When Love Becomes Control: How Enmeshment Keeps Mothers Stuck

Episode 181 - When Love Becomes Control: How Enmeshment Keeps Mothers Stuck

Have you ever felt like your child’s success—or failure—reflects your worth as a mother? If you’ve found yourself trying to fix their problems, steer their life, or hold it all together for them, this episode is for you.

In this powerful and vulnerable conversation, I share how many women—especially mothers—unknowingly lose themselves in their relationships. What looks like love and concern is often fear and control shaped by cultural, religious, and family systems.

You’ll learn:

• What enmeshment really is (and how it’s not the same as closeness)
• Why mothers tie their identity and worth to their children’s choices
• How your nervous system keeps pulling you toward old patterns
• Why we were never taught how to belong to ourselves and to others
• How to begin shifting toward healthy, grounded love through differentiation

This episode is not about blame. It’s about healing, clarity, and reclaiming your emotional freedom.

Join the Free Class: End Family Disconnection and Rebuild Relationships That Last
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Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:04

Welcome back to coaching your family relationships. I'm Tina Gosney, family life educator and family conflict coach. Today we're going to talk about a very tender, often in invisible, experience for so many women, losing yourself in someone else's life. This is something that's so common for women. This episode is about enmeshment, what it looks like, why it happens, and how we can start to very lovingly untangle ourselves from it. So I want to be really clear about this. This is not about blaming or shaming anyone. It's about awareness. Because when we see what is happening, we gain some awareness. It actually creates a possibility for healing, and healing opens the door to different kinds of love, a love that is way deeper than trying to manage your family members or losing yourself in a pattern of self sacrifice. Have you ever felt like when your child struggles that it was your fault, especially when they are they grow up and they turn into those older teenagers or young adults, or maybe even older than that. But if you ever think, well, if I had just done something different, if I had been a better mother, if I hadn't maybe been working, and if I had stayed home to raise them, then this, this struggle, wouldn't be happening, or if we hadn't moved, or if we hadn't changed schools, if I hadn't have gotten divorced, if I hadn't have gotten remarried, none of this would be happening right now. Have you ever thought any of those things? Have you ever also thought maybe on the flip side of that coin, like their successes proved that you did something right? You can find, I have evidence of this all over social media. You're going to see parents very quickly posting about their child's successes and, you know, happy pictures of a family that's smiling at a wedding or a graduation or some other type of milestone. And we get really super proud at those moments. We don't post pictures that are the opposite of that, but we get really proud at these moments, and so do other people. So if you are nodding your head, you're not alone, we will tie our identity into being a mother. And it's so easy to start believing that your worth depends on how your children turn out. But I want to be very clear. First of all, there is no turning out that's another, another podcast episode. But just because you post pictures of a happy event in your family does not mean that you're in mesh with their children. It does not mean that you're using your children to prove your worthiness or effectiveness as a mother, but in my experience, as a coach who has worked with many, many women for many years now, we will often take our child's successes as evidence that we did a good job, and we will take their struggles as a sign that we did something wrong, when actually neither is completely true or completely false. So when this happens, when we take on all of their stuff as our identity, something very subtle takes root inside of ourselves. Our worth becomes something that is walking around outside of us, inside someone else, in someone else's hands, and because we all want to feel safe and worthy and whole, we're going to try to manage that person because their decisions determine our worth. So we try to shape them, we try to guide them, and we also try to control them. And we do it far longer than just their early childhood years. We often will do this into their adult years as well. And it looks like love, it looks like concern, but it's really coming from fear and unworthiness in disguise. And I know this not just because I have coached so many women on this topic, but also because I have lived it myself. So there was a time in my life when I was trying to do everything right, and I put right. I'm doing little air quotes right now. I was trying to do everything right as a mother, I thought it was my job to steer my children towards what I knew was the right way to live. I'm also I'm going to put new what I knew in air quotes. This as the right way to live. I want. I wanted them to be happy. I still do. I want them to be safe, successful. I want them to have everything wonderful happen to them in their life. But underneath there was this deeper truth that I could not see yet, that my sense of worth was so wrapped up in who they were and what they did, I thought I was being very loving. I was actually being very controlling, unknowingly and with the very best intentions, I was being controlling. That was another younger version of me, one that was super afraid of things not going the way that I thought they were supposed to go. In my mind, there was only one path in life that was okay, and I was so afraid of the people that I love not following that path. So that younger version of me was driven by fear and did not know what it means to show love and trust in someone enough to let them go. Now, through the help of others and some really deep, difficult personal work, I slowly started to unravel that pattern, and this is what I learned. And this is actually not unique to me. We live in a culture that tells mothers their value is measured by their children's outcomes. Let me show you how that happens. There's this good mother myth, right? A