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Welcome to Islamic Life Code School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donal Aphtar.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Inshallah, today's podcast will help you relieve some of your enmeshment patterns. Enmeshment is when people become overly entangled with other people's emotions, feeling responsible for their feelings, and creating a loss of overall individuality. This enmeshment is important for you to learn because once you unlearn this pattern, a large burden of relationship toxicity falls off of your shoulders. Opposite to enmeshment, which is the healthier response to relationships, is attunement, where you engage with a person by choice, you stay connected and empathic without losing your sense of your own emotions, without losing sense of yourself. Getting rid of enmeshment without learning healthy attunement dynamics creates hyper and toxic individualism, which is not what we're going for. And if this hasn't occurred to you until now, I will invite you to notice where in your relationships are you enmeshed. The concept here is essential to understanding because it exposes one of the most invisible forces behind relationship exhaustion. When you operate in an enmeshed pattern, your nervous system is constantly scanning for other people's emotional cues, trying to maintain peace through anticipation. That constant vigilance creates an illusion of closeness because you're constantly thinking about the person, but actually keeps you in a state of internal labor. Enmeshment makes you believe that constant hypervigilance is closeness, that reading every small bit of data and signal makes it about your worth and security of the relationship. And learning enmeshment dismantles all of this invisible workload. When you recognize that another person's emotions are not your signal to regulate them, you remove an entire layer of psychological noise from your system. The space that opens up might look like emotional distance in the beginning, but it's actually mental clarity and peace. You stop managing your energy through the moods of other people and start making decisions from your own internal reference point, which by the way is the best reference point and the only real reference point to begin with. This shift of going from enmeshment to attunement rewires your sense of intimacy. When you no longer manage your connection through other people's emotions around you, you begin experiencing steadiness in your relationships, and that feels much better than the control you're trying to exert on them. And then by no surprise what happens also is that everyone else starts to treat you with attunement and respect of your own opinions and your values, and they all drop their own enmeshment burden on you. And this reciprocity between the two people transforms the relationship dynamic. The toxicity you thought lived in the relationship dissolves because the fuel which is your constant emotional management of others and others control of you is gone. Once you unlearn enmeshment, you release yourself from emotional labor, which up until now might have looked to you like love or real connection, but it is not. This transition from enmeshment to relating with relationships and going to attunement is a process. It involves learning to recognize which emotions are yours and which belong to someone else, and understanding that creating healthy boundaries does not mean you're abandoning the relationship. It means you're engaging more healthily. Getting rid of enmeshment without learning healthy attunement creates hyperindividualism, the kind that mistakes withdrawal for healing. When someone detaches abruptly from enmeshment, they often confuse isolation with self-protection. The nervous system that once survived in a relationship through merging now tries to survive through avoidance. And it might feel powerful in the beginning, but it's just another form of fear, and that fear hides behind independence. Healthy attunement requires the capacity to stay relational without losing your self-command. This is a very evolved nervous system skill. This is not a personality or a genetic trait that you're born with. It demands awareness, skill building, pacing, your own emotional literacy. The goal is not detachment, it's the differentiation of enmeshment and attunement by choice. To remain aware of the other person's emotional field without absorbing it or dismissing it completely. When you integrate attunement after unlearning enmeshment, you develop a relational authority that is magnetic. You sense connection and other people sense that connection with you and they seek it out. During this process, your internal reference point is the guide. You experience closeness without being consumed by it. And this is where maturity lives, the ability to hold proximity and boundaries at the same time. Without the development of this skill, liberation of your enmeshment will simply turn into another dependency, but this time the dependency will be on isolation instead of attachment. Enmeshment describes a state of being deeply entangled when other people's sadness, anxiety means the same for you. This happens with blurred or non-existent boundaries. This is where you yourself haven't learned emotional independence. In an enmeshed family system, role and expectations are confused and the members of the family feel overly responsible for each other's emotions and well-being. In an enmeshed family system you might think that your actions cause other people's happiness and sadness. There are very