Financial enmeshment can happen when your financial life is overly intertwined with another person’s. This can result in stress, financial trauma, codependency, and an overwhelming sense of failure.
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Recognizing financial enmeshment
What is financial enmeshment
Outcomes of financial enmeshment
Financial enmeshment and mental health
Overcoming financial enmeshment
How to recognize financial enmeshment
Financial enmeshment happens within a variety of relationships. Parent-Adult child, parent-child, romantic partner and even between former romantic partners. It’s prevalence within family dynamics is the reason financial enmeshment often goes by another name: financial incest.
What is financial enmeshment
The simplest definition is that financial enmeshment is the breakdown of one or more boundaries, and the confusion of responsibilities.
But of course it’s more complicated than that. Financial enmeshment, and the emotional entanglement that comes with it is closely related to dependency and codependency and can be part of the cycle of domestic abuse, dependency, codependency, narcissism, and elder abuse.
Here are the main indicators of financial enmeshment I’ve noticed with my financial coaching clients (there are others, of course):
Indicators of financial enmeshment
“You were supposed to…”
Another person was/is responsible for us feeling happy, safe, or secure. It was either implicitly or explicitly understood that someone (a partner, parent, child, or other) was or is responsible for your security. This is the hallmark of financial dependency. Not only does this pull towards dependency open us up to risk if that other person is not able to fulfill our every need and expectation, it sets the other person up for failure too.
This indicator often comes along with a sense of resentment towards whomever we’re dependent on. It’s a weird irony of our species that we seek dependency (after all it was the first way we connected with other humans) but also resent it because it removes our autonomy.
“I feel responsible because…”
In this indicator, we are responsible for someone else’s safety, happiness, and security. That expectation looms large, and can be overwhelming. It’s also likely that we will slip into the “parent” role in this condition.
The parent role comes along with its own resentment. It sucks to have the weight of the world on your shoulders and be responsible for everyone’s (or just one other person’s) safety and happiness. It kind of feels like we can never do enough, work hard enough, or BE enough.
Rebellion and resentment
When we feel like we have choices removed from us, we’ll inevitably feel rebellious and resentful. That’s not a personality defect or even a choice, just a natural outcome at all stages of our lives
Conflating care with enmeshment
We’ll talk more about this below, but very often what we think is caring about others, caring about our finances or caring about others’ finances is actually enmeshment, control, or dependency.
Outcomes of financial enmeshment
Guilt
Wherever you fall in the enmeshment dynamic it can seem like no matter what you do it’s not enough. Internalizing the message that there must be something fatally wrong with you is all too easy.
Secret-Keeping
Secret-keeping is not limited to financial infidelity but can also be just avoiding sharing with those closest to us. In most cases I’ve seen this isn’t even a matter of being withholding or malicious, it’s about protecting ourselves and sometimes others. And once the secret keeping starts, it can be difficult to stop.
Boundaries are easily overrun
You set a boundary with someone you feel you’re enmeshed with, and it lasts… until it doesn’t. This isn’t because you’re doing anything wrong, or that you weren’t serious about holding that particular boundary. Just expecting yourself to magically set (and keep) a boundary is kind of unrealistic. I know it sounds simple, but it’s not. The one thing we need to set and keep boundaries is to trust ourselves. And that’s the one thing in short supply within a financially enmeshed relationship.
Control
One of the weird ironies about humans is that we tend to spend a lot of time and energy trying to control the things in our lives that we actually have very little control over. But because our brains equate a lack of control with danger, we will grasp ever harder at those things we cannot control, frustrating and exhausting ourselves in the process. All the while we neglect the parts of our lives we have a higher level of control over, namely our own behaviors, actions, reactions, attitudes, etc. This is a cognitive bias present in pretty much everyone’s brains called the Illusion of Control.
This applies whether you are the one feeling controlled, whether you are the one doing the controlling, or both. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “hurt people hurt people”, well the same applies here:
Controlled people control people
Resentment and anger
Any time we feel we are being controlled or have choices removed by another person, ourselves, or even a situation, we are likely to become rebellious and/or resentful. And this is not a personality defect. Rebellion, resentment, anger, and “acting out” are most often a kind of protective strategy. Someone or something is removing choices from you ( i.e. controlling you). According to our survival-obsessed brains, the best way to wrest control back is to respond with lighting-fast intensity. This is one of the reasons we here at yourworthcoach.com talk about restriction being bullshit.
Financial enmeshment and mental health
Feeling like you have choices removed from you and/or feeling responsible for everyone and everything all the time is exhausting. And it’s difficult not to feel like a failure. This sense of failure and shame can result in apathy, depression, anger or reactivity, anxiety among others.
My guess is if you’ve read this far through an article on financial enmeshment, you probably feel like you’re doing something wrong, or worse, that there is something wrong with you.
There is NOTHING wrong with you.
If you feel like financial enmeshment or financial dependency is impacting your mental health, sleep, or physical health, it may be time to talk to a qualified therapist or holistic, trauma-informed financial coach.
How to overcome financial enmeshment
Understand the difference between care and enmeshment
As mentioned above, we often conflate financial enmeshment with caring about someone, so let’s look at the differences.
Trust yourself to be able to set and keep boundaries
Setting and keeping boundaries isn’t easy, even though it seems like it should be. The one thing you need to be able to set and keep a boundary with yourself or someone else is trust in yourself.
Trusting yourself is exactly the same as being resilient. When you know you have your own back and can weather storms you KNOW you are flexible-yet-strong enough to put boundaries in place and then stick by them. But that also means you can cleanly evaluate when it’s time for a boundary, and when it’s not.
Healthy connection
Interconnectedness is not the same as enmeshment. Very often in the depths of enmeshment and independence we somehow feel extremely isolated. Add to that the social conditioning we have to not talk about our finances, and we feel even more isolated.
We hide things we are ashamed of, and we are told to hide our financial lives, so we naturally equate that secrecy with shame.
Interconnectedness with others heals us in ways we can’t do on our own. Respectful connection with others that meets the requirements of the “care” side of the infographic above means that we can be safe in that connection. Respectful interconnectedness, even if it has nothing to do with finances, means we have someone who can gently and honestly reflect things back to you. Those reflections help us grow in a way we cannot through sheer independence and certainly not through codependence or enmeshment.
Seek help and support
Seeking the support of a therapist you connect with is never a bad idea. My favorite modalities for understanding and undermining enmeshment (financial or otherwise) are Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and parts therapy.
Additionally, seeking out the support of a holistic, trauma-informed financial coach (full disclosure: yourworthcoach.com coaches are exactly that) in conjunction with therapy or on its own may help you develop the tools and skills to undermine financial enmeshment.
In Conclusion
In summary, financial enmeshment is a complex and often painful experience, but healing is within reach. Recognizing when your financial life is too intertwined with another’s is the first step toward breaking free. By embracing self-trust, developing healthier boundaries, and reaching out for professional guidance, you can move from financial dependency to financial empowerment.
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