Hey deserving listeners, there are essentially three different kinds of families according to family systems theory.

You have healthy families that are operating healthily and adaptively and they function well, for the part you know they have issues but they're

handleable and then you have disengaged families which are distant pathologically

distant and then you have enmeshed families which are pathologically distant. And then you have enmeshed families,

which are pathologically over-involved.

Sometimes people think that enmeshed families are very close,

but they're actually not close.

There's a distance in their over involvement. They'll appear to be close from the outside.

They talk to each other a lot. They know a lot about each other. They can even have a lot of love

for each other for sure but underneath there's a

pathology of over involvement a pathology of requiring other people to think and

behave a certain way,

a lack of individuation, that sort of thing.

And so that's what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about enmesement because it's pretty complicated actually.

And it's something that I've been concerned with since the

beginning of my career in marriage and family therapy 25 years ago. I have also

been teaching it for the past 20 plus years and it's a complicated topic.

I often find that it requires a lot of explaining, a lot of examples, a lot of exploration for people to really

understand what investment really means. Disengagement, you know, pathological distance

in families is pretty easy to understand. You know, people don't really

recognize each other's needs, they don't know what is going on in each

...