Attachment:
Understanding Entanglement
What is entanglement?
Entanglement occurs when boundaries between people blur and your emotional wellbeing becomes dependent on someone else. Feeling responsible for other people’s feelings, and other people being dependent on us for their feelings. With emotional entanglement, you lose track of where your feelings end and theirs begin, often feeling responsible for their moves or sacrificing your autonomy to maintain the connection.
Most people aren’t trying to harm their loved ones, but this is coercive control without the bad intentions. People just need reassurance about their feelings and to calm down their ego or their inner children who are acting up. Relationships like this are an example of a coercive control situation and how we get caught in that cycle – without realising it – is toxic.
When I’m adding to the chaos by contributing with rescuing actions instead of just staying out of it, my loved ones or colleagues become dependent on my efforts of rescuing.
Then when I stop rescuing, it feels like abandonment and that feels like it reinforces their and my own spiralling.
But if I don’t stop, I’m sacrificing my own autonomy to maintain the connection, which means fawning – which is one of the trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop).
Fawning is being good at being good, to be safe, but at the expense of yourself. A key warning sign is mood contagion. Your happiness is entirely contingent on other people’s moods.
You feel intense anxiety when you are not in emotional contact with them. These are the blurred boundaries between you and them, a lack of autonomy. You absorb their emotions as your own and frequently make excuses for their toxic or damaging behaviour. Sometimes you feel so porous that you don’t even know if it is you feeling this or them.
So, this goes back to how long are you going to put up with what you’re putting up with? What is the cost? What is maintaining this behaviour costing you? And what is it costing your children? They learn what love is from you, they copy your behaviour patterns.
You do this because you want to belong, be part of a community, be part of your family. This is the attachment wound from your childhood, where it was so hard to attach to your (disorganised) attached mother / father. But what is the price of admission? You’re walking on eggshells. You avoid setting boundaries or expressing your own needs because you fear how the other person will react.
An honest question to yourself is: is it worth it to live like this?
Fawning as a trauma response contributes to chaos as you get into the drama triangle, especially when you think you caused it or you’re supposed to cure it, or if you try to control it. As soon as you start engaging with other people’s drama, then you suck yourself into the drama triangle.
Sometimes you will find that you start the drama triangle, by initiating drama when you feel lost or left alone. This is called the attach cry or attachment cry. When a baby whose mum has attachment issues is left alone, often it will give out a little cry, hoping but already no longer believing that she will turn around and give her full attention to them. This is what is happening when you as an adult, or your kid as a teenager, start a little drama at the moment overwhelming feelings of abandonment or disappointment come up. The drama helps you to push these hard emotions down and blame something or someone else.
This is called “re-enactment of trauma”, which is not a great expression, since acting seems to mean that I do something intentionally, and I don’t. But the expression is valid in the sense that when I have trauma, I will try to heal myself by seeking out these traumatic situations to try to get the “happy ever after” ending this time.
Unfortunately, that almost never happens. Instead, I get the “rinse and repeat”.
So rather than trying to change the ending, work to change the beginning: healing the attachment, feeling safe and protected within yourself, so that you learn to seek out people who are safe and will also attach to you. Once you feel safe and comforted by yourself, you will feel worthy and seek out work and living environments with people who are supportive.
So when I set boundaries sooner, and I don’t engage, then I do not get entangled.
Does that make sense?
What helps here is the Bubble exercise, as well as Havening or Tapping to release the emotions that come up when you lose yourself in the entanglement and control situations with triggering family members or work colleagues.
Also, see it as all just habits, long-practised negative thoughts that can be turned around by you being your own “Thought Police” and stopping yourself every time you are tempted to go into your familiar spiral or drama. Journaling about your thoughts and writing down more positive, better thoughts to oppose the downward drama cycle will help you find some distance to review your habitual patterns.
Loss of identity.
You may struggle to make personal decisions or enjoy hobbies without factoring in other people’s preferences or validation. It means you may be losing the things that feed you, that keep you breathing. I’ve seen many burn-outs happen because the client gave up their own nourishment so that others could feel in control, connected, could keep functioning, or could keep their job.
The “nourishment barriers” – meaning barriers for good self-care, keeping yourself safe and protected, seeking to feel good and undertake the right actions and activities for yourself – stem from the attachment gap.
