Trauma-informed therapy for hearts that have forgotten where they end and others begin
Sometimes caring for others can feel like breathing — instinctive, constant, impossible to turn off. But what happens when that care begins to blur the edges of who you are? When loving someone starts to feel less like connection and more like losing yourself in the endless task of managing their emotions, anticipating their needs, fixing their problems before they even ask?
You’re not imagining the weight you carry. And you’re not selfish for wanting to set it down.
When Love Becomes a Full-Time Job
Have you ever caught yourself scanning someone’s face for signs of upset, your chest already tightening before they’ve said a word? Or felt that familiar surge of panic when you can’t immediately solve someone else’s crisis — as if their pain is somehow your failure?
Many of my clients at Jim Brillon Therapy describe relationships that feel like being permanently on call for someone else’s emotional emergencies. “I can’t relax when she’s struggling,” one person shared with me recently. “Even when I’m at work, I’m mentally rehearsing how I’ll fix whatever’s waiting for me at home.”
This isn’t love — it’s survival mode wrapped in the language of devotion.
Understanding Emotional Enmeshment
What you might be experiencing is emotional enmeshment, a pattern where the boundaries between your inner world and someone else’s become so thin that their weather becomes your climate. Their anxiety lives in your chest. Their problems become your urgent missions. Their moods determine whether you can breathe freely or not.
The Weight of Invisible Chains
I think of someone I’ll call Maya, who came to therapy feeling like she was drowning in plain sight. “I don’t know who I am when I’m not taking care of someone,” she whispered during our first session. Her mother called multiple times a day with crises. Her partner expected her to manage his anxiety. Her sister dumped relationship problems on her weekly. Maya felt like she was suffocating, but every time she tried to step back, she was labeled selfish.
Over months of gentle work together, Maya began to notice something her body had been trying to tell her all along: she had been keeping score of emotions that were never hers to carry. The knot in her shoulders — that was her mother’s worry. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep could touch — that was the weight of trying to control outcomes she was never meant to manage.
The Question That Changes Everything
“What would it feel like,” I asked her one afternoon, “to let other people have their own feelings without making them yours to fix?”
The question made her cry — not from sadness, but from the relief of imagining it.
The Paradox of Caring Control
Here’s something I’ve learned from sitting with people as they untangle themselves from emotional enmeshment: the very things we do to feel close to others often push them away. When we can’t let people have their own experience, we rob them of their autonomy. When we rush in to solve every problem, we send the message that we don’t trust them to handle their own lives.
Real intimacy needs space to breathe. It requires room for both people to exist fully — with all their messy emotions, their own struggles, their separate inner worlds. Emotional enmeshment collapses that space, turning love into something that feels more like emotional fusion than genuine connection.
Before and After: The Transformation Process
Before healing, life can feel like living in a house where every window faces someone else’s storm. You’re constantly watching the horizon, scanning for signs of trouble you might need to fix before it’s too late. Your nervous system never fully relaxes because someone else’s peace has become your responsibility. And when you are always focused on others, your needs tend not to get met. You might even lose sight of what you truly need.
Resentment can start to replace happiness, and you may find yourself trapped in a “drama triangle”, constantly trying to rescue another. It can become a way of creating an identity for yourself.
After working through these patterns in therapy, something shifts. People tell me about moments of unexpected calm — times when someone they love is struggling and they can offer support without absorbing the struggle into their own body. They discover they can say “no” without the world ending. They learn to be caring, rather than rescuing, and to pull back from overly engaging. They start to believe that love doesn’t require the sacrifice of self.
Learning to Love With Open Hands
Recovery from emotional enmeshment isn’t about caring less — it’s about caring differently. It’s learning to love with open hands instead of clenched fists; more mindfully and less reactively. It’s discovering that boundaries aren’t walls but the spaces between us that allow authentic connection to flourish.
In our work together at Jim Brillon Therapy, we explore what it means to offer your presence without losing your center. We notice when you’re absorbing emotions that belong to someone else. We help your nervous system learn the difference between supporting someone and taking responsibility for their entire emotional experience.
Body-Based Healing Approaches
This work often begins in your body — that tightness in your chest when someone starts sharing their problems might be your internal wisdom trying to tell you something. The exhaustion that sleep can’t touch might be your system’s way of saying it’s carrying too much that isn’t yours.
Through approaches like EMDR, I help your nervous system find new responses to old patterns. Instead of automatically reacting to someone else’s distress, you learn to stay present with your own experience while offering compassionate support. We work with the parts of you that learned early that love meant usefulness, that connection required constant vigilance, that your worth existed only in service to others’ comfort.
The longer term healing often involves Reparenting work, and sometimes connecting with a support group like Al-Anon, CODA, or ACA.
