Is your problem with the idea of avoiding enmeshment based on your fear that without enmeshment you don't understand how people can be bond and care for each other? Because I believe you can bond with and care for people without enmeshment.
Enmeshment is too much emotional bonding between people
This is not true in clinical descriptions of enmeshment and certainly not in my personal understanding of enmeshment. Emotional bonding is NOT enmeshment. Differentiated people can emotionally bond with others and in fact can do so easily WITHOUT LOSING THEMSELVES. Being differentiated makes it easier to feel and empathize with another's emotions WITHOUT feeling like it is YOUR emotion.
Enmeshment is looking to another to "complete" you - "We're enmeshed when we use an individual for our identity, sense of value, worth, well-being, safety, purpose, and security. Instead of two people present, we become one identity. More simply, enmeshment is present when our sense of wholeness comes from another person....Enmeshment doesn't allow for individuality, wholeness, personal empowerment, healthy relationships with ourselves or others, and, most importantly, a relationship with our Higher Power."
Cobra said: However person A still feels the pain of person B because person A is still not differentiated.
For me this is not exactly true. The difference is in HOW you feel the other's pain. I am an empathetic person and an emotional person; so I tend to cry easily. (True story. When I was leaving for work a few years ago I heard on the radio that Mr. Rogers had died. I rolled down the window to tell my XH and found myself crying when I spoke. Yeah Yeah I know but I grew up with Mr. Rogers and he was such a kind gentle spirit that his passing did sadden me. Of course I was feeling my own pain with his loss. My XH did not cry when he saw me crying or when he heard the news. He didn't grow up watching Mr. Rogers so he had no connection to him. And why should he cry just because I was crying?)
I think you see enmeshment as the only way for people to be empathetic to another's feelings. Unfortunately enmeshment is not empathy; it is actually taking someone's feelings as your own which is NOT the same as recognizing those feelings for the other person. (Has anyone else had that experience where you share a feeling with someone and instead of that person empathizing with your feeling they seem to take on your feeling as their own? For me it is not comforting and is in fact disconcerting because you don't feel any empathy from them)
Also I don't think we are using the same definition for detachment (and there are more than one). For me detachment is separating yourself from someone so you can remain individuals however it is NOT a disconnection or disengagement at all.
So if you believe that to be a differentiated person you must disengage and disconnect from others, then I can understand why differentiation would bother you. For me it is the other way around, differentiation is what gives you the power to connect to others in a truly meaningful way.
I have no idea if it would surprise you to know that people have always seemed to gravitate to me to talk and open up. I get the "you are so easy to talk with" line all the time. I love people. I like having connections to people. I believe that my differentiation is probably part of that draw.
Please check out this site on detachment for more information. I'll include some quotes here.
Here is one part of their definition of detaching.
Detachment is the "Ability to maintain an emotional bond of love, concern, and caring without the negative results of rescuing, enabling, fixing, or controlling.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads? ~Albert Camus