good mother sacrifices everything for her children, and if your child is struggling, it means you didn't pay enough attention and you didn't love them enough success is defined by your child's accomplishments, not by your own growth and identity. We live in this culture that gives hyper responsibility to parents, especially mothers so intensive. Parenting trends tell mothers that they must supervise every aspect of their child's life, their education, their emotions, their friendships and their health. We live in a very hyper focused, Child Focused culture and society, and when things go wrong, it implies we did not give enough supervision or make the right choices. And we get this reinforced on social media. You know, you can get online at any time, and you can see perfect family image, images that show how a mother you should be able to control everything, and if your family doesn't look like that. If you have a distant child, if you have one struggling with mental health or not following your values, then it reflects poorly on you. We have cultural and religious perfectionism teachings that say children are a reflection of their mother's righteousness and effort, and the saying Train up a child in the way he should go is often misinterpreted as if you did it right, they won't stray. And then, have you ever heard of their refrigerator mother? This was back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Doctors were blaming mothers if their children were diagnosed with autism by saying you're a cold person, you do not give enough love and warmth to this child, and now it's your fault that they have this condition. Mothers have been blamed for eating disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety, all without scientific basis, see if any of these phrases resonate with you, because these are phrases that are common, that will just reinforce these messages. Where did she learn that this implies poor parenting, lack of teaching, often directed at the mother. Another one didn't his mother teach him any manners blames the mother for behavior that may have multiple causes. This is one of my favorites. If that were my kid, I'd never let them get away with that. You know, suggest that this child's choices are due to the mother's failure to control them. Here's another one. Well, she must not have set enough boundaries. This is oversimplifying a very complex parent child dynamic, and places that responsibility solely on the mother. Another one I could keep going on for the entire podcast. He just needs more discipline at home. Well, this assumes that behavior issues are stemming from parent deficiencies, rather than maybe the child's temperament, some type of trauma they've been. Through or some other context we're not even aware of. Here's another one. She's too soft, or she's too strict. Well, either way, it's the mother's fault. So no matter what she does, she can't win. Another one. We can keep going on. He's acting out to get her attention. Well, that's this is implying that the mother is not emotionally available or doing enough. This one, you know, can be kind of tricky. And this next one has, it's like a two edged sword. Mothers are the children's first teachers. Well, that can be empowering. It also can imply failing in a child is a failure in teaching on the mother's head, the mother's shoulders. We got a couple more here, if you don't raise them right, society will have to deal with them later. Well, this just adds a layer of public shame and responsibility that weighs on mothers. And the last one, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I've actually heard this one applied to the Father as well. So this is not solely on the mothers, but definitely it has been used as a weapon against mothers. It's a code that means blame the mother. And so how many of those have you heard before? How many of you heard your entire life. I've heard all of these my entire life. You know? Who else heard them? Our own mothers and their mothers, and probably their mothers, these ideas and ways of blaming the mother have been carried and passed down for generations. So if you find yourself wrapped up in what your children are doing or not doing, no wonder everyone your entire life has told you it's a measurement of your worth. So if you lose yourself in self sacrifice, or if you find yourself trying to control your your people, your family, your children, like I did, please give yourself some compassion. You are not broken. There is nothing wrong with you. You have just been fed a lot of misinformation for a really, really long time. So let's dive into what is happening for us here. This is enmeshment. This is when your emotional state depends on someone else's emotional state. This is not the same as closely as closeness. It is not intimacy. It's the loss of yourself. It sounds like, well, if they're not okay, I can't relax, or I've got to fix this before it gets worse. Or the sneaky one that kind of sits underneath all the rest of them that says, well, their their choices are reflecting badly on me. One of the most painful parts of enmeshment is what it feels like to watch someone that you love struggle that can be excruciating if your child is anxious or failing or walking away from values that you hold dear, and every part of your body screams, do something. Then you feel helpless and you feel out of control. When you feel that way, your brain and your body are just reaching and stretching for something familiar. It says, step in, take over, fix it, pull them back into safety. This is also we call it sometimes like the mama bear coming out in us, right? Because our culture labels that as being a good mom, and we don't see it for what it is, because it doesn't feel like control, it feels like helping, it feels like protecting, it feels like loving. But if we're honest, except in extreme cases, we're not always doing it for them. We're doing it because it helps us to feel better. We feel more regulated within ourselves. This is a nervous system thing that helps us to feel more regulated. So where does this come from? We are taught cultural conditioning and social rewards from the time we are little girls, we are taught to be nice and polite, accommodating, helpful, selfless and and then we become mothers, and suddenly our identity becomes almost entirely tied to how our children are doing so when they're thriving and they're doing