CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Analyzing Prime Video's The Girlfriend | Mother-Son Enmeshment and Emotional Incest

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Whitney analyzes the Amazon Prime show "The Girlfriend" to explore mother-son enmeshment and emotional incest. She analyzes how the show illustrates blurred boundaries, guilt and manipulation, marital dysfunction, and the devastating long-term impacts on sons' ability to form healthy romantic relationships, connecting the fictional dynamics to real research on these family patterns. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles. 00:00 Introduction to The Girlfriend and Mother-Son Enmeshment 04:00 Defining Emotional Incest and What It Looks Like 09:06 Power Assertion and Blocked Individuation 14:10 The Girlfriend as Both Rival and Mirror 17:25 How Marital Dysfunction Fuels Enmeshment 21:56 Why Enmeshed Sons Struggle with Adult Partnerships 25:12 Lies, Isolation, and the Ultimate Betrayal Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at 866-225-5466 Join the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠ Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhit Follow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft ⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic Positivity⁠⁠ Learn more about ad choices. Visit podcast.choices.com/adchoices This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and happy Tuesday, everyone. I hope that you're all doing well. Welcome to the Calling Home Podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. Today, we have an episode that is all about mother, son, emmeshment, and emotional incest through the show The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime. This show came out recently, I think a couple of weeks ago, and I binged it all in a matter of like two days because I thought it was such a fascinating portrayal of this dynamic. So this is going to be a great episode for anyone who has been in a relationship with someone that seems to be very enmeshed or overly involved with their mother or their mother is that way with them. Or you know someone that's like this. Maybe you are the son that has been in a relationship like this

with your mother, or you've had a really dysfunctional relationship with a girlfriend or a partner that mimics the relationship that you've had with your mother. So let's go ahead and get into it. I want to start by telling you a little bit about the show. And full disclosure, they're going to be spoilers in this episode. So if you're planning on watching it and you want to wait until you've seen it all, pause now. Otherwise, we can talk about the dynamic here. And even if you haven't seen the show, I think that you'll still find this super interesting and informative when it comes to mother-son, emmeshment, particularly with adult sons. So in this show, we have a son and his mother. And the son is an adult male. He is a child. He is a child. He is,

is, I believe, in, like, a medical residency. It seems like he's completed school. He is a doctor, but he's still in training. So he's likely in his late 20s, potentially early 30s, and the family lives in London. But the parents are American. They have American accents, and then the son begins dating this British girl. And in the show, they show everything from the perspective of the mother. and the perspective of the girlfriend.

And it's fascinating how you will watch their perspectives kind of flip back and forth. And the show will tell you that this is from Laura's perspective, the mother, or Cherry's perspective, the girlfriend. And really how there's just these little different nuances that are happening throughout the show depending on who is the one that we're viewing it through, whose lens we're viewing it through. And throughout the show, we see the conflict that arises between the girlfriend, the mother, and the son. And there's also a husband and father involved here. And this couple had lost another child. They had a daughter that died when she was very young. It seems like this

child died, like, under the age of five. And you can tell that there is a lot of trauma and grief and loss in this family that is unresolved and hasn't been dealt with and is likely manifesting through this over-involvement with their remaining living child, the son. Now, when we're talking about mother's son emmeshment or emotional incest, these terms can be used a little bit interchangeably, and I want to define them for you. So this happens when a mother relies on her son for her emotional needs. And I did an entire episode on emotional incest about a year ago. If you want to go back and look at that, the title of the episode is emotional incest.

And I know a lot of people don't like that term, but it's that term for a reason. And the reason we use the term incest is because in a lot of these relationships, the mother or the father, but in this case the mother, is so deeply, emotionally involved with their child that this relationship looks more like a romantic relationship between partners than it does a relationship between parent and adult child. And typically, this behavior is driven by unmet needs in the couple's relationship or in their own like peer-to-peer romantic relationships, maternal attachment insecurity, especially like in the wake of the death of another child, or if this mom grew up with

her own attachment issues in her childhood and abandonment issues, and family system stressors, which in this family, we know there have been some major ones, such as the loss of a child or a sibling. And when we see emotional incest or mother-son emmeshment, we often will then go on to see that child develop insecure attachment, poor individuation, and impaired romantic functioning. And this has been documented in sons in the research, when sons are exploited in this way by their mothers, and they are unable to take on their own identity and become their own people.