typical characteristics of enmeshed relationships that include lack of boundaries, emotional fusion, where family members feel emotionally dependent on one another and they experience each other's emotions rather than their own. It includes poor emotional independence, where you struggle with your own identity and your own emotional self-regulation. It includes oversharing and excessive control. Parents get overly involved in the children's lives, or one partner attempts to control the other. It also includes difficulty with separation. In family dynamics, it shows up as a child who feels responsible for their parents' happiness, or a family where members feel they cannot have their own separate life or opinions. In romantic relationship it involves a partner who lies to keep the significant other close, or a relationship where one person's identity is entirely dependent and defined by other people's approval. I know most of you want other people to stop controlling you. You can absolutely feel it when they try to manage your choices, your timing, your values, all because they believe that their happiness depends on your behavior, on your compliance, your endless availability. This type of enmeshment shows up as dominance and looks like authority over you. Their control is absolutely necessary for their own inner peace, because they're afraid that if you make your own independent choices, then they're gonna feel loss of control. They're afraid that if you change, they'll lose access to the version of you that keeps them emotionally stable. Which of course is all a lie. These are all just thought errors that can be easily corrected. While trying to get out of this enmeshment dynamic, you can teach them through confrontation or explanation. But unfortunately that type of instruction doesn't rewire people. The moment you stop participating in their emotional fusion is when their control loses its anchor, and that's when they start to learn by example. You heal the enmeshement dynamic of another individual by not demanding it from them, but by embodying it, by exemplifying it. When your nervous system learns attunement, presence without absorption, care without compliance, everyone around you will start to recalibrate. They sense that your stability is no longer negotiable, and they will learn that for themselves. That recognition alone does more teaching than any lecture or explanation ever could. Teaching others attunement without enmeshment in your relationships becomes more effortless once you've learned it yourself, because your regulation becomes their instruction manual. And you can shift this entire dynamic without a single argument, without ever having to make a single point of view and having wish that you were understood. So the way you're gonna start healing it is think of it like your nervous system as basically being your internal dashboard, your database. Every time you think you're feeling somebody else's emotions, what's actually happening is that your thoughts are interpreting their signals and your nervous system is creating your own emotional response. So to say you're not actually carrying their emotions, you're carrying your emotions about their emotions. And that's where my C-near algorithm comes in extremely handy. C-near. C standing for circumstance that is someone else being close to you, feeling upset or anxious. N being your nervous system thoughts, which picks up on the cues. Maybe they're sighing, maybe they're making microfacial expressions, maybe they're pacing. Your body starts to feel that tension through your thoughts that kicked in, and it picks up on their anxiety and stress. This is happening through your own nervous system. Then comes the E, which is your emotions. Your thoughts about their feelings generate your emotions. You might feel anxious because you think, oh no, they're upset, I need to immediately fix it. Then comes A, which is the action. Because you feel the anxiety, you might jump up at the first opportunity to soothe them or to make them feel better. Mistakenly thinking that them feeling better would then result in you feeling better. Mistakenly thinking that if you took on their problem and solved it for them, you manage their feelings well enough, then you would feel better. When in reality their feelings are their responsibility. You can teach them, but again, that won't happen through enmeshment. That will only happen through attunement. The last one is results, the R. From taking responsibility for their emotions, anxiety, and stress, the result becomes that you are staying enmeshed. You've blurred the lines between your own emotional state and theirs. This is a strong call towards awareness and realization. With this you can start to shift towards attunement. And you can use the same formula, but add layers of awareness. And the way that looks like is that you pause and you ask yourself, is this my emotion or theirs? You remind yourself that your nervous system is responding to your own thoughts about the situation. The other person's emotions are not directly living inside you, or vice versa. Over time, practicing this awareness lets you stay engaged and compassionate without losing yourself. This is you learning to fine-tune your empathy so it doesn't drain you. It lets you connect in a healthier way. Letting go of enmeshment does not mean that you're detaching yourself. It does not mean toxic individuality. It means that you're choosing to be attuned. And that is extremely empowering. There are multiple relationships in my life that I choose to be attuned. And you might do the same. Because