Love Yourself Out of the Web of Enmeshment

Yesterday I was watching the film Eat, Pray, Love. It’s about a woman, Liz, who has little sense of self and strong codependent enmeshment issues.  Liz marries a man named Steven when she is very young. He was someone she chose to fade-into, even though they had little in common. Liz gave up her identity to become Steven’s shadow and has been living in the misery of being what he wants her to be for many years. As the movies opens we find Liz discovering that she no longer wants to be Steven’s mirror—and she tells it to him face to face that she no longer wants to be married before fleeing and filing for divorce.

I realized while watching the film that there is a great paradox here that many codependents suffer from. First, I do not know of any codependent that enmeshes into someone who actually mirrors his/her likes and dislikes. For some odd reason, we have a tendency to enmesh in someone who is the total opposite of us in terms of personal preferences. We choose someone who is toxic in every way: Someone who is emotionally or physically (married or of the opposite sexual orientation, for example) unavailable,  who is as damaged and empty inside as we are, and who has interests that are 360 degrees different from our own. In doing so, we set ourselves up for total disaster.

First, by choosing to enmesh in a toxic person we are choosing to lose ourselves in someone who is every bit as empty and unavailable as we are. It’s impossible for two emotionally unavailable people to achieve some level of intimacy beyond emotionally or sexually abusing each other. It’s even worse if the person is married, separated or rebounding from a divorce; or if we are gay and choose a straight man or straight woman to enmesh our hopes in. This is blindly walking into disaster with our eyes wide open. It’s total denial and we only do this to punish ourselves because subconsciously we know that this person will be forced to abandon us, and this is why we are fascinated with them. Engaging with this person will ensure that we end up victimized one more time. It’s the only pattern of behavior we know and feel safe with—even though it devastates us.

Second by enmeshing in a person whose likes and dislikes are extremely different from our own, we choose to give up our entire identity in order to take-on theirs. At first this makes sense, because we hate ourselves. We don’t want to be like us. We want to be like someone else and we think that this person is a good enough someone else to completely lose ourselves in. So we choose to annihilate ourselves by taking on this person’s every like and dislike, belief, want and need.

Although Eat, Pray, Love doesn’t go into this detail, I’m assuming that this has been Liz’s story. And as we meet Liz she has reached the stage that all codependents eventually reach. This is the stage where the true self comes fighting back. It’s tired of being ignored and mistreated, and so it comes roaring back with a vengeance. We decide we’re tired of eating Chinese noodles when we want ravioli. We decide we’re tired of only seeing blow ‘em up, shoot ‘em up movies when we want to see romantic comedies. And we decide that we’re tired a playing Scrabble when we’d rather be dancing at a club. In other words, our denial has temporarily lifted. We can see with some clarity again, and either things have to change or we want out of this relationship.

There’s a double whammy that also comes into play here often times. And that double whammy involves the fear of abandonment. After all, every relationship we’ve ever had from Mom and Dad on down has involved people abandoning us. We KNOW it’s going to happen every time. And so as we are regaining our sense of self, we are often subconsciously dealing with the fear of abandonment. Deep down we know it’s about time for the other person to run out on us; and so we subconsciously choose to either push them away by demanding they change in unreasonable ways, or to physically run out on them first.

This is exactly what I see happening to Liz in Eat, Pray, Love. It seems her pattern of behavior has been to enmesh herself in all of the wrong men, give up her identity to each of them, then struggle to get her true identity back as she walks out on them before they can abandon her. The rest of the film is about Liz coming to grips with these sick patterns of behavior, learning to love, nourish and find balance in her true self, and then learning to find balance in a romantic relationship between herself and an emotionally healthy man so that there is no longer any enmeshment involved.

If you haven’t seen Eat, Pray, Love, I highly recommend it.