But then that doesn’t work anyway, because if I’m not nourished, there’s nothing left, not for me to function and not for them to connect to. So even outside of work, when you have kids, when they are needing you to be present, then you need to do the things to care for yourself, so that you can be present.
The difference between emotional intimacy and entanglement
While emotional intimacy involves sharing your inner world while maintaining a strong sense of self and respect for boundaries, entanglement is more about functioning as survival. Entanglement is fueled by codependency or fear of abandonment, by attachment wounds, rather than a healthy, interdependent commitment, sharing the burdens as well as the joys. Attachment wounds that bring entanglement with them are not a helpful starting point for relations or friendships.
Signs of an unhealthy entanglement
It is crucial to distinguish between healthy supportive relationships and toxic codependent entanglements. What are the signs of entanglement?
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Loss of autonomy.
If you lose your happiness, contentment, and positivity, or if those are entirely contingent on the moods and temperament of your loved one(s). That’s the Venn diagram of hell right there. Disproportionate reactions. A stressful event in your partner’s life, like a bad day at work, causes you so much distress that you cannot function normally.
Establish autonomy by focusing on building a strong independent sense of identity outside the troublesome relationship. Engaging in your own hobbies, journaling, art, music, any daily habits that foster a good connection with yourself. -
Inability to self-regulate.
Every deep feeling from either party escalates into a shared crisis.
Instead, practice processing your own emotions before bringing them to your partner, your difficult colleague or your loved one. Give voice to your feelings to a third party or in writing to paper, this helps you define, analyse and process the issues. No secrets for yourself, allow your feelings to pass through you.
Eckhart Tolle talks about staying in the here and now while the “pain body” is acting up, Buddhism talks about the suffering caused by clinging, both to the good and the bad. Refusing to let experiences, thoughts, emotions flow through causes you to get stuck. -
Boundary dissolution.
You abandon your own hobbies, friendships, or personal goals because they don’t involve your loved one(s). Feeling guilty, out of control and panicked when you chose you.
You feel intense anxiety when you’re not around them, or you become jealous when they invest time in others. Establish clear boundaries and clearly define for yourself and others what your personal space means. Rediscover your personal interests instead and re-engage with friends outside of your relationship. Frame this not as a pulling away, but as making room for healthier, more sustainable love.
Unhealthy entanglement is when attachment styles get weaponized and cause cyclical conflicts.
Every disagreement blows up into a crisis because your sensitivities are intertwined, making minor issues feel like relationship- or life-ending threats.
In case of couples, this is a contraindication for couple’s therapy, because it can make things worse: you need to disengage rather than validate the entanglements.
Untangle and find your autonomy
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Reclaim your center.
Being able to re-center on what nourishes you so that you can be yourself, that helps you to be present in other relationships. What is helpful here is the gratitude practice.
General happiness hack: a gratitude journal
Journal every day for 30 days to feel better, or for at least 90 days to change yourself permanently (research proved these results).
• 3-5 things about the day you’re grateful for (beautiful weather, smooth traffic etc.),
• 3-5 actions you took you’re grateful for (went for sports, had a coffee with someone nice etc.)
• 3-5 qualities you have that you’re grateful for (I am smart, I am brave healing myself etc.)
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Identify personal needs.
Make a list of your own emotional and psychological needs, affirm that you have the right to ask for space, emotional support, and authentic communication. Also helpful for this is the mirror practice.
The mirror practice is as follows:
Preferably daily for 30 days or so, practice in front of the mirror, looking into your own eyes.
[Name] , I am proud that you… state 7 different things
[Name] , I forgive you for… state 7 different things
[Name], I commit to you that… state 7 different things
When you have complex trauma and deprivation, it is really hard to know what your personal needs are, or to even exist enough to have needs, much less know what they are. In my Transactional Analysis blog I talk about the Drivers and Injunctions. It may be helpful for you to define what those are for you. Online you can also find free TA tests for this.
Not being able to get space when you ask, not being able to get emotional support or goodwill, or presuming goodwill, not being able to communicate authentically if you are having to defend yourself instead of just being allowed to be yourself is all harming your sense of self and the development of an idea about your personal needs.
That’s when your upbringing, or your work situation, or your current home situation swings back into coercive control, and you’ve got to get out of that. Finding a place where you can hold your own, to set your boundaries, to have healthy communication and be respected.
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Set and hold boundaries.
This is on me. No one can do that except myself. It’s hard, but it is the truth. If you allow for leeway, people will take it.
