Enmeshment and Late Diagnosis: Why You Don't Know What You Actually Want

Have you ever had a moment when you realized that you have no idea what you actually want, that your preferences, your moods, your sense of whether a day was good or bad, are almost entirely determined by other people's emotional states? Don't worry, you're not alone. This isn't just a byproduct of a life of masking. It's often a symptom of having a meshed relationships, and it's a common experience for late-diagnosed folks. Hey, I'm Dr. Regina Ph.D., and this is Divergent Paz. The podcast where we talk about all the things that late-diagnose neurodivergent folk experience. Make sure to subscribe to my newsletter, Nerd Notes, where I share even more information and tips for making your weirdness feel like home. In this episode, I'm diving into why many of us struggle with enmeshment. How a history of masking creates a lack of boundaries. An understanding that recognizing that things we like and don't like is part of how we start building boundaries that actually hold. Let's start with the definition, as we often do. What is enmeshment? Enmeshment describes a structural lack of boundaries where identities are blended and your emotional state is dictated by the people around you. Let's look at the difference between what is healthy empathy and what is enmeshment. Healthy empathy is when you can say, "I see your distress and I care about it." Enmeshment is when instead of that, you would say, "I feel your distress." Like somebody was angry, you feel angry too. Or if somebody was upset or crying, you might cry as well. And I am also now in crisis and will be until you are okay. Now notice in that that's about the other person. It's about when they are okay, not about when you are okay. Masking, long term masking, acts as a gateway into experiencing enmeshed relationships. When you spend your childhood and adolescence monitoring everyone around you to figure out how you should behave and how you should look and what feelings are valid, you get very good at making other people's internal states your primary data source. In the recent episode I talked about your emotional dashboard. And often we are looking at other people's dashboards instead of our own. The idea of enmeshment is part of what would be the definition of why you would be looking at someone else's dashboard, not paying attention to your own. This is people pleasing and sort of part of that codependency structure. And this is a survival skill. It just got over generalized where you started applying it everywhere in your life instead of at places where you really needed to use it as a skill for survival. When you are undiagnosed, you are unencored. You don't have a framework for understanding how your brain works. Any late diagnosed or late identified neurodivergent people build their entire identity around their relationships. They focus on the roles they have in their friend groups, in their families, and on the expectations within those groups. The self that should have been an anchor, the identity and the person deep inside you, was still under construction or in some cases unreachable because your mask was so all encompassing. When you get your late diagnosis or when you start to identify yourself as neurodivergent and you finally start to understand why your brain works the way that it does, that doesn't remove the enmeshment. That doesn't remove the structure that created those relationships. Because that was baked in long before you had any of this language to understand why you experience rejection sensitivity, why you have difficulty understanding your own emotions because you lack interception. All of that was structured before you figured out that you were neurodivergent. What this looks like for people who are late diagnosed or neurodivergent is it doesn't always look like our textbook family systems that you might have read about in a psychology class. It often shows up in your body. As we have mentioned with the lacking abilities in interception, neurodivergent people are often miserable at identifying their emotional and physical state internal states. You would take on the emotions that the people around you and then you get overwhelmed emotionally by them. You would end up feeling exhaustion, likely from being around specific people, which is more draining than just being an introvert. One of the biggest revelations for me in unmasking was realizing that I am very extroverted, which several of my friends knew about me. I had always said I was an introvert. In part, that was because I had so many enmeshed relationships from my childhood and from my family that I just didn't know how I needed a lot of. I felt like I needed a lot of downtime to recover from being around people, but that was partially because I was around people I was too enmeshed with and I was taking on the emotions of too many people around me. You might build up some physical dread about interacting with specific people. All of this body experience of having enmeshed relationships is your nervous system trying to help you understand why boundaries are important. It's your nervous system trying to communicate to you that something's wrong with how this has been built about how your system is built. Having family systems and in-friend groups and with romantic partners, enmeshment can look like loyalty. It can look like love and it can look like deep connection, especially when we have this in our family of origin. I am including myself in this because I come from a very enmeshed family of origin growing up in a family structure that required me to sacrifice who I was in order to be who my mom wanted me to be. When you grow up in that environment where one person's emotional state and mood sets the tone for the entire family, you feel like creating that kind of structure in your relationships is imperative. It is the only way for you to have relationships that support and provide what you think is nurturing. Enmeshment can feel nurturing when you don't understand what it