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Endings - Enmeshment
Endings
I hate it when season finales end on a cliffhanger. I watch that last episode of the season and the writers’ choose to leave the main character in the middle of some dire circumstance. The credits roll and I’m left to spend the summer (or longer) wondering what’s going to happen next.
Will they get out of it?
Are they going to be okay?
What were they thinking, getting themselves into that predicament?
After a while, the shock and questions fade into the background of life. My questions seem less important.
And then I stumble across a preview for the next season, and everything explodes again. I’m right back in the middle of their predicament, questions, thoughts, ideas cascading and interrupting whatever I was working on at the time.
I often tell clients that every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That doesn’t mean it has a neat bow or a tidy, clean summary. It simply means that we acknowledge the importance of the story, learn from it, and then take the next step.
Our unfinished work has a way of building and intruding on our present lives. Ever had an argument with a significant other and something gets brought up from two weeks or ten years ago? Yeah, I thought so.
I’m not judging, I’m just drawing your attention to the wound that never healed because the story was still open. That’s what happens when we leave a story in the middle, it circles back around as an open wound.
No ending, no scar tissue, no closure, no chance at a new and clean beginning.
Every ending carries grief, even the good ones.
You can be relieved and wrecked at the same time.
You can be glad it’s over and still miss it.
A good ending isn’t about closure, although it’s nice when it happens. A good ending just reminds us that someone, something, some experience mattered. It’s an exercise in truth-telling. That moment, that relationship, that experience impacted me, what can I learn, how can I grow, what does my next step look like?
See: grief, finitude, stories, hope, forgiveness.
Energy
The amount of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy that you can put into any given day is finite. Yet, we often act as though our energy is a moral category.
We glorify those who burn the midnight oil and who grind until the job is done (we don’t ever say anything about the quality of the work though). We vilify those who rest, take breaks, and walk away when their energy is depleted.
That doesn’t mean we give up or we’re lazy, it means knowing our limits and when our marathon work session is producing diminishing returns. Rest, sleep, exercise, eating well, doing something we love, being with people we love can help limit the impact of high energy days. They can even replenish our energy.
If we’re as smart as we think we are, then why do many of those things take a backseat to productivity?
When I coached master’s students, I’d often tell them that the people and activities that support our work and vocation deserve the best of our energy, not the rest of our energy.
See: finitude, embodiment, boundaries, depression, rest.
Enmeshment
Enmeshment is what happens when “we” eats “me” for breakfast.
Your mood tells me how I feel. Your anxiety is my assignment. Your disappointment is my moral failing.
We don’t usually set out to build relationships like that. Becoming enmeshed is rarely intentional. It often grows out of care, or survival, or a long history of being rewarded for not rocking the boat.
If you grew up in a family where love meant loyalty, and loyalty meant sameness, and sameness meant safety, then having a separate thought can sometimes feel like betrayal. It can also be the first step of untangling an enmeshed mess.
The tricky part is that from the outside, enmeshment can look like devotion or deep connection. We tend to praise relational fusion by saying, “they’re so close,” “they do everything together,” “they never leave each other’s side”. It looks happy, until someone in the system tries to breathe. The reaction is often swift and emotional, but really, it’s an attempt to manipulate, to bring someone back in line.
Enmeshment muddles the story. When everything is shared, nothing is really owned. Decisions blur. Responsibility gets foggy. Boundaries feel selfish or cruel. Soon, you don’t know if you’re comforting the other person or just trying to calm the discomfort in yourself.
Healthy attachment needs both connection and differentiation. It needs a “we” and a “me” Without both, we lose track of who’s feeling what, and why.
Becoming enmeshed doesn’t make you a bad partner, child, parent, or friend. It just means that somewhere, someone taught you that closeness required being consumed by each other. That loving someone meant shrinking yourself.
There are gentler, braver ways to love. Ways that let both people breathe and become the me they were meant to be.
See: boundaries, empathy, identity, interdependence, codependence, differentiation.