If I am not used to setting boundaries because it wasn’t a thing in the house where I grew up, setting boundaries will come with a lot of guilt as well as pushback from those around me who are so used to that person that they can push around to do anything and everything.
Your loyalty to your family system slaps you in the face when you are trying to change yourself.
These are some severe growing pains you will have to go through. What is useful here is for instance the Bubble and Loving Kindness meditations.
Establish clear limits on what you are willing to tolerate and how much of your energy you are willing to expend on fixing someone else’s issues. You don’t have to tolerate what is not healthy behaviour, the negative or shameful interactions. The thing is: how do you recognize unhealthy behaviours when this was the air you breathed when you grew up? It the joke about the fish that asks: “What is water?” in response to “The water is nice today, isn’t it?”.
A first point of recognition may be when you feel you are being put down instead of lifted up in your relationships. Do you feel better or worse after spending time with this person, at this job?
Also, how much energy, how much of yourself are you using up to survive everybody around you instead of thriving and feeling energised? If it feels like people around you are draining you, are energy vampires…. Well, maybe they are. And maybe you want to reconsider whether you are willing to continue to tolerate those attitudes. The gratitude exercise will help you define what gives you energy and thus what you need to do more often.
4. Seek specialised support.
If breaking free from the repetitive cycle of an entangled dynamic is causing significant distress, consider speaking to a licensed mental health professional who specializes in co-dependency and boundary setting in cases of complex trauma and deprivation. This needs to be someone who understands that if the above is what is happening, couples therapy is contraindicated.
Otherwise, it just makes things worse and it’s a disservice to you and your partner.
Entanglement Reenactment
The emotional entanglement is a reenactment from childhood experiences.
There’s a compulsion to continue to hyper-focus on another person, so that you can recreate familiar (but unfortunately toxic) relationships in effort to gain closure or fix the original wound. However, this unconscious(!) reenactment continues to harm us because it doesn’t actually address the original wound. The repeat is just making the gash more sore.
The mechanics are the unconscious pull towards what’s familiar. You subconsciously seek out love or work dynamics that feel familiar, even if that familiarity is painful. Because you were taught that that’s what’s called love, or that’s what called a good work ethic.
Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.
When I do this, I have the illusion of control, because of the familiarity. My brain attempts to process and master an old, unresolved hurt by restaging it in the present with new characters, so that I can solve the problem for one and for all. Okay, well, you know, we do not need our relationships to be escape rooms!
When overwhelm hits you and you are ready to explode into your favourite bad feeling – which is a secondary feeling, not a primary one – pause to ask instead: “What feeling in myself am I having trouble sitting with, because I am now trying to cover it up again with this old, familiar, favourite bad feeling of mine? Can I show up in a way that I don’t sacrifice myself but include myself?”
Anytime I have big feelings about someone else, like overly sad or super angry at someone, I need to ask myself, what feeling within myself am I having trouble being with?
To the extent that I get caught up in my reaction to someone else, I become blind to the part of the difficulty that lies within me. I am externalising the problem, while the emotion has arisen in me, not in them. As if making them throw up when I have eaten something rotten is going to help.
Acknowledge the part of your brain that is actively trying to set up a reenactment, so then the bad stuff, that favourite bad feeling, which is really related to memory time, keeps seeking out where can it can play itself out in now time. It gets you stuck in loops on any pieces that were off when you were young(er), and then the brain draws false conclusions about the situation. just to make the puzzle fit. And that’s where I contribute to chaos.
For instance, not understanding how early I need to say no about certain things, because I just keep thinking I should be accommodating or I could be supportive or I need to be diplomatic. Then it turns into a crisis because I didn’t recognize I was fawning, and I have to say “no” late, or too harshly, or try to come up with excuses.
But how can I know how to do that if I don’t know what my needs are? I can only learn what my needs are when I know who I am. Initially, it may feel egoistic to spend time learning who you are and what it means to be you. But as you are getting stronger through making “me-time” and focusing on your hobbies and doing what you enjoy, you get more adept at knowing yourself and what your needs are, and then you get less tangled up in sacrificing yourself because of others’ needs.
Go back and resolve the neglect that happened in your childhood; rescue your inner children!
How long are you going to put up with what you’re putting up with?
What is maintaining this behaviour costing you?
And what is it costing your children?
Is the drama and are the eggshells worth it?