Hey deserving listeners, today I'm going to do a follow-up to the inmeshment episode that I did a while back.

Famous patron Linden actually emailed me several questions that are very intelligent,

and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to expand and elaborate on this idea of

enmeshed which is a very important concept in family therapy that we all use.

This is the Psychology and Seattle Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Kirk Honda.

I'm a therapist and a professor

in Marriage and Family Therapy.

I thought I'd read his questions and answer them, but first let me review

in measurement. I did a whole episode but let me quickly review what it means. Basically when we look at families we see three main categories of family styles or even

relationship styles.

We have enmeshed, we have disengaged, and we have healthier, healthier adaptive and that kind of thing.

So healthy and adaptive families, these families are, they have close bonds but they're

flexible.

There's a balance between the needs of the family and

the needs of the individuals and there's relatively low anxiety about

distance and closeness for the full explanation of all this to listen to the full episode on an emishment, but healthy

families operate, they're close, but they're flexible, they understand the needs of the family they understand the needs of the individual people everyone tends to get their needs met

it's sort of an optimal way and and there's flexibility like when people want to separate that's allowed to happen

when they want to get close that's allowed to happen in enmeshed families these families

are over-involved there's a pressure to conform, there's anxiety about distance, and they are inflexibly close, meaning that there's a requirement to be close, and if people try to occasionally

move away from the family, emotionally or physically or whatever, then there's a reaction

...