CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Enmeshed Parents: What You Can Do About It

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

What do enmeshed relationships actually look like? Why do parents become enmeshed with their kids? And what can you do about it? If you've ever felt like you can't hear yourself think, you're expected to be your parent's therapist or partner, or missing a weekly dinner feels like betraying the family, this episode is for you. 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.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic PositivityThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome back to Calling Home. I'm Whitney Goodman and this is the podcast where we talk about the hard stuff like family dynamics, boundaries, estrangement, and what it actually looks like to break generational cycles. Before we dive in, I want to remind you about the Family Cycle Breakers Club over at Callinghome.co. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, you get monthly groups, worksheets, videos, articles, scripts, and everything you need to actually do this work and not just think about it. You can head to Callinghome.co to join us. Today we're going to be talking about enmeshed parents. What does an emmished parent actually look like? Why do parents become enmesh with their kids? And if you are their child, whether you're 22 or 45, what can you do about it? This is one of those episodes that I think is going to hit home for a lot of you.

So let's go ahead and get into it. I want to do a quick recap on what emmeshment is. I know some of you are familiar with this term, but emmeshment is when two or more people, typically family members, and in this context we're talking about adults and their parents, are excessively involved in each other's lives in a way that limits their autonomy and their identity. And it's not necessarily the behavior that makes a family close versus emmeshed. It's the impact. There are so many ways to define.

closeness as a family, that this can be deeply nuanced and really heavily impacted by things like culture, where you grew up in the world, et cetera. It's not that if you check off this list of behaviors, that automatically means that you are enmeshed versus close. Close families ultimately feel supportive and the people feel free to be themselves. Emmeshed families tie love to compliance. I like to use this dinner table example, okay? In a close family, there might be a weekly dinner, let's say. And missing that weekly dinner doesn't threaten your role in the family. People will say things like, oh, I understand you can't make it this week. We'd love to see you next week. And you genuinely want to be at the dinner. You like spending time with your family and you

enjoy that closeness. In an enmeshed family, being at the dinner is an obligation it is a tool to enforce compliance. And there is a lot of guilt complaints or punishment when you don't make it to the dinner. And so instead of having this feeling of like, I really want to be at dinner with my family, I'm bummed that I have to miss it or it's something that I like to make every week to the best of my ability. And in a meshed family, you might feel like I have to go to this dinner every week because if I don't, there are going to be some really bad consequences. And I don't want to face that.

I am scared of what it's going to mean if I don't go to this dinner. Now, I mentioned there's some cultural nuance to this. Emashment is highly culturally dependent. What looks like emmeshment in one family may be healthy in others. And there's research that shows that enmeshed patterns can actually be adaptive in some context. So there was a study that was done in 2009 that enmeshed patterns were associated with healthier coping in families of children.

who have autism spectrum disorder. And there was also some research done on Korean immigrant families that showed enmeshed relationships benefiting children in their social, emotional development. So emmeshment, again, isn't about what your family does. It's about how it impacts people in the family, especially those with less power like children. Emmished parents have a very specific look and feel to them. Okay.

So an immeshed parent might present as the parent who needs to know everything. They have excessive checking in, surveillance, and an entitlement that they deserve and have a right to know every detail of their adult child's life. If their adult child wants privacy, they will label their child as rude, secretive, or ungrateful. And these are patterns that often show up in childhood, right? and they don't stop in adulthood. It could actually intensify when the adult starts to build a life, get a partner, move away, et cetera. And a lot of the adults that come to our estranged adult child group at Calling Home

and our adult children of emotionally immature parents group report that these life stages where they went away to college, they moved into their own home, they got a partner, they started having more friends, were actually when the emmeshment and some of those negative behaviors associated with emmeshment started to really intensify and get worse. An enmeshed parent is also often a parent who cannot tolerate differences. So their child may be shamed, ridiculed, or exiled for being different from the family. Self-exploration would really be discouraged. And there is an expectation that you will become exactly like other members of the family.

and any different opinions are treated as betrayal. So dissent is disloyalty in these families. There is a big fear underneath this because for many Amesh parents, a child being different feels like they're losing their child completely. And this is because emmeshment can often be a result of. The parent feeling like their child is actually an extension of them. They are them. They are a part of them.

they don't look at their child and see this fully separate being, they see a part of them that is kind of walking around in the world, but it is their job to exert control and power over that child. Emmeshed parents are also often the parent who uses their child as a therapist, partner, or best friend. And this is where we're going to see emmeshment overlap with other terms that you might know, like emotional incest and parentification. And I've talked a lot about these inside the family cycle breakers club at Calling Home.

