. That's not my job.
Host Jamie: Mm-hmm
Dr. Kenneth Adams: So that's the belief that has to be challenged.
So I wanted to clarify that for you listeners, that obligatory love and devotion is not it's, it's not by itself. Pathological. If you see what I mean,
it's, when that currency gets used by a parent to wed the child and the adult child to the parent's narcissistic needs. For them to stay next to them.
Host Jamie: mm-hmm and just to be clear here, this could be a daughter to either her father or her mother feeling this sort of obligation.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Absolutely!
Host Jamie: Not always the opposite sex?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: No, no, no. no. In fact, we probably get more in our women's workshops. probably three fourths of the women are talking about too much entanglement with their mothers. and maybe another fourth, are with their fathers. again, this is overstated, but if it's what the father, sometimes it feels more like the covert incestuous, if they're heterosexual.
Host Jamie: And so the first step you said is that you are, dealing with the belief.
and then the second again, can you go into
Host Jamie: that
Dr. Kenneth Adams: a little, but
the second is, is, is this sort of internal representation that I carry about my story, right? So we all have a story. Right. You ask people what their story is.
Some people are more insightful about their personal story than others, but everybody has a story. Everybody has a narrative about how they were raised and how they were loved or not loved and how it's affected me. So everybody has a narrative. They have a portal, a set of perceptions that they look through in which they tell that story and in enmeshed systems, oftentimes that story is complicated. If not. contaminated by the parents' viewpoint. Right? And so their story is not really fair to them. it's organized around the parents' need rather than my own. Well, I've gotta be there for my mother or father, you know, they really it's what my job is. And it's what I grew up with.
Right. The narrative is off. So that internal story has to shift. And it has to shift long enough that I can breathe in my own life and be free long enough to have my own sea legs and to say, no, that's not my job. I care about you. I love you, but I'm not here to take care of you. You gotta deal with your marriage. and no, I'm not gonna talk about dad or mom anymore. And have you complain about them and I certainly don't wanna know about your sex life. Right? So now I can set the boundary because I've changed the internal representation. That takes time. That's why, I do a couple times a year.
I do a one day workshop for professionals, therapists only, uh, on best practices in how to treat adults enmeshed with the children. And one of the best practices is should you invite a parent in the family therapy? And the, and the short answer is no, because it feels like a marital session. Right?
And so You know, if they're aging parents or if there's a family business, you might need to do something like that, but really you need some space. you need some physical space and you need a shift. you need that internal shift. That's the second piece. Ah, I'm looking at my story through my eyes now. Not your eyes, mother or father. this is how I see my story, and I can still care about you, but I'm not gonna let you intrude and become my higher power, right.
Because that's what happens is the parent has become the higher power and they dictate the narrative either implicitly through their own, you know, poor me, you know, woe was me story or ex explicit demands that you. Go too far away from me. Both of those are, are the way they operate. And then I guess the third one is the third piece is the boundaries, you know?
No, I can't be here this, Christmas, cuz we're gonna go visit my spouse's family, but we'll come after and next Christmas we'll see you. So I now have a set of boundaries and they're my limits. I don't need your approval. I hope you'll love me and accept me and work with me and negotiate with me, but I don't need you to do that for me to do what's in my best interest.
So now I'm much clearer about that because my beliefs have been corrected and I have a, a greater sense of internal freedom. But if you try to do it the other way, if I try to set the boundary I'll collapse,
Right.
Makes total sense to me.
you know, how do I set a boundary?
Dr. Kenneth Adams: And I, I think to myself, well, I could walk you through how to set a boundary, but you're not gonna be able to keep it if you've not done these other two steps. I mean, maybe you could, but there's a good chance. You'll probably, we call it, uh, Troublesome compromising
Uh, adults who are enmeshed with their parents are very skilled at troublesome compromising And then nobody's happy the spouse isn't happy. The parent isn't happy and they are not happy.
Host Jamie: And you did all that effort for nothing. So it's sort of an unsustainable thing to try to set the boundaries because the groundwork has not been done.
Um, well, I have to say, I have looked at a number of the videos on your YouTube channel and they are just immensely helpful. and really would highly recommend that people.
look at that. And certainly, we will put, you know, your website in the show notes, because it's quite mind blowing stuff for people who are dealing with, these topics, in their families or in their marriages. So, thank you so much for this insightful conversation. I really appreciate your time.
Dr. Kenneth Adams: Well, you're so welcome. Nice chatting with you.
Host Jamie: Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode, Dr. Kenneth M. Adams is a clinical psychologist with a specialty in enmeshment, sex addiction and covert incest. He and his team regularly run workshops to help people overcome enmeshment. You can find out about his work on his website. He also has a very helpful YouTube channel.
The links to those resources are in the show notes. Also tickets for our first ever online event are now available. The event is on Sunday, September 25th. With our prior show guest sister Monica Clare. Our theme is Major Life Changes. Sister Monica will reveal how she made the radical move from acting an improv to joining a progressive religious community and becoming a nun.
Sister. Monica is hilarious and insightful. I am absolutely positive you'll enjoy spending time with her. The event is nine bucks, but if you're a patron of this show or become one before September 2nd, you'll receive a free ticket. Alternatively, if you sign up for our newsletter before September 2nd, you'll receive a coupon code for 25% off.
So it's worth joining us soon.
Links to buy tickets, become a patron and join the newsletter are all in the show notes.
This podcast is produced by me, Jamie Yuenger, and my husband, Piet Hurkmans. Thanks so much for listening to 'If You Knew Me'. We'll be back with you next week.