is. But it's not love. It's not what healthy love looks like because love when you don't have any edges and when you don't have any boundaries is just you giving all of yourself into something that is not going to return the same energy back to you. As we start to unpack this and as we start to come up with the ways to have edges, to have boundaries and to hold them, this isn't about blowing your relationships into small pieces. It's about finding where those hard parts are, where those edges are for yourself. As I often say, the first thing we need to do in order to start to understand how to back out of and meshed relationships is just to notice, to start observing. Is this feeling, am I feeling this? Am I feeling happy? Am I feeling sad? Am I feeling angry? Am I feeling annoyed? Am I feeling this because I have reason to feel this or because someone in my life is feeling this? I still often pick up on other people's feelings and have a hard time separating myself from them when I have had several friends going through some hard times lately and some real difficult things that they've been dealing with. And I found myself carrying some of that agitation just from what they were going through because I still have that tendency towards and meshed and toward boundaryless. I have to pull back and say, you're not annoyed today. Your day is actually going reasonably well. I do that by starting to think about what's happening in my life. Is this happening here? When you start doing that, it starts to rewire your brain to recognize what's you versus what's the people outside of you. And you start asking that question, is this feeling mine and where is it coming from? from. It sounds really simple. Even my description of pulling it out of my own life sounds simple, but it's not. I went through many hours feeling like a ramped up anxious, you know, agitated state before I realized that I was taking on the feelings of people around me and not my own. It sounds simple, but taking that notice is so important. Do it even though you think it's a simple thing to do. Another way to help you kind of find those edges is start practicing identifying strong preferences. A lot of people who are late diagnosed and late identified and who come to their realize their neurodivergent as adults struggle to name their preferences because they've been optimizing their identity for belonging and for being accepted. Start small with low stakes things. What do you want for dinner? What do you want to do with a Saturday morning that you have available? These aren't trivial things like saying no to something you don't want to do or something you don't like is one of the most effective ways to teach yourself how to say set a boundary when it comes to someone running over them in a higher stakes environment or for higher stakes reasons. These are like small workouts for you to test your strength and to build toward it. And I've told this story before, but I often refer to it with my clients. I accepted and for a long time it said yes to bell pepper on pizza and I hate bell peppers and I especially hate bell pepper on pizza. Like I do not understand why you would want to sell the beauty of cheese and pepperoni with a bell pepper. Like why would you want to do that? Bell peppers are awful. Why do you want that? But I said yes to bell peppers on pizza with a specific relationship because I felt like I needed to. I'm like oh I'll just pick it off. The thing is you can't pick bell pepper off pizza because it gets in the cheese. There was a lot of friction in our relationship when I started saying things like I don't like bell pepper on pizza and I don't want to order pizza that has bell pepper on it anymore because yes you can't remove even if you pull the bell pepper off you can't do it. You can't you can never you can never undo the bell pepper flavor on your pizza. So expect that there's going to be some friction and knowing that what that means what that's going to mean for you and what that's going to mean for your relationships. When you start having harder edges some people will experience that as a problem and that reaction from them is data that's information. It's not an indication of whether or not your boundaries are valid. It's if you are in a relationship that were acquired you not to have boundaries and that was the only way that relationship would function that relationship was already out of balance and already had problems. You inserting boundaries, you finding your edges, you holding you know to things that are important to you to give you a sense of self isn't the problem in the relationship and it does take time. Finding yourself isn't the same as losing the people you love but it does require risk a lot of the time being willing to risk it. Finding that belonging at any cost is something that late diagnosed people have done most of their lives. It's genuinely hard to take that risk and to build the hard edges and to build the boundaries. Pay attention to that honor that you're doing that and that you're going through that process. And do it anyway. Remember how I opened this episode. What do you actually want? This isn't an existential crisis. This is the starting point. Asking yourself what do you want? What do you like? What's important to you? This is the way you can make a new map of your brain a way to untangle the enmeshment you've had in your relationships and how to to figure out what the new territory is for you to actually live separate from everyone else's needs and not having to track everybody else's emotional dashboard quite like you did in the past. If this episode hit close to home I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a message on Instagram @DrRajinaPHD or leave a review for the podcast. If you're in the season of figuring out who you are post diagnosis this is exactly the work I do with my clients. Join me for a make it make sense call. The link to sign up is in the show notes. Until next time you can't build a life that fits you if you don't know where you at. Start there.