We have a lot of content on emotional incest and parentification for members. But we've also talked about it on this podcast, especially emotional parentification, which often falls into this like using the child as a therapist where emotional incest really overlaps with using the child as a partner. And you'll notice that this parent tends to overshare about their romantic relationships, marital problems, finances, work stress, or other topics that are just not developed mentally appropriate for a child. And the child becomes the parent's primary emotional support person. They're expected to provide comfort, advice, and companionship that should come

from an adult partner, friend, or a therapist, not from a child. And there was a video that I was watching, gosh, I wish I could remember. There's a guy on TikTok, he wears glasses and has reddish hair. Please put it in the comments if you know who I'm talking about. But he had this video talking about how kids who are parentified or who engage in habits of like emotional incest with their parent, they have this kind of therapist or partner relationship are destined to fail because they can never actually help the parent with what they're going through. And the parent kind of knows this on some level, right? You're going to go to a kid with your problems like this. If you know that ultimately you can dismiss what that child says because they're a child,

they can't hold you accountable because they're a kid. They don't have the level of insight or the ability to push back against you. So you're constantly handing them problems that you would quote unquote like to be solved. But the parent knows on some deep level. that this kid actually can't do anything about these problems. And it helps them continue to repeat the cycle that they're repeating because if they actually went to a friend or another adult or a therapist, they might get called out on some of the ways that they are repeating these behaviors, right? And so the kid is always going to fail. They're trying to help their parent, make them better, teach them something. But they can't because they are a child in that hierarchical role.

There is a book by Dr. Patricia Love that talks about like the three types of emotional incest, and she breaks it down into the romanticizing parent. So this is a parent that turns the child who's often the opposite sex. The parent turns to this child for the intimacy and companionship that they would normally find in a partner. And this is again one of those very obvious cases of emotional incest. There's also the friendly parent. this can be a type of emotional incest. And typically these are same sex, so like father and son.

And they see the child as their best friend and partner and engage with them in this way. Then you'll also see the critical abusive parent who uses the child for emotional release. And they kind of alternate between kindness and cruelty. And whatever the parent is feeling gets directed onto the child. All three of these things share. are two things in common, okay? The parent is using the child to meet needs that the child cannot fulfill. I just talked about that with that TikTok video. And the parent neglects the child's needs in the process because you can't be doing this to the child while also taking care of

their needs. It's largely incompatible. Inmeshed parents may also really punish boundaries because in a meshed families, no is a bad word. And setting a boundary can trigger things like the silent treatment, guilt trips, rejection, or being exiled from the family. You'll remember we talked about with that, with that dinner table example. And often these parents in the face of boundaries will use guilt as a weapon. So you only think of yourself. You're so selfish.

Can't you ever think of anyone else? or they'll kind of inhabit this martyr role of like, oh, go out, be with your friends, I'll be all right. I'll just be sitting here alone by myself, but don't worry about me. And the message is very clear here, right? Your independence, your separation from me is a threat and I am going to make you pay for it. Emmashed parents may also have a lot of trouble functioning without their child. So their emotional stability depends entirely on their child's availability and compliance. And that's where you'll see, like, this is why these parents kind of fall apart and resort to some of those things like guilt, martyrdom, shame, punishment that we just talked about because

they cannot function and they're trying to bring the child back in. I have an example that I think of where, like, let's say you're at work. And your mom, text. you during the workday. And when she doesn't get an immediate response or the child doesn't provide instant support, she continues like blowing up your phone, then it's okay, and you just don't care about me. I can't believe that you would do this to me. They may even sort of go into threats about their own safety or taking their own life and then even maybe saying, fine, I'll just never talk to you again and then going into the silent treatment. And so you'll see this path where the parent is trying to get their needs met by the child. They can't. And then they ultimately

just crash and start kind of acting out until the child comes back. And in this case, we're talking about an adult typically, and is like, oh, mom, I'm so sorry. I was at work. I should have been there for you and gets pulled back into that cycle. But if you are someone with a parent like this, you probably realize that you live at the absolute mercy of your parents' emotional state at all times. Why do parents become enmeshed? I want to help you make sense of this pattern, and this is not an excuse or way to let people off the hook, but we need to understand where this behavior comes from. Most of the time, emmeshment is passed down generationally in families. So if you grew up without boundaries, you're more likely to raise your kid the same way,