Now, if you're wondering, what does mother son emmeshment or emotional incest actually look like? The first thing you're going to see is a lot of blurred roles. You will not see these distinct roles of parent and child. The child will function as the emotional confidant or surrogate spouse and they will likely take on more of a caregiving role for the mother, a partner role, and they are really there to help make the mother feel better. more secure, take care of her emotional needs, or give her the feeling that she is taking care of the child, and she's always relied upon and needed. There's also a lot of psychological control in these relationships. So there will be a lot of guilt, intrusiveness, restriction of autonomy, and this is all being done to impair that healthy separation that happens at. a child gets older. The child will likely be drawn into spousal conflict or used to regulate how that parent is feeling. And they might often even feel like they are a third member of

the couple. Or when the marriage isn't going well or the parent is going through a breakup or they're single, the child is then pulled in to take on more of that role of like surrogate spouse. What makes a mother at risk of doing this? I mentioned a couple of these, but let's go a little bit deeper. So when there's a maternal history of boundary problems or parentification in their own life, they are more likely to repeat those emmesishment behaviors with their children, especially if they did not work on this, become aware of it. It's not as if you experience during childhood, you're guaranteed to do it with your children. But if you do not become I'm aware of those patterns and how they've impacted you, definitely statistically more likely. Maternal depression and high emotional needs also impact this. It can predict permissive or emmeshing caregiving. That's a hard word to say. And the partner in the relationship can buffer some of these effects.

But if that partner is not there, does not have any awareness of this, does not take an active role in the parenting or in the marriage, then maternal distress and depression and high emotional needs that are not being taken care of in other relationships are a risk factor for emmeshment with sons. We also know that adult attachment insecurity, so an anxious attachment style or an avoidant attachment style can relate to poor mother and adolescent attachment and also greater harsh or boundary violating parenting. And this increases the risk for emmeshment. I am going to illustrate some of these dynamics with scenes from the show and research. So you're going to hear me

break down a couple of different scenes. And then I'm going to hear me break down a couple of different scenes. And then I'm going to tell you what is going on within those scenes and why this is emmeshment or emotional incest, what the research says about this, and what is happening in the show. One of the themes that we're going to see when there is a mother who is emmeshed with her son is over-dependence and power assertion. There is a scene early on in the show where the son is telling his mother, about how he's going to take a different path in his career. And instead of becoming a pediatrician, he is going to become a trauma surgeon.

And we see from, especially from the perspective of Cherry, that the mother becomes very upset about this. And she says some things to undermine him that are like, do you know how much work that's going to be? Are you sure you've thought about this? You didn't talk to me about this. And so there is kind of this sense that the son is not allowed to make decisions on his own. When he veers off the path, there are consequences for that.

And he will be questioned and people will kind of doubt him. And this isn't being done necessarily in like, you know, you're in danger. You're not making good choices kind of way. Of course, a parent can do that even when their child is an adult. This is more of like, you know, he's still becoming adult. doctor. He just chose a different path. And that is, feels like a threat to the mother, right? She also does this with his apartment choice. So when he picks an apartment, you know, she's not really certain about it or she tries to make a dig at him about why he's able to afford the apartment

and that it's not really him, but actually it's because of his father helping him. And so she undercuts these attempts at independence that we typically see in younger adults where they are finding a place to live, choosing a career. And then we ultimately see this power assertion becoming extremely pronounced through the choice of his girlfriend. Okay. And what we know about individuation is that it's an ongoing negotiation, right? Little kids as they grow up and they move through adolescence and the teenage years and they become adults, they are constantly going through this process of individuation. And parents and their children are consistently having to be like, okay, you're getting a little bit more independence. I'm going to allow you to

have a little more space. I'm still going to keep you safe and have rules and be involved in your life. But now you're able to do those things. You can cut your own food now. You can pick out your clothes, like they're always achieving these new milestones throughout life. And the parent has to learn to also tolerate that individuation. But with emmeshment, we see that guilt and control are kind of always there bubbling under the surface and being used to bring the child back into the fold and to make them feel like they cannot achieve or have that independence. And so these tactics can cause the child to experience anxiety and to stay close to the parent and to not pursue that individuation. And there are quite a few empirical studies that show that these blurred

