Holy shit. I've encountered descriptions of enmeshed families before but always exempted my own, because "they weren't that bad." When the reality was that I was so scared to question them that I never did so, and so they rarely showed the behaviors that were described. I internalized that fear of questioning as a personal fault, never considering that it might be due to the implicit threat of shaken family dynamics should I ever cease to toe the line. Having finally broken away from many of their held opinions, I sure am seeing and feeling that now.
Fragile peace… thanks for giving words to my experience and putting it in a larger context. I am no contact with both sets of parents (well, one went no contact with me first lol) and it took a while and lots of autonomy building and counseling for me to be where I’m at now: I will not re-enter a relationship with them based on a fragile peace ever again. If they don’t do their work, I know exactly what to expect and I will stay removed from that damaging, unhealthy system that really has no authentic place for me.
DL came up with that phrase, and it's soooooo accurate -- and yes, no use in putting yourself into a situation where you can just expect more conflict and no healthy working through things.
A few years ago I let my mom guilt me into calling her once a month (for a "Christmas present"). I dreaded it so much that it caused severe anxiety for days, and when I finally couldn't put it off any longer I would have several drinks before and during the call to make it through. Which was probably fine because it was dominated by her talking and me listening. Any time she did turn the conversation to me, it felt not like genuine curiousity about my life and thoughts but like I was being tested to see if I was still in the Christian-Republican fold. Part of this was dropping one-liners from hate preachers like Feucht or from Kenneth Copeland's online "news" channel and seeing if I would respond. Sometimes it was a pro-Trump/anti-Biden zinger, other times it was just straight up homophobia or anti-trans hate. But I thought it was my job to keep the fragile peace, that I was obligated to maintain the parent/child relationship, so I bit my lip and said nothing as she laughed to herself. By early this year I just couldn't do it anymore and stopped calling. I thought maybe all I needed was time, but the election was the last straw. I deleted their contacts and blocked their numbers. I just can't do it anymore and I'm not going to give them a chance to guilt me back into making excuses for their hateful worldview. I was never going to be able to be out to them, anyway.
Oh Russ. I am so sorry for what you have had to experience. You are not alone in this election being the impetus for taking the actions that will protect us and allow us to move forward with our lives, but it still is devastating.
Thanks. Even if I'm not out to them, they know I work in the journalism field, and they voted 3x for the guy who thinks it's funny to "joke" about murdering journalists, so they've painted at least two targets on my back. For a while I held onto the idea of a "healing fantasy", that if I just laid out who I am and how I really felt about everything that they would see the error of their ways--or at least come to a mutual understanding and minimal level of respect to salvage the relationship. But this imagined confrontation was also cause for extreme anxiety, and through your guys' work (and also Lindsay Gibson and others) I came to realize that this fantasy was just that. A fantasy. I don't "owe it to them" to open up and give them the opportunity to attack and hurt me further. Right now silence is the best option for my mental health. I'm still here if they repent and change, but it's not on me to do it for them.
Addendum: something I've been thinking about all day. If I feel so strongly about their political choices, i.e. their transactional values, that I'm breaking off all contact for good, do I at least owe it to *myself* to get if off my chest and tell them why? Won't a clear conscience feel better?
And still I keep arriving at...No. I know that I would not be able to make it through that conversation without getting emotional, and as an exvangelical, I know that's a danger zone. There are only two ways that it could go:
1) "See? It's an emotional decision. You're not thinking straight. *We're* being rational here and *you're* just upset about how the election went and you're having a knee-jerk reaction..."
or
2) They won't be able to resist the sight of an emotionally vulnerable, potentially broken person, and sensing the opening, they will blow right past the need for consent and try to minister to me, telling me I'm hurting them (victim status) and that it's God's design for families to be whole (demanding spiritual submission) and it's Satan who's trying to tear it apart (deflecting responsibility for their choices), etc.
Nope, nope, nope. I just can't deal with that right now. I'll let my silence do the talking.
I had a moment of recognition when you mentioned, “It’s God's design for families to be whole (demanding spiritual submission).” My mom sent me a prayer card recently, all about “what family is,” and I couldn’t figure out what it was about it, exactly, that bothered me. This! You’ve helped me see the point of the prayer card.