unless you are listening and reading to stuff like this and learning a different. way to be because you realized there was another way or you realized that it wasn't working for you. But many of these enmeshed parents experienced this as children. And so they kind of expect their kids to play the same role. They think that it's just normal. It's this rhetoric of like, well, this is how it's always been. And they don't have a model for anything different. And I know that that can be extremely frustrating for a lot of adults who also don't have. a model for anything different because they grew up like this, but they went out and learned and tried to become different. And you look at your parent and kind of say, why can't you do that too?

In my experience, this is one of the biggest contributors that I run into anecdotally in my work, is that a lot of times these parents are in an unfulfilling partnership or they are alone. So when a parent doesn't receive any emotional or physical intimacy from their partner, or they don't have one, or they don't have a lot of friends or other types of community support, they may turn to the next available person, which is their child. And this is really common in mother's son enmeshment. The mother will look to the son to take on the role that their father should be filling. Now, of course, underneath this, there's a lot of norms and complicated factors of, you know, women being placed in certain roles in the home and not having any help. And I think the main driver here, when we're talking especially about a meshed mother's son relationships, is the mother's relationship or lack thereof with her partner, especially when we're

talking about heterosexual relationships. and that male partner or the father not tending to that relationship and kind of leaving their son to pick up the slack. You may also see a lot of addiction and substance use in emmeshed families because these parents might be preoccupied, recovering, they're just, they're experiencing mood changes that disrupt their attachment. And these children can become very skilled at suppressing their own needs and hyper-focusing on the parents' needs so that they're able to stay safe. And in these families, there are probably not a lot of boundaries. There's some role confusion between who's the parent and who's the child.

And inappropriate situations may become the norm as a result of the substance use. In the same vein, we're going to see mental health issues coming up in a meshed families, right? So certain diagnoses like personality disorders, severe debilitating anxiety or depression, can make maintaining healthy boundaries extremely difficult. And the child may become overly involved in managing the person who is struggling. And this can blur the lines further. And some parents who struggle with their mental health during those moments where it is very debilitating, they might be experiencing a lot of signs of emotional immaturity. And they don't have the regulation skills to meet their own needs, let alone their child, and the child becomes acutely aware of this.

We can also see a meshment in families where there's health issues and disability. So chronic illness or disability in a parent or a child can lead to a meshment when the caregiving isn't handled in the right way. So when children are overly involved in the parent's care or when a parent can't let go of over-involvement in their child, child's care, emmeshment can happen. And these are often some of those, like, well-intentioned forms of helping that can blur into emmeshment. Now, insecurity, separation, anxiety, and a lack of support, much like not having a solid partner or community for the parent can also lead to emmeshment. If you have a parent who feels very alone in the world, they don't trust others,

they don't have a support system, they may cling to their child as, a lifeline as someone to spend time with. And if they have a strong fear of abandonment or their own attachment trauma, the parent may then become overly involved in the child's life. And they become the parent's entire emotional world. Now I want to talk about how this impacts you because you may be hearing all of these signs and thinking, wow, this is the first time I've put all of this together. I did not realize this is what was going on in my family. it is so painful. I think emmeshment trauma or just emmeshment in general is so hard to accept because it can look so nice on the surface actually. People may even love that your family is so

close and be like jealous of it. And for kids who grew up in enmeshed families, it is much easier to say like I was a bad kid instead of saying my parent hurt me. And especially when their behavior that is leading to emmeshment feels like it should be loving or good, there's just too much of it. It's an excess and it's being used to control. It can be very, very hard to call that out. And I've talked about how, you know, pop culture and television and movies often normalize and even romanticize enmeshment. We did that episode on Gilmore Girls and talked about how like it looks good on screen, but the cost is actually enormous, especially for the person who has less power in the hierarchy like the child. And so we have to understand this tradeoff and why it's

not normal. If you have to give up everything important to you, hide who you are, ignore your own boundaries in the name of family, that is not true closeness. That's often just obedience in exchange for closeness. And when you make that trade-off, there are a lot of losses and consequences for it. You may not know who you are outside of your family. Like your likes, beliefs, and values have been dictated by that system. You may also have difficulty making decisions. Often in enmeshed families, there is someone making decisions for you.