parent-child roles can solidify into these long-term identity issues where the adult then is unable to separate from the parent because they have not been allowed to achieve that at all of these different steps. And that is why we can look at this as, yes, the parent is leading the charge, but there is also this, you know, co-construction of the relationship because the mothers and sons are mutually shaping this attachment and separation process throughout the life cycle. The child is responding to what the parent is doing. And over time, this is creating more and more emmeshment and dependence on the parent. Now, this doesn't mean that the child in this case is actively choosing this or wants it, but they often feel like they have no choice. It's not safe

to separate. It feels better to stay close to the parent. They are rewarded more often. And they may even get used to or more comfortable with their parents making all of the decisions and calling the shots and feel like they really know what's best for me. Now, in this show, I also think that the girlfriend functions as both a rival to the mother and as a mirror. So the mother is defensive from the start. You know, we can really see that there are clearly some things. that are up with this girlfriend. She is not a perfect companion for the son at all. But before the mother even knows anything, she is already defensive and looking out for problems with her. And she goes hunting for them. She wants reasons to dislike this girlfriend. And research on this

shows that enmeshed mothers experience their son's romantic partners as a rival. And there is a high likelihood that they will experience jealousy and insecurity when their sons get into a relationship. And their sons often unconsciously choose partners who replicate these maternal dynamics, which we see in this show. The girlfriend Cherry is actually quite similar to the mother when we see these patterns playing out. And they both get to then become both the persecutor and the victim and the hero in these situations, right? So if we look at this from the perspective of the drama triangle, Cherry is saving her boyfriend, this son, from the mother. She is also the victim of the mother's anger and angst and, you know, sneaking around

and trying to keep her from the sun and all of that. And then from the mother's perspective, Cherry is also the persecutor and she is the victim and Cherry is going after her and doing bad things to her. And in reality, they both are doing this. They're both throughout the show doing things that are pathological to some degree and not healthy. And they are both acting as heroes for this son and trying to save the sun. Right. And these sons often choose partners that are also controlling, intrusive, emotionally volatile. And it then becomes a battle between these two women who are both exhibiting unhealthy behaviors and the son is forced to be in this position of identifying who's wrong, who's right, what do I do? And they typically are not

very equipped to do so because of the relationship that they have been raised with and with their mothers. And it's likely that any woman who would have come into this situation, even if they were healthy and not controlling, not intrusive. They were emotionally healthy and stable. I think this mother would have still been, you know, would have been defensive from the beginning and finding reasons to dislike this girlfriend. Now, enmeshment dynamics between parents and their children and particularly between mothers and their sons, I think are really often more about marriage than they are about anything else. The marital dynamics of the couple are often one of the main catalyst for this type of dysfunction within a family. And the married couple in this show

is very, very interesting. So we have a husband and a wife that have been together for many years. I think this is a 30-plus year marriage. They have one living child and they have a daughter who is deceased that was older than their son. And I don't believe that their son ever met this daughter. And this is clearly a huge strain on their relationship. And they have had different processing styles and ways of dealing with this. The husband, in my opinion, wants to have a deep committed relationship with his wife, with the wife, Laura, the mother in the show. Laura is emotionally avoidant. She has difficulty being vulnerable in this relationship with her husband.

And I think she wants to displace him to have this more intimate emotional relationship with her son. And she does this in a couple of ways throughout the show. She tries to have what is like an open marriage with her husband, but it seems that he's never really fully on board with this. She wants him to be with this other woman, Marianne, and she encourages them to be together. And she says that their relationship just works better when there is another person. Laura, the mother, is also having an affair with a woman that she used to see when she was younger. It appears that her husband does not know anything about this affair. And that is not part of their agreement in the open marriage.

And so while the relationship, I think, for the husband, he wants it to be stable and healthy and he wants to just be in a monogamous relationship with his wife, it appears that she cannot handle that. It does not work for her. And I think she needs this disconnect with her husband in order to continue having this type of relationship with her son. And as the show progresses, the husband becomes much more aware. I think of what his wife is doing and her patterns and how close she is with her son.

