What are family systems?

• Think of a family system as our parents, caregivers, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, partners, children, best friends, and even pets. Each individual is one unit within a larger system, a family system. Our interactions with one another - whether healthy or unhealthy, positive or negative - our boundaries, or lack thereof, play a role that impacts other units within the system. From generation to generation, patterns (that are not always adaptive) are inherited until a unit breaks the pattern.

• I work with individuals to navigate their family system, to un-learn patterns that are disorientating for folks. In doing this, we learn how to develop boundaries, we become mindful of our own patterns, and we begin to break generational cycles so future generations can interact and live in a way that feels cohesive.

  What is enmeshment?

• Enmeshment is when family patterns facilitate psychological and emotional fusion, or “too much closeness,” among family members. This often leads to an inhibition of developing our own sense of self, as well as our development of emotional maturity in some cases.

  What is emotional incest?

• Emotional incest, or covert incest, is specific to a parent-child relationship, where a parent seeks to satisfy spousal, emotional, and relational needs in their relationship with on of their children. In other words, children become a parent’s surrogate spouse in a sense.

• This differs from what many of us know as incest, or overt incest, in that emotional incest is typically unconscious and isn’t sexual in a physical sense, but may have sexual undertones, or give the child a feeling of “ickiness.”

• Emotional incest is an enmeshed parent-child relationship that has been sexualized, emotionally.

• I often refer to emotional incest as emotional surrogacy.