It's hard to consider that your parent(s) would have ulterior motives when reaching out to you, and it feels kind of shitty to think that whatever love they have for you might not in fact be unconditional. But they're operating under the prime directive to bring every soul into submission to God and all else is subservient to that goal.
After many years it became evident that the relationship they want from me is loaded with preconditions--submission to their parental and spiritual authority and denial of who I am as a person to suit their idealized image of me. They grew frustrated that I wasn't dutifully giving that to them the way I did as a quiet, meek, terrified child and later as a closeted self-loathing on-fire Christian young adult, and so they resorted to guilt-tripping. That worked for a while, and I allowed them a distant, superficial connection but never offered a spiritual toe-hold. They just kept trying to maneuver around the boundaries without showing they were engaging in any self-reflection or willingness to change and grow and be open-minded enough to accept me for who I am. (All the homophobic slurs they kept parroting from the hate preachers and politicians they follow were a big clue.)
It just became too much. I'm not saying reconciliation can never happen but it's on them to find their own way out of the darkness. Seeing as their livelihood depends on their not finding their way out I'm not holding out hope.
While my parents did not literally demand a hug in the moments after physical punishment, they made clear that their version of “this hurts me more than it hurts you” meant that the most important outcome of punishment within the system of religious authoritarian parenting was that the child was once again doing their job to fulfill parental wishes. The logical outcome of such a system is a parent whose reaction to their offspring’s divorce is not to offer comfort but instead to resign from an important board membership in the church, because “how could I do that work at the world policy level of our denomination when I can’t even control my own family?”
I guess that’s another big yes checkmark in the “enmeshment” column.
There was never any expectation or hope for understanding and comfort, when I considered calling my parents. There was only how carefully I could frame the conversation so that they didn’t have something more to seize upon to demonstrate how difficult and sorrowful I was making their lives both now and in the hereafter.
I'm so sorry this happened to you. This also happened to my sister -- my parents actually said they were grieving the divorce as if it was an actual death in the family, instead of offering emotional support to my sister (whose ex was abusive). It was such a slap in the face, and I know that these dynamics are unfortunately so common.
It is so validating, hearing you call it a slap in the face. Telling my parents about my impending divorce was absolutely the hardest thing I had ever done…for good reason.
One of the worst beatings I ever got involved my mother exclaiming she'd sooner be damned than have people (outside our family) think she would allow my supposedly grievously "selfish" behavior to go unpunished. My crime? Failing at age 3 to relinquish a slice of orange to my sister *immediately* upon hearing my mother's rageful demand that I do so. (There'd been a misunderstanding on my part due to where on the table our mother had placed the plate of orange slices in question. The plate looked as though it were closer to me and I'd thought the slices were more for me than for my sister. I made the mistake of momentarily hesitating.)
Thank you, Krispin and D.L., for this excellent book you're writing and sharing with RAP survivors.
An excellent chapter, as always. The absolute, gobsmacking gall of FotF!
I'm thinking about how their are spectrum of enmeshment. My family doesn't feel nearly as enmeshed as a lot of the people here. Mostly, I think my mom is fine with me making my own decisions--she's never criticized my choice to remain single, not have children, pursue the career route I did, etc.
But there are limits. The big things. If I told her I was in love with another woman, that would be a big thing. And in a couple of weeks, I'm going to have to tell her that I'm converting to Judaism, which is the biggest thing of all. And I'm so hung up on number two on your list--I feel SO responsible for her emotions. I have never felt that before. But even though my therapist and my friends tell me I can't be responsible for how she feels or reacts, I can't help it. I'm trying to remind myself that the fear I feel at the idea of telling her (my stomach starts to ache whenever I think about it!) is sign that something is wrong in our relationship, and that's not my fault. But it SO hard to internalize that!
