Getting Started with an Enmeshed Couple Moving to Early Differentiation

Couples who marry young often establish enmeshed relationships that inhibit individual growth. They have not had the opportunity to mature and do much differentiation work prior to getting married.

When partners organize their relationships in an enmeshed way, their own desires are usually obscured and are often presented in terms of: “We are alike in so many ways.”

There’s very little self-definition or ability to articulate individual desires. Everything is framed in terms of “we” or “us.”

When they arrive for therapy, they may have one partner still trying very hard to maintain symbiosis, and the other partner making tentative forays out of it. The relationship is unbalanced for the first time, and the symbiotic partner may feel as though the whole world is falling apart.

And when a couple has been interacting in one predictable way for a very long time, the developmental tension of change can terrify them, signaling the potential for major rupture or even separation or divorce.

Differentiation begins as clients learn to internally self-reflect and define what they want, think and feel. Next, they develop the ability to articulate those desires clearly to somebody else without collapsing or abandoning themselves in the process.

But sometimes, especially in relationships that are highly merged, partners may have trouble identifying or defining their own desires.

So when you ask a client to focus on one desire that really matters to him or her, you may get a response such as, “I want our relationship to be good. I’m looking for happiness. I don’t want to walk around stressed or anxious because we’re on totally different pages.” These statements do not include an individual desire.

I like to normalize their fears and how difficult this process is. I might say something like, “Of course you don’t want to walk around stressed and anxious, and yet it’s taking you a while to be comfortable with your husband having different desires than you have. You can get there, but one important goal is for you to become comfortable with him being different than you.”

As her husband is becoming more authentic and vocal about his desires, she will hear requests

she’s never heard before. And when she doesn’t recognize these, she feels anxious and wonders, “Where did that come from?”

Every step that her husband takes out of the symbiosis may be experienced as, “He doesn’t want to be with me. I’m not a priority. He doesn’t love me. I’m not enough.”

It’s like a reflex. That’s where she’s goes with her thoughts and feelings.

Here it can be helpful to support the husband to express his intentions, if he is not leaving. Hejust doesn’t want to be in the old relationship, the way it was between the two of them. He doesn’t want that anymore. He wants something new and different.

So now let’s focus on the partner who seems stuck in trying to maintain the symbiosis, in this example the wife. She may say “I want honesty and I want consistency. I want our relationship to come first. I don’t have huge expectations. I just want us to be together often for coffee in the mornings or go to bed together.”

Now on one hand, she seems to be saying she wants honesty from her husband. At the same time, she’s describing a lot of togetherness without leaving much room for his individual desires. And, she is framing what is important to her in terms of what she wants from her husband.

As therapists, our challenge is continuing to bring clients back to this: “Right now, I want to ask you to focus on your own desires – learning how to express them, and learning how to listen to his desires, which are different from yours.”

This is something you’ll need to emphasize a lot as you move forward with a couple like this.

Sometimes with this type of couple, I’ve found it useful to say something like, “When you want to go to bed together and your husband isn’t ready or he isn’t coming to bed, what do you do or say? Could you play that conversation out in front of me right now? I’d like to see what actually happens and how you navigate this difference.”

This gives you something concrete to work with immediately in the room to help them navigate and learn how their conversation might go in a different direction. You’ll get to see the moments where differentiation completely collapses. You can support them continuing. Your challenge is helping them stay in the tension that will create change.

Your goal as their therapist is to strengthen each partner’s differentiation while structuring dialogue in a way that’s not too scary for them.

One of the resources I highly recommend for therapists when working with early differentiating couples is our Stepping Stones Brochure. It’s something we developed at The Couples Institute to give to your clients to help them understand why their relationship is changing. It helps them see their positive momentum toward a deeper, growing relationship.