imagine if you have a friend who's really anxious about a job interview, they're pacing, they're talking fast, they're sweating, and you start to feel a familiar knot in your own stomach, now you're in that enmeshment mode, and you might immediately think, oh no, I need to fix this, I need to calm them, and you'll jump into action. When in reality, there's your own nervous system reacting to your thoughts about their anxiety, creating your own anxiety. If you apply this separation, this little boundary, what happens is that you've created a space for yourself to think, okay, the circumstance is that my friend has an interview, the circumstance is that she's anxious, my nervous system is picking up on all of these cues, but my emotions are my own. In this way, instead of jumping to fix it, you might say to yourself, I can be supportive without taking on their burden of anxiety. I can listen, I can offer a calm presence, I can even offer solutions, but I don't have to feel what they feel, and I don't have to get dysregulated just because they are dysregulated. Similarly, it happens in a family dynamic where a person is upset and you always felt responsible for keeping their peace or keeping them happy. In an enmeshed state, you will immediately jump into soothing them. You will say whatever you think will calm them down, you will do whatever it takes to help them feel comfortable so that in turn you can feel comfortable, even if it means sacrificing your own opinions and feelings on the matter. But through the space you give by learning that their emotions are theirs, you will create a space where you might have an opportunity to think, my discomfort about their upset is being created by my own thoughts. Do I want to create it or do I want to step back and offer support without taking a burden? The more you practice this in each micro situation, the more you train yourself to notice when you're slipping into enmeshment. And this way you can gently guide yourself back to attunement. Over time you're building this muscle. Over time you'll start to realize with more and more practice that you're feeling this emotion because you are experiencing it or because you're picking it up from somebody else and thinking it's yours to carry. When you start this transition from enmeshment to healthy attunement, one of the most common questions that surfaces is around self-doubt. Your mind unquestionably presents, have I gone cold in this relationship? Am I starting to care less? Am I dropping them out as an important relationship in my life? And this confusion happens because the nervous system equates the newfound calm with distance. When you stop absorbing other people's emotions, the internal noise quiets down, and that quiet and peace will feel unnatural in the beginning. When you have started to equate constant worry about other people's emotions as your responsibility, when you start to equate that responsibility with a strong relationship, and when you start to take a step back from that, there's a space that's created. And this is the space where you start to fill it with attunement. And I want to highlight this paradox because when you find yourself in that space, the strangeness of peaceful relationships, your mind is going to want to flag it as danger. Because to the lower brain, anything that's new gets flagged as danger. But what you might be experiencing is regulation, the nervous system recalibrating and relearning how to stay present without constant surveillance. You're observing, listening, and responding to relationships without tension. Your mind will have a tendency to call it hyperindividualism in the beginning. Because remember, your lower brain calls it danger and your mind has to label it something in order for it to protect you from it. When what you're creating is not hyperindividualism, it's attunement by choice. It takes some time to recognize this new neutrality as strength. Eventually what will happen is what once felt like detachment will start to sound like you're being available in a relationship by choice. And through this you perceive another person's pain and you remain centered, and you choose to accompany them through that pain. This is a much more upgraded language of care that sustains connections over a long period of time. Hyperindividualism is the opposite extreme of enmeshment. It's emotional indifference and it's complete detachment. When you stop caring about other people's pain, that's what toxic individualism is. It feels regulating, but it's still based on fear and avoidance. And this avoidance is not freedom. It looks like independence, but but it's far from it. Humans are wired for connection. We're designed to coexist, to witness, to accompany, to love people. The goal here is not to detach from the suffering of others, it's to stay present with it while knowing whose pain belongs to who. When you love someone, their difficulty might move you, as it should, because that's what we do with people who we choose to love. Your compassion here is evidence of your humanity. But your nervous system also does not need to collapse over it in order to prove a relationship. You can recognize that their pain is theirs, and your pain is the ache of witnessing it. Those two different experiences and the clarity between them is what keeps compassion sustainable. Attunement is the ability to accompany someone in their difficulty by choice, and that is an incredibly empowering choice you're gonna get to make. You don't do it by guilt, obligation, or reflex. You do it by conscious participation. You choose to stay near, you choose