Codependency in Adulthood

FULL PROGRAM

Dr Aileen Alleyne
An Intercultural Perspective
Enmeshment is the opposite of individuality, a view easily endorsed if we only embrace Western theories that measure therapy outcomes through the process of achieving individuation and personal autonomy. In this presentation, Aileen will draw on her clinical and social experiences of working with individuals who hail from non-nuclear or culturally extended families where staunch cultural values and belief systems present dilemmas for both the client and practitioner working with enmeshment issues. To highlight some of these intercultural dilemmas, we will be addressing the following areas: the immobilising conflict experienced when faced with being between two loyalties, that to one’s self and simultaneously to one’s family; the challenge of separating out and letting go from unhealthy family bonds; managing expectations borne out in phrases such as, “when you marry The One, you also marry The Entire Family”; and, the complex subject highlighting the impact of absent fathers on lone parent/child bonding.

Dr Arlene Vetere
Triangulation in Family Relationships: A lifespan developmental perspective
This presentation will explore triangulation in families as a process of enmeshment. In our search for safety and security in our close relationships we sometimes form both stable and unstable tryadic relationships that can have consequences for our psychological development and long-term wellbeing. Using examples from research and therapeutic practice with domestic violence and eating disorders Arlene will explore how an integration of systems theory, attachment theory and trauma theory helps us formulate and intervene with processes of power and influence in relationships, secrecy in families and the positive intentions in our corrective and replicative scripts as partners and parents.

Q&A

Mark Linington
Enmeshment As a Response to Childhood Abuse
When there have been sexually abusive and physically violent experiences with attachment figures, it can contribute to the development of enmeshed relationships. This may be an adaptive development for survival at the time but can lead to difficulties in later life. Such enmeshment can be apparent in both external relationships and in the structure and dynamics of the person’s internal world. In this presentation, using anonymised clinical examples, and including work with those with dissociative identity disorder, Mark will explore from an attachment-based psychoanalytic perspective, how we can understand and work with such external and internal relational responses to abusive attachment experiences.

Q&A

Dr Tamara Feldman
From Container to Claustrum: Projective identification in couples
This presentation will explore the concept of enmeshment through the lens of projective identification as it relates to couple relationships. Projective identification as a defence is well suited to couples as intimate partners provide an ideal location to deposit unwanted parts of the self. This paper illustrates how projective identification functions differently depending on the psychological health of the couple. For healthier couples, projective identification is a form of communication; for the more disturbed, it is used to invade and control the other, as captured by Meltzer’s concept of “intrusive identification”. These different uses of projective identification affect couples’ capacities to provide what Bion called “containment”. In disturbed couples, partners serve as what Meltzer termed “claustrums” whereby projections are not contained but entombed in the other. Applying the concept of claustrum helps illuminate common feelings these couples express, such as feeling suffocated, stifled, trapped, or held hostage. Finally, this paper presents treatment challenges in working with more disturbed couples.

Q&A

Discussion with all speakers