And he starts to call her out on that and to become aware of it. We know in the research on emmeshment and emotional incest, that marital distress and even single parenting can increase parental reliance on children for emotional support. And this makes boundaries less likely to be enforced and can also lead to parentification where these kids are taking on adult tasks in the home or it becomes more intense emotionally and they take on like a partner-like role. Low marital satisfaction or unavailable partners can also push mothers to recruit their sons as a surrogate spouse.

When we see that there is a partner that is reflective and engaged, this can help buffer some of that maternal depression that we talked about and reduce some of the emmeshing behaviors. But I think what is interesting here is how rejecting the mother is of her partner's desires to be closer and to be involved. And that is what ultimately allows her to recruit her son in. And it would be really interesting to see, you know, had she been more accepting of her husband's desire to have a close marriage, if that would have positively impacted her relationship with her son. When son, are deeply enmeshed with their mothers over the lifespan, adult partnerships become almost impossible

for them, certainly healthy adult partnerships. And this son seems unable to form healthy romantic attachments outside of his mother. And throughout the show, we see that he is consistently sort of volleying back and forth between being overly attached to the the girlfriend and overly attached to the mother. And the two women are kind of fighting for his attention and to have him all to themselves. And both of them cannot win this because they require complete and utter dependence and devotion from this young man. Clinical observations and research show pretty consistently that sons who are survivors of this type of emmeshment with their mothers repeat caregiving roles and replicate these parent-child dynamics in their adult partnerships.

And there's a lot of failed individuation among this population because enmeshment reduces separation and identity formation and this can create over-dependence, boundary confusion, and role confusion in adult partnerships. And so when these men go on to form partnerships, they might be looking for a woman that is going to be like their mother. and is going to take on that motherly role in their relationship. They also have some altered self-functioning sometimes. We might see narcissistic traits, difficulty with vulnerability, PTSD symptoms that make it even more challenging for them to form these healthy attachments in adulthood as a result

of the emmeshment. And for these sons, unequal maternal affection also predicts. future jealousy in romantic relationships and attachment insecurity. And so there is definitely a pathway that happens here where these maternal boundary violations and emmeshment and emotional incest lead to romantic jealousy in future adult relationships. It's also very common for emmeshed sons who are enmeshed with their mothers to have very short and unstable relationships. There's ample clinical descriptions and case literature of emotionally incestuous mother-son relationships, and a lot of these report patterns such as numerous short-term

romantic relationships and difficulties forming reciprocal adult intimacy. And there's also included accounts of repeated brief partnerships among survivors of maternal emmeshment. The other thing that we notice among this population is that the reports of emotional incest predicted decreased life satisfaction and elevated anxiety in adulthood. And these are also additional factors that tend to complicate healthy partner selection and relationship maintenance over a long period of time. And the therapist often report, myself included, that clients that struggle with maternal enmeshment struggle with boundary setting. They prioritize pleasing or caretaking partners, and they replicate child relational scripts

in their romantic partnerships. And these clinical patterns mirror the empirical findings that have linked mother-son emmeshment to insecure attachment and poor relationship adjustment. Another theme that we tend to see in these types of mother-son dynamics, and we see in this show is lies on isolation. Okay. And in the show, this is one of the biggest, like, most egregious things that happens is that the son has a climbing accident and he is in a coma and in the hospital. And the mother does not allow Cherry, the girlfriend, to come and visit or to be there. She does not answer any of her calls. And she does not update her on his prognosis or how he's,

he's doing. Several weeks later, after the son is already out of the hospital, the mother lies to Cherry about her son and says that he is dead. She then goes on to block the girlfriend's number and take him to Spain for his rehab and recovery to essentially isolate him from everyone that knew him and not allow this girl to run into him or come to his home. And let's remember that at this time, him and this girlfriend were living together. They had been dating for a little while, certainly several months. He had told her that he loved her. And before this hiking accident, he had, you know, kind of proposed to her in this very, like, unplanned way. But Cherry was under the belief that they were engaged prior to this accident. She was also there when this accident

happened. And so the mother clearly does this as a last effort to get rid of this girl and to be the most important person in her son's life. And during this episode, we're there in Spain, we see the mother go to extreme lengths to make this happen. She saves Cherry's number as a different number in her son's phone. She then, you know, blocks her from being able to contact her. and she is responding to these messages. This is very reminiscent of the unknown number documentary that we talked about. She responds to Cherry's messages from this burner phone that she has and says, you know, to like messages her son back, sorry, saying, do not contact me anymore.