The Quiet Revolution of Boundaries
“I used to think boundaries were mean,” another client, David, reflected after months of therapy. “Now I realize they’re the kindest thing I can do — for everyone involved. When I stopped trying to manage my partner’s moods, our relationship actually got better. When I stopped absorbing my father’s anxiety, I had the energy to genuinely listen to him.”
Why Boundaries Are Acts of Love
Boundaries aren’t about building walls — they’re about creating the conditions where love can be honest, where both people can show up authentically without one disappearing into the other’s experience. They’re how we honor both our own humanity and that of the people we care about.
Learning to set boundaries often feels terrifying at first. Your body might flood with guilt when you decline to solve someone else’s problem. You might feel like you’re abandoning people you love when you refuse to carry their emotions. These reactions make sense — they’re your system’s way of protecting attachments that once kept you safe.
What Your Body Already Knows
Sometimes healing begins with the simplest recognition: you are not responsible for other people’s feelings. You never were. The hypervigilant part of you that learned to manage everyone else’s emotional weather was trying to keep you safe in situations where safety felt conditional on your usefulness.
But what helped you survive then might be suffocating you now.
Creating Safety in the Therapeutic Space
In the quiet space of therapy, we slow things down enough for your body to remember what safety actually feels like — not the constant alertness of managing everyone else’s experience, but the grounded calm of being present with your own. I help you distinguish between compassion and control, between love and management, between supporting someone and disappearing into their story.
Your Heart, Your Pace
You don’t have to choose between having a self and loving others deeply. You don’t have to sacrifice your emotional well-being to prove your devotion. You don’t have to carry everyone else’s feelings to earn your place in their lives.
There’s a different way to love — one that honors both your tender heart and your need to exist as a separate person. One that trusts in the resilience of the people you care about, even when they’re struggling. One that allows you to show up fully without losing yourself completely.
The path back to yourself doesn’t mean loving less. It means loving more skillfully, more sustainably, more truthfully. And that journey — that quiet revolution of reclaiming your emotional autonomy while keeping your heart open — is some of the most important work any of us can do.
I don’t offer quick fixes or simple solutions. What I do offer is a steady presence as you navigate the complex territory of learning to love without losing yourself. We’ll go at your pace, honoring both your desire for connection and your need to come home to yourself.
If this feels familiar, if you’re ready to explore what it might look like to care deeply while staying rooted in your own experience — you don’t have to figure it out alone. Therapy can be a place to start, a gentle space where you can begin to untangle the threads of love and control, care and enmeshment.
You deserve relationships where you can breathe freely. Where your love flows from fullness rather than emptiness. Where caring for others includes caring for yourself. That’s not selfish — that’s the foundation of genuine connection.
Frequently Asked Questions About Emotional Enmeshment
What exactly is emotional enmeshment?
Emotional enmeshment is when the boundaries between you and another person become so blurred that you can’t tell where your feelings end and theirs begin. You might automatically absorb their moods, feel responsible for fixing their problems, or lose your sense of self when managing their emotions. In my practice, I help you recognize the patterns and gently untangle them.
How do I know if I’m enmeshed or just caring?
Caring feels like choice—you can offer support while maintaining your own emotional stability. Enmeshment feels compulsive—you physically can’t relax when someone else is upset, their problems become your emergencies, and saying “no” triggers overwhelming guilt. If love feels like drowning, we might be dealing with enmeshment.
Can I maintain close relationships while healing enmeshment?
Absolutely. In fact, relationships often improve once healthy boundaries are established. When you stop absorbing others’ emotions, you have more genuine presence to offer. When you stop trying to control outcomes, real intimacy can flourish. The goal isn’t distance—it’s healthy closeness that allows both people to breathe.
Why do I feel so guilty when I try to set boundaries?
That guilt is misplaced, and often driven by your nervous system’s alarm bell, learned from times when your survival or acceptance felt dependent on meeting others’ needs. In therapy, we work with this guilt gently, understanding it’s trying to protect you from perceived abandonment. As your system learns that boundaries are safe, the guilt gradually lessens.
How does EMDR help with emotional enmeshment?
EMDR helps process the memories and experiences that taught your nervous system to merge with others’ emotions for safety. We might work with early memories where you learned that love meant self-sacrifice, or times when your needs were dismissed. EMDR helps your body understand that you can stay connected while maintaining your own emotional boundaries.
What if the other person gets angry when I set boundaries?
Their anger is information about the dynamic, not evidence that you’re doing something wrong. In therapy, I help you navigate these reactions, understand that others’ emotions belong to them, and maintain your boundaries even when it’s uncomfortable. Often, the relationships that can’t tolerate your boundaries are the ones that most need them.
Ready to learn how to love without losing yourself? Contact Jim Brillon Therapy to begin your journey toward healthy boundaries and authentic connection.
