Back Pocket Parenting; Getting Un-Enmeshed From A Child Who Misuses Drugs and Alcohol, with Cathy Cioth

Parents often don’t realize they’re deeply and unhealthfully embedded in their child’s life- especially when that child struggles with their relationship to substances. The official term for this dysfunction is called enmeshment, but since Cathy and I aren’t therapists, we liken it to back-pocket parenting.

If you find yourself intertwined in your child’s life to a degree that they’re not doing things for themselves, or you don’t know where they end and you begin, this is your episode. We talk about what enmeshment looks like, the impact it has on a teen or young adult, and ideas for how you can start to disentangle from them using boundaries and natural consequences (and a good therapist!)