This is over as if she's Cherry. And so she makes her son think that this girl has just disappeared, doesn't love him, and is not even like going to show her face after he's just been in a coma and is rehabbing his ability to walk and swim and eat and all this stuff. And this is a perfect moment for the mom to be able to isolate her son, save him from this accident, rehab him and become the most important person in her son's life for that time. Now, in the final scene of this show, there is a violent interaction between Cherry, the son, and the mother. And in the end, you know, the son has gotten back with Cherry. They are together. He has moved out of his mother's home. And he has discovered

that his mother was lying to him this entire time. And he has, you know, committed the ultimate act of betrayal to his mother of abandoning her. They get into this argument and fight in the apartment and their knives involved. And while this is a really dramatic, I think, portrayal of where these relationships can go, it highlights how absolutely intolerable this emotional incest can feel to the victim, to the child, when individuation seems absolutely impossible and like it will not happen. And so, In the final scene, you know, the son ends up killing his mother with the girlfriend present. And this really is a, again, you know, dramatic version of him essentially saying,

I cannot be myself with you around, with you alive even. I have to pick between these two women and I have to pick between them and myself. And I think that's ultimately what he's missing here is that neither of these options are very good options. And the reason that it feels like he has to pick Cherry or his mother is because they are very similar. And only one of them can have him. And so I think in a pursuit of trying to undo all of the trauma and emotional incest

and manipulation that he has experienced from his mother, he thinks that if he gets rid of her, he is going to be able to have individuation and peace and the life that he wants with Cherry. But I think we as the viewer know that he is simply replicating a pattern and he is choosing someone that is likely going to do the same thing that his mother did to him just kind of in a different flavor. And at the end of the show, we see him kind of discover that like Cherry has been lying and she has hurt other people before and that maybe his mother was right about some of the things that she was afraid of when it came to this girl. I think that if there is another season of this show, we are probably going to see how this

young man has kind of moved himself out of one relationship with a woman that looked like this with his mother, into another with a romantic partner that is actually quite similar, unfulfilling, controlling, and emotionally or even physically abusive because he just substituted one for the other. And I think we're also going to see him going through some real inner turmoil about what he did and what he chose and if it was the right choice and not feeling very secure in who he is as a person because he has never functioned without this sort of overbearing, domineering, emotionally involved, and manipulative woman in his life in the form of his mother that he now has in a lot of ways in his partner. And so while that might show up

very differently or feel like a different relationship, I foresee that there will be a lot of the same consequences and experiences. If you are feeling like, wow, I have seen relationships like this. I think my partner has a relationship with his mother like this. Some things to look out for, you know, are blurred roles, always being a parent's confidant, a lot of guilt and manipulation, seeing the partner as a rival, not having a strong relationship with a partner themselves or any other friends, therapist, peer support, like really just relying on the child. And you can see from this show and from the research that I outlined how this can manifest over time and what some of those consequences are. I want to thank you all so much for listening

to this show. I hope that it was helpful and that it gives you a new perspective and some tools to help you deal with emotional enmeshment, especially between mothers and sons. You can watch the show The Girlfriend on Amazon Prime. It's out now, and I think it's a great way to sort of get some insight into these dynamics and see if you can relate to them or if you've seen them in your life. And then if you have and you decide that this is something that you would like to work on, we would love to have you join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. This is our online membership community where you get access to our entire resource library that is dedicated to helping you have better adult family relationships.

We deliver new content to your inbox every Monday. You get an article, worksheet, script, and a video, as well as unlimited access to all of our support groups with me and our other licensed therapist. We have groups every single week for estranged adult children, adult children of emotionally immature parents, daughters with difficult mothers. We have our topic focused groups, and we also have family estrangement groups for anyone that is working through a family estrangement. I would love to see you inside one of our groups at Calling Home. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Callinghome.co. That's www.callinghome.com. And thank you so much for listening to the

Calling Home Podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. the founder of Calling Home and the host of this show. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, and you can always call in or send me a question to answer during our Thursday Q&A episodes or let me know if there is a show or movie that you'd like me to watch and cover on the show. As always, please like, subscribe, leave a comment or a review. That's really what helps us keep the show going. Thank you so much, everyone, and have a great rest of your day. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Colling Home or Whitney Goodman.

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