Big same on #2 on the list. I likewise didn't realize I was doing it until my therapist pointed it out to me a few months ago. My mother lives 1500 miles and two time zones away, but I was still walking on eggshells, afraid that if I asserted my independence in the smallest way over the phone that she would be taken aback and feel some kind of injury. I was being held captive by *her* emotional immaturity and was subconsciously submitting to her authority and feeding her entitlement. The only way to stop the dread of talking was to stop talking. Besides I'm pretty sure that any parent of adult LGBTQ+ children who aren't out to them knows what's up by now and are in serious denial.
Reading this book in serial format has been illuminating in so many ways, but the big one is seeing which parts of RAP my parents used and which they did not. No corporal punishment, but they seem to have expected the same results and had completely perfected their catholic guilt trips so I rhyme with a lot of the description of responses to that kind of parenting.
But this week was strange because I did not expect to see my family in those questions for enmeshment but...yeah. The insistence on dancing attendance for a fragile peace. Recently, my mother even defended her Not Great reaction to me coming out -- begging me not to tell the extended family -- as her wanting to protect me from my conservative uncle's reactions (everybody was very nice to my face, just like when my uncle came out). And I asked what she would have done if they had been jerks -- surely she would have defended me? Kicked them out of her house? *silence*
So then you wanted me to never bring it up and just...be in a "close" family with people who would hate me if they knew? To keep the "peace"?
In contrast, I remember the visceral shock and horror my mom and grandmother displayed when I politely asked my step-grandfather not to make "harem" jokes about the three of us as they made me uncomfortable. My mom even pulled me aside to talk about how old and sick he was. But you know what? He immediately stopped. For the rest of the visit (and the rest of his life, as it turned out, since he died shortly afterward), he stopped with the Horndog Jokes and leaned into the I Love Pie Jokes, the Second (Third) Dessert Jokes instead. It wasn't the end of the world if HE was asked to change to make ME more comfortable. And we could acknowledge that I was uncomfortable without the entire world caving in on itself.
Then again, I was disinvited from his funeral, so I suppose there was a social cost?
I’m just now really seeing how my parents didn’t require a physical hug after the shaming, but I was definitely meant to show gratitude and love for their “care.”
Holy shit. I've encountered descriptions of enmeshed families before but always exempted my own, because "they weren't that bad." When the reality was that I was so scared to question them that I never did so, and so they rarely showed the behaviors that were described. I internalized that fear of questioning as a personal fault, never considering that it might be due to the implicit threat of shaken family dynamics should I ever cease to toe the line. Having finally broken away from many of their held opinions, I sure am seeing and feeling that now.
yes! I think this happens so often, especially because there's not been so much focus on families that look "good" on the outside :(
Fragile peace… thanks for giving words to my experience and putting it in a larger context. I am no contact with both sets of parents (well, one went no contact with me first lol) and it took a while and lots of autonomy building and counseling for me to be where I’m at now: I will not re-enter a relationship with them based on a fragile peace ever again. If they don’t do their work, I know exactly what to expect and I will stay removed from that damaging, unhealthy system that really has no authentic place for me.
DL came up with that phrase, and it's soooooo accurate -- and yes, no use in putting yourself into a situation where you can just expect more conflict and no healthy working through things.
A few years ago I let my mom guilt me into calling her once a month (for a "Christmas present"). I dreaded it so much that it caused severe anxiety for days, and when I finally couldn't put it off any longer I would have several drinks before and during the call to make it through. Which was probably fine because it was dominated by her talking and me listening. Any time she did turn the conversation to me, it felt not like genuine curiousity about my life and thoughts but like I was being tested to see if I was still in the Christian-Republican fold. Part of this was dropping one-liners from hate preachers like Feucht or from Kenneth Copeland's online "news" channel and seeing if I would respond. Sometimes it was a pro-Trump/anti-Biden zinger, other times it was just straight up homophobia or anti-trans hate. But I thought it was my job to keep the fragile peace, that I was obligated to maintain the parent/child relationship, so I bit my lip and said nothing as she laughed to herself. By early this year I just couldn't do it anymore and stopped calling. I thought maybe all I needed was time, but the election was the last straw. I deleted their contacts and blocked their numbers. I just can't do it anymore and I'm not going to give them a chance to guilt me back into making excuses for their hateful worldview. I was never going to be able to be out to them, anyway.