And so you don't learn how to trust yourself. It's a muscle that you have not been using. You also may struggle with boundary setting because you don't know what boundaries are or how to set them and saying no can feel physically dangerous in these situations. People pleasing and hypervigilance are also very close. common, you know, you've kind of been wired and conditioned to monitor other people's emotions and suppress your own needs. You may also experience low self-esteem because you were consistently put down and don't have a solid identity outside of your family. We also see a lot of

relationship struggles with people who grew up in a meshed families or a meshed parent-child dynamics. You have difficulty forming adult relationships because you weren't taught what one is supposed to look like. There's also a higher risk of anxiety, depression, and PTSD when emmeshment is co-occurring with neglect or emotional abuse, which, as you can tell, it often does. And you also might experience a lot of guilt for having your own needs. Like wanting something just for yourself feels very threatening or selfish. Now, as with all things, there are some positive. qualities that do come up as a result of growing up in an enmeshed family, right? And I always say these positive qualities could have and likely should have been developed in a healthier way.

You do not have to be grateful that all of this happened because it led you here. You all know I'm not a fan of that toxic positivity. I wrote an entire book on it. But you are not ruined because you experienced this. I think a lot of enmeshed adults, adults who grew up in a meshed families, are excellent at reading and assessing how others feel. They can be highly empathetic and intuitive. They often are very committed to the people that they love and their relationships. They're incredibly self-sufficient, resourceful and good at solving problems. And you're listening to this. So you're becoming aware of the pattern. And that means you're going to change it and do something about it. The important qualification here is that all of these positive qualities

that you can develop as a result of growing up in this type of dynamic need to kind of come with another quality attached to them to actually be healthy and positive in your life. Right. So you need boundaries with your empathy. Otherwise, you're just absorbing everyone's emotions. And you need to have limits that come with your commitment to others because otherwise you can really lose yourself. And if you're not able to accept help and you're extremely self-sufficient, you're probably going to get burnt out or too overwhelmed or people can take advantage of you. Now that we've gotten to this point in the episode, I think you may be asking yourself, like, what can I do then if I have an emashed parent?

And I want to give you some practical, like, action-oriented tips here. So the first thing that you're doing right now is recognizing the pattern. You cannot change things if you haven't seen them. Okay. We do have an emmeshment checklist inside the family cycle breakers club under our emmeshment topic. If you go to callinghome.co, you can type in emmeshment in the search bar and you'll see all the resources that come up there. But that's a good checklist to identify the emmeshment in your family and what it looked like

and felt like and how those unique signs showed. up for you. And then you want to ask yourself, like, how is this impacting me? Is this a problem for my relationships, my health, my sense of self? Like, if it's not showing up for you right now, this isn't something that you need to really dig like so, so much deeper in, right? It's, it's okay to say, I feel like comfortable with how things are going. But if you notice that when you do that checklist or when you're listening to this, you're nodding a lot and it's popping up everywhere, then you may want to continue past this point of awareness. After you have that awareness, setting boundaries is very important, even very, very small ones.

So boundaries in an enmeshed family can feel very foreign. And in fact, boundaries are like the opposite of emmeshment. They are the antidote to emmeshment. And this might be the first time in your family that anyone is experiencing any type of boundary setting. And so it's tricky. When you start setting boundaries, even just limits for yourself of like, I'm only going to see my family twice a week and I'm used to seeing them every day, like little things like that, then you can expect that you're probably going to feel some guilt and shame. And it's a normal part of the process.

And you can think about physical boundaries too around, you know, your home, your space and then thinking about holidays, visits. even like touch. It might be revolutionary in your family to say, like, can you call us before you come over? We would appreciate knowing what time you're coming over. I also want you to try, and I just mention this about like seeing your family, try small steps first. So if you're talking to your parents seven times a day, try cutting back to six, then five. Like it doesn't have to be like, okay, now I'm only going to call my mom once a week if you've been talking a million times a day. this significant change doesn't happen overnight. You also may want to consider, and this is another form of boundaries, you know, limiting what you share with your family.