well in school, and they're making good choices, as far as you know, our definition of good choices, and they're succeeding in all the ways of life that we all those boxes that we want them to check when they're succeeding in all of those. We get praise from family and from friends and from our faith communities. We hear, Oh, you're such a great mom. Oh, you must have done something so good in your home. You raised them so well, and that feels so good. It feels like validation. Feels like success. But what about when things fall apart? What about when your child leaves, your faith, drops out of school, is battling addiction, makes a choice that you don't agree with. Suddenly, the praise stops. People pull away. What if they didn't check all those boxes that you consider, the boxes of success, you feel judged or worse. You feel like you failed. You feel like your child's struggle is a reflection of your own worth, because society has told you that it is, and that's when shame takes over. So instead of asking what they need, we try to rush in and fix the solution, we try to fix the situation so we can stop feeling that pain, and we can help get them back where they're supposed to be. This is control. This is enmeshment, and it's really hard to let go, because letting go is terrifying. Our nervous system has been trained to associate control with safety. Now, when I mentioned the nervous system, and you're not exactly sure what I'm talking about, I want you to go listen to episode 180 how your nervous system shapes your reactions, relationships and resilience. This was a conversation I had with Leah Davidson, who trains on the nervous system. If you're wanting to know how that impacts your relationships and your ability to function in life, go listen to that episode. It's a great one. So if your body learned early in life, which most of us do, that everything is only okay when everyone else is okay, then you'll keep trying to manage everyone else's emotions so that you can finally feel calm. Your nervous system doesn't care if it's a healthy reaction. It it cares if it's familiar. And enmeshment is often the only kind of love that we've ever known, and so that feels familiar and that feels safe, and that's why we repeat it over and over, thinking that it's the right thing, because it feels good to us, but just because it feels good does not mean that it really, actually is good or healthy for us or for them. When we really move into love and begin to let go of enmeshment, it can feel really scary and wrong, and our anxiety starts kicking up because our nervous system is not used to it, so it sends out all the signals, the warning signals, you'll feel them in your body, you'll hear them in your brain, and they start like panic and ruminating thoughts and anxiety. And this is wrong, and we have to stop this. These are so common when we're going through this type of transformation. But real love is not about control. Real love is about connection without possession. It is curious. It is accepting. It is kind, patient, calm, not easily offended and not defensive. And I'm talking about real love in the way that you are viewing your own reaction and your own anxiety about letting go and letting go of control, also real love in how you are approaching that relationship with the other person. Because when we are approaching someone else in this way with curiosity, acceptance, kindness, patience, calm, an unoffended attitude that is not defensive. It says I can sit here with you and your struggle without taking over it and trying to fix it. That's a love that allows room for two people to exist separately and still stay in a relationship. No one teaches us how to do that. Instead, we are taught how to merge, how to carry someone else's struggle and rush in and fix it, and how to hustle for our approval. And when that stops working, we will usually do one of two things. We will double down on control. And when that doesn't work, we cut people out of our lives. And that brings us to something that I call the Relationship Paradox. This is the paradox of the heart at the heart of human connection we all want to belong to. Each other. We want to have these relationships with other people and to feel connected and secure and part of a group. And we all want to belong to ourselves. We want to have self confidence. We want to be know who we are and be able to make our own decisions and have our own opinions. But no one teaches us how to do both of these things at the same time, and so we swing between two extremes. We lose ourselves for the sake of closeness. That is enmeshment, or we're going to push away people in order to protect ourselves. That's the cut off. And neither of those things are true connection, because true connection happens in the middle where I could be me, and you can be you, and I don't have to fix what's yours to carry, and you don't have to fix what's mine to carry. And we can stay in a relationship even when we're not the same. That is differentiation, that's emotional maturity, and it's one of the hardest, hardest things we'll ever do in our families. It's actually not a place that we're ever probably going to arrive at perfectly on this earth. It's something that we are going to be working at as long as we're here. But it's also one of the most beautiful things that we'll ever do for ourselves and for our families. If you are hearing yourself in this episode, if you have felt lost, exhausted, overly responsible from someone else's life, if you realize what you thought was love might actually be fear. You are not alone, you're also not broken, and you can learn something new. This is the kind of work we're going to start looking at in this upcoming class that I am holding later this month, July, 2025 this class is end family disconnection and rebuild relationships that last. This is a free training. We're going to begin the process of returning to yourself, releasing unhealthy patterns, creating safe, loving connection with people that you care about the most, your family, and this is the beginning of your transformation, not just for your family, but for you, because it always starts with you, because when you get grounded in yourself, everything changes. There is a link in the show notes. You can go to get registered. You can also go to www.courageous-connections.com/training thank you for being here with me today. I will see you next time you.