Oh Russ. I am so sorry for what you have had to experience. You are not alone in this election being the impetus for taking the actions that will protect us and allow us to move forward with our lives, but it still is devastating.
Thanks. Even if I'm not out to them, they know I work in the journalism field, and they voted 3x for the guy who thinks it's funny to "joke" about murdering journalists, so they've painted at least two targets on my back. For a while I held onto the idea of a "healing fantasy", that if I just laid out who I am and how I really felt about everything that they would see the error of their ways--or at least come to a mutual understanding and minimal level of respect to salvage the relationship. But this imagined confrontation was also cause for extreme anxiety, and through your guys' work (and also Lindsay Gibson and others) I came to realize that this fantasy was just that. A fantasy. I don't "owe it to them" to open up and give them the opportunity to attack and hurt me further. Right now silence is the best option for my mental health. I'm still here if they repent and change, but it's not on me to do it for them.
Addendum: something I've been thinking about all day. If I feel so strongly about their political choices, i.e. their transactional values, that I'm breaking off all contact for good, do I at least owe it to *myself* to get if off my chest and tell them why? Won't a clear conscience feel better?
And still I keep arriving at...No. I know that I would not be able to make it through that conversation without getting emotional, and as an exvangelical, I know that's a danger zone. There are only two ways that it could go:
1) "See? It's an emotional decision. You're not thinking straight. *We're* being rational here and *you're* just upset about how the election went and you're having a knee-jerk reaction..."
or
2) They won't be able to resist the sight of an emotionally vulnerable, potentially broken person, and sensing the opening, they will blow right past the need for consent and try to minister to me, telling me I'm hurting them (victim status) and that it's God's design for families to be whole (demanding spiritual submission) and it's Satan who's trying to tear it apart (deflecting responsibility for their choices), etc.
Nope, nope, nope. I just can't deal with that right now. I'll let my silence do the talking.
I had a moment of recognition when you mentioned, “It’s God's design for families to be whole (demanding spiritual submission).” My mom sent me a prayer card recently, all about “what family is,” and I couldn’t figure out what it was about it, exactly, that bothered me. This! You’ve helped me see the point of the prayer card.
It's hard to consider that your parent(s) would have ulterior motives when reaching out to you, and it feels kind of shitty to think that whatever love they have for you might not in fact be unconditional. But they're operating under the prime directive to bring every soul into submission to God and all else is subservient to that goal.
After many years it became evident that the relationship they want from me is loaded with preconditions--submission to their parental and spiritual authority and denial of who I am as a person to suit their idealized image of me. They grew frustrated that I wasn't dutifully giving that to them the way I did as a quiet, meek, terrified child and later as a closeted self-loathing on-fire Christian young adult, and so they resorted to guilt-tripping. That worked for a while, and I allowed them a distant, superficial connection but never offered a spiritual toe-hold. They just kept trying to maneuver around the boundaries without showing they were engaging in any self-reflection or willingness to change and grow and be open-minded enough to accept me for who I am. (All the homophobic slurs they kept parroting from the hate preachers and politicians they follow were a big clue.)
It just became too much. I'm not saying reconciliation can never happen but it's on them to find their own way out of the darkness. Seeing as their livelihood depends on their not finding their way out I'm not holding out hope.
While my parents did not literally demand a hug in the moments after physical punishment, they made clear that their version of “this hurts me more than it hurts you” meant that the most important outcome of punishment within the system of religious authoritarian parenting was that the child was once again doing their job to fulfill parental wishes. The logical outcome of such a system is a parent whose reaction to their offspring’s divorce is not to offer comfort but instead to resign from an important board membership in the church, because “how could I do that work at the world policy level of our denomination when I can’t even control my own family?”
I guess that’s another big yes checkmark in the “enmeshment” column.
There was never any expectation or hope for understanding and comfort, when I considered calling my parents. There was only how carefully I could frame the conversation so that they didn’t have something more to seize upon to demonstrate how difficult and sorrowful I was making their lives both now and in the hereafter.