Because in enmeshed families, there are typically very little, if any, boundaries around information. And everyone feels entitled to know basically everything about your life, right? And so you have permission not to share every detail, to wait until you're ready, or to kind of pick up on topics that have not been the best to share about in your family because they lead to the biggest consequences. And this will feel uncomfortable. Your family will probably have a reaction, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing anything wrong. For those of you that kind of became your parents' therapist as a result of this emmeshment, I think this is something that you're really going to work on, want to work on, that will improve your life in a big

way. So if your parent is using you as their primary emotional support and it is taking a toll on you, you're allowed to do something about this. And you can say things like, I love you and I care about you, but unfortunately, I can't help with this because it's just way too hard for me. Or I know you're going through a hard time, but I think it would be best to talk about this with someone else. I'm happy to help you find a therapist or maybe you can make some other type of suggestion if there's someone they're really close to. I really want to be there for you and I feel like I can't really help with this. Do you think blank would be better at helping you? And again, expect some pushback here, especially if this is very new. You also need to focus on developing who you are. I think one of the

biggest consequences of emmeshment is losing your sense of self and you may have formed to fit what your parent or your family wanted. And so this is where you're going to just start exploring what do you like? What do you dislike? What do you value? How would you describe your personality versus how your family described you? And who were you told you should be? This like decision making practice and getting to know yourself is a muscle. It gets stronger the more that you use it. And so you just work on building that ability to trust yourself. I also think it's really important to get some outside support when you're working on enmeshment. And this podcast and the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home are all those things, right? Because I think in Ammashed families,

they discourage outside input. Your family is supposed to be your source for everything. And so you might want to go to therapy, ask potential therapists, how they handle a meshment specifically. because you want someone who recognizes there are a lot of options to handling this, depending on how it's coming up in your family and your culture, and they won't push you towards one resolution. You may also want to get more diversity in your support. So attending support groups, finding community, friends, other people that you can go to about certain things outside of like just your parent

or just your family and even practicing getting advice or feedback from other people can be really, really helpful. Now, of course, in some situations, becoming estranged from an emmished parent or a meshed family member is necessary. And I know none of you want to do that and people usually have to do that because they have to. I think that in enmeshed families, you need to expect significant pushback to a lot of these changes because you're literally doing the opposite of what happened in your family. And ending the relationship with a parent or an enmeshed family will not solve all the consequences that you experienced from emmeshment. It might give you the space to do so, but you're still going to experience some of those consequences, right, that we just talked about that you can work on.

And some people can return to the family once they've developed a really secure sense of but others cannot because the family doesn't allow them to exist as a separate person. And I've talked about how I think actually overly enmeshed families often experience more estrangement because some adults will feel like it is my only option is to totally step out of this system because I truly cannot hear myself think. I can't make decisions. I can't do what I want. I can't be married to this partner. I can't raise my children how I want to raise them if I am in this family. And so if families can learn to tolerate difference and give a little bit of space, they're much less likely to become estranged. I want to give you a couple of reminders as we

wrap up this episode. Emeshment between your adult family member and you as a child was never your fault. You as the child did not become emmeshed with them. And realizing that your family is enmeshed is very painful. I expect some of you to have a lot of strong feelings that come up after this episode or maybe your thoughts are racing and you're like, God, I didn't realize there was all this stuff going on. It's very, very normal. And as you work through this, doing things the same way over and over in your family might feel easier in the short term, but it won't end well. Change is very hard and you just have to remember that you are changing your family for the better if this is something that has been very difficult for you and needs to change in your

life and in your family's life. I also want you to remember that you're an adult now. You have power. You do not have to do what has always been done and you get to create a family that makes sense for you and your life. You're also not doomed because of what you experienced in your family. You have a lot of good qualities and you have the potential. for change, growth, and a good life. And I think sometimes when you're healing from a meshment or stepping back, you can feel very, very alone. And so I want you to remember that even when you feel alone, you are not alone.

And I think that's one of the best benefits of our groups and discussion boards at Calling Home because there are people out there and I see them every day who feel exactly how you do. And there's also people on the other side who know that you will not feel this way. forever. Thank you so much for listening to this episode about emmeshment and enmeshed parents. If this episode resonated with you, I want you to know that you don't have to figure this out alone. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at www.callinghome.co, we have scripts, worksheets, and a whole community of people who get it. We also have so many resources on emmeshment

that you can go on there search for, including that checklist that I mentioned. Head to calling home.com to become a member. of the Family Cycle Breakers Club. And if you found this episode helpful, please take a second to like, subscribe, and leave a review wherever you're listening. The reviews really, really help people find us, and that means more people breaking these cycles and creating better families that they deserve. I will see you again next week. 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 Colin Holm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Collingholm's terms of service linked in the show notes below.