to offer support, to hold, to listen, all the while remaining grounded in your own nervous system safety. You are connected and you're not consumed. This is what mature love and connection looks like. Proximity, empathy, and boundaries with structure. All of this care happens with agency. When you're in isolation through hyperindividualism, you're not connected to anyone at all. Enmeshment appears empathic, but it's over surveillance. Surveillance of other people's moods, approval, reactions. This is your nervous system's attempt to secure safety through hyperattunement. If this is familiar, then in this state you're constantly living in overfunctioning, monitoring, anticipating, trying to stabilize the emotional environment around you. Believing that your own harmony depends on your management of other people's emotions. Attunement, on the other hand, is very much a regulated awareness. It's your capacity to stay connected. It operates from internal steadiness. In this state you notice, you respond, and you stay available while remaining anchored in your own perception and your own authority. This is a whole new level of emotional leadership. What ends up happening, especially for Muslim women, is that their empathy is usually the first doorway into enmeshment. It's an extraordinary human function that allows you to sense and interpret the emotions of other people. But without structure, without guidance, without skill development, it creates a form of self-neglect when this empathic nervous system starts to use empathy as a survival strategy. And if that's happening, empathy is not serving you. Another dynamic I commonly see is from women who are trying to heal from their enmeshment patterns, and when they recognize that that's how they're living, reflexively, through a knee-jerk reaction, they try to drop their empathy altogether because they start to think that this is a weakness. The realization that you are enmeshed with someone does not call for immediate abandonment of your own empathy. The goal here is not to abandon empathy or suppress sensitivity, it's to build a mental distance. And the work evolves in a way where your empathy turns into strong attunement and very strong relationships. And all of that happens through creating a little bit more of awareness intentionally. Just as empathy might have been your first gateway towards enmeshment, it is also your gateway towards attunement, towards creating safe, loving, long-lasting relationships, relationships that feel safe. And this differentiation is super helpful because women go through their entire lives being weighed down by their empathy when it's actually a superpower. If enmeshment is the most dominant way you've learned how to relate to people in relationships, then it will take you a hot minute to relearn these patterns and to come into attunement. And one of the most promising outcomes here is that empathic attunement becomes a self-generating energy. And you'll notice that empathic enmeshment is completely exhausting. So if you've been navigating life through a high degree of empathic enmeshment, you might want to start to expect that things are gonna change right after listening to this podcast. And now that you can tell the difference between healthy attunement and toxic empathic enmeshment, then all of a sudden your patterns will change and you will release these immediately. And you might even feel frustration if you can't release them immediately. But be patient with yourself. This is the step in the right direction. Once you continue to take steps or continue to practice this shift, you will land in attunement. It might be tomorrow, it might be next month, it might be a year from now. I don't know how many ingrained patterns you're working with and how the journey will unfold for you, but consider this the absolute first step. As a Muslim woman, you're taught that making somebody else's mood or comfort your responsibility is the very definition of caring, which leads you to further believe that love might mean effort, acts of service, selflessness, contribution. And when these are the qualities that you adopt willingly, that's going to create the difference between enmeshment and attunement. Through socialization and cultural upbringings, enmeshment gets confused with labor of love. But when in reality it's based in fear, afraid of losing connection, afraid of disappointing others, afraid of being misunderstood, afraid of being alone. That's what keeps you entangled in exhausting emotional labor. And this exhaustion is beyond what can be explained by the work you put in a relationship. Healthy work that you put in a relationship can be and is tiring a lot of times, but that labor of love is not exhausting beyond explanation. When you're choosing to hold space for your kids' emotions, when you're the anchor of the family, when you're doing all of this emotional labor, it is tiring. But at the end, the choice is using conscious engagement with someone. And when you've done this work, you look back and you say, Yeah, that was time and effort well spent. I would do that again any day of the week because I choose to love these people. With that I pray to Allah, Ya Allah, give us loving people in our lives that we can attune to. Grant us wisdom to recognize where our responsibility ends and where trust in you begins. Help us show up for people from a place of strength. Let our empathy be a form of worship. Ya Allah, make our hearts spacious enough to love deeply while remaining anchored in you. Amin Ya Rabul Amin. Please keep me in your du'az. I will talk to you guys next time.