I'm so sorry this happened to you. This also happened to my sister -- my parents actually said they were grieving the divorce as if it was an actual death in the family, instead of offering emotional support to my sister (whose ex was abusive). It was such a slap in the face, and I know that these dynamics are unfortunately so common.
It is so validating, hearing you call it a slap in the face. Telling my parents about my impending divorce was absolutely the hardest thing I had ever done…for good reason.
One of the worst beatings I ever got involved my mother exclaiming she'd sooner be damned than have people (outside our family) think she would allow my supposedly grievously "selfish" behavior to go unpunished. My crime? Failing at age 3 to relinquish a slice of orange to my sister *immediately* upon hearing my mother's rageful demand that I do so. (There'd been a misunderstanding on my part due to where on the table our mother had placed the plate of orange slices in question. The plate looked as though it were closer to me and I'd thought the slices were more for me than for my sister. I made the mistake of momentarily hesitating.)
Thank you, Krispin and D.L., for this excellent book you're writing and sharing with RAP survivors.
Much love to you today.
An excellent chapter, as always. The absolute, gobsmacking gall of FotF!
I'm thinking about how their are spectrum of enmeshment. My family doesn't feel nearly as enmeshed as a lot of the people here. Mostly, I think my mom is fine with me making my own decisions--she's never criticized my choice to remain single, not have children, pursue the career route I did, etc.
But there are limits. The big things. If I told her I was in love with another woman, that would be a big thing. And in a couple of weeks, I'm going to have to tell her that I'm converting to Judaism, which is the biggest thing of all. And I'm so hung up on number two on your list--I feel SO responsible for her emotions. I have never felt that before. But even though my therapist and my friends tell me I can't be responsible for how she feels or reacts, I can't help it. I'm trying to remind myself that the fear I feel at the idea of telling her (my stomach starts to ache whenever I think about it!) is sign that something is wrong in our relationship, and that's not my fault. But it SO hard to internalize that!
Big same on #2 on the list. I likewise didn't realize I was doing it until my therapist pointed it out to me a few months ago. My mother lives 1500 miles and two time zones away, but I was still walking on eggshells, afraid that if I asserted my independence in the smallest way over the phone that she would be taken aback and feel some kind of injury. I was being held captive by *her* emotional immaturity and was subconsciously submitting to her authority and feeding her entitlement. The only way to stop the dread of talking was to stop talking. Besides I'm pretty sure that any parent of adult LGBTQ+ children who aren't out to them knows what's up by now and are in serious denial.
Reading this book in serial format has been illuminating in so many ways, but the big one is seeing which parts of RAP my parents used and which they did not. No corporal punishment, but they seem to have expected the same results and had completely perfected their catholic guilt trips so I rhyme with a lot of the description of responses to that kind of parenting.
But this week was strange because I did not expect to see my family in those questions for enmeshment but...yeah. The insistence on dancing attendance for a fragile peace. Recently, my mother even defended her Not Great reaction to me coming out -- begging me not to tell the extended family -- as her wanting to protect me from my conservative uncle's reactions (everybody was very nice to my face, just like when my uncle came out). And I asked what she would have done if they had been jerks -- surely she would have defended me? Kicked them out of her house? *silence*
So then you wanted me to never bring it up and just...be in a "close" family with people who would hate me if they knew? To keep the "peace"?
In contrast, I remember the visceral shock and horror my mom and grandmother displayed when I politely asked my step-grandfather not to make "harem" jokes about the three of us as they made me uncomfortable. My mom even pulled me aside to talk about how old and sick he was. But you know what? He immediately stopped. For the rest of the visit (and the rest of his life, as it turned out, since he died shortly afterward), he stopped with the Horndog Jokes and leaned into the I Love Pie Jokes, the Second (Third) Dessert Jokes instead. It wasn't the end of the world if HE was asked to change to make ME more comfortable. And we could acknowledge that I was uncomfortable without the entire world caving in on itself.
Then again, I was disinvited from his funeral, so I suppose there was a social cost?
I’m just now really seeing how my parents didn’t require a physical hug after the shaming, but I was definitely meant to show gratitude and love for their “care.”