Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood.
But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom.
Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls “mother-enmeshed men” and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom. Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one, and he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom.
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Your relationship with your mother is likely the first and most foundational connection in your life. At its best, this bond can be a source of comfort, strength, and love that lasts a lifetime and changes in healthy, appropriate, and adaptive ways as you mature into adulthood. But sometimes, the attachment between a mother and her son can become unhealthy, resulting in a phenomenon called mother-son enmeshment, in which a man can become a kind of surrogate husband to his mom. Here to unpack this complex issue is Dr. Kenneth Adams. Ken is a clinical psychologist who has spent much of his career working with what he calls mother-enmeshed men, and is the author of When He’s Married to Mom.
Today on the show, Ken unpacks the characteristics of mother-enmeshed men and how to know if you are one. And he explains what can happen in childhood that would cause a mother to enmesh with her son. We discuss the problems enmeshment can create in men’s relationships and other areas of life, and how it can lead to things like compulsive porn use. And we unpack what it means for a man to become independent and emancipate from his mother, how it’s different from cutting her off, and what it looks like to have a healthy relationship with your mom. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriedtomom.
All right. Ken Adams, welcome to the show.
Dr. Ken Adams: Thank you. Nice to be here, Brett.
Brett McKay: So you’re a therapist, and for your career, you’ve spent a lot of time working with men who you call them mother-enmeshed men. And you wrote a book about this called When He’s Married to Mom. Give us a thumbnail sketch, and we’ll get into this deeper in our conversation. But what is a mother-enmeshed man?
Dr. Ken Adams: So enmeshment is a word people use to describe too much entanglement between what is called, in this case, mother and son, although it could be between daughter and mother and father and daughter and so forth. Too much entanglement where the needs of the parent or the needs of one individual supersedes the other, and that there’s a demand for loyalty based on guilty obligation that is used to leverage.
Love is transactional, so the enmeshed individual organizes their self around the parent and absorbs their feelings and needs as if it’s their own. And then when they try to get off into adulthood, particularly romance, they’re having a lot of trouble. So enmeshment refers as too much dependency, too much involvement, too much shared brain. I mean, certainly we all have dependencies, right? Emotional dependency is not pathological, but too much of it at the cost of your own autonomy and your own emancipation is very costly. These individuals struggle immensely in romance.
And I get emails all the time, daily from spouses and partners of these guys who say, you know, I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been in the backseat of this marriage or this relationship. I’ve had enough. He’s over at his mother’s house every day, or he blames me for everything and protects his family and so on and so forth. So the evidence that these enmeshment dynamics impact romance is just overwhelming.
Brett McKay: When did you first start noticing enmeshed men in your practice?
Dr. Ken Adams: Well, you know, so let me take you back a little further. I was working, when I first started my professional practice, I was working with kids and I was doing a lot of family system therapy and the family system therapists talk about enmeshment. And what they noticed is that a lot of these kids who had psychosomatic disorders and other issues really were symptomatic of the family enmeshed system.
And so, you know, I began to take a look at that when I was working at a Children’s Hospital in Detroit. We were seeing school-phobic kids. And I said to my supervisor, these kids aren’t afraid of school. They can’t leave their mothers. He goes, how did you know that? I said, well, that’s a whole story there. So I really began to notice it early in my career with children and families. And then I moved into working with adults who were raised in alcoholic families, adult children of alcoholics.
And I began to see adults who were over-involved with their mothers, adult men who were also sexually compulsive. And so I remember working with a man who was sexually compulsive, picking up sex workers. And he would do this when he was living, he would live with his mother part time during the week and then other part of the week, due to employment reasons, he was at his own place. And so he said, well, what should I do to stop the compulsive sexual behavior? And so I instinctively said, well, move out from your mother’s home. I sort of, just sort of intuitively knew that was the move. And sure enough, he did that.
And to my surprise, his sexual compulsivity dramatically decreased. So I began to put together at that time, the link between enmeshment and sexuality, which was missing in the literature on family systems. So you don’t need to be sexually, physically violated to have your sexuality hijacked. So if you’ve got a parent who has dominated you, say mother over son, and has turned you into her boyfriend, surrogate husband, caretaker, you’re in trouble because your sexuality can’t unfold naturally and purely. So that’s when I first began to notice it. I first began to notice the link between enmeshment and sexual compulsivity. I wrote my first professional article at that time based on that case, and everything went from there. So that was the beginning. And that was in 1991 or earlier when I first published that article. So I’ve been working with adult men who have been enmeshed ever since then.
Brett McKay: What’s interesting, I think there might be a tendency for people to think that this mother enmeshment is a modern phenomenon. But something I’ve noticed, I’ve read a lot of biographies from my work of famous great men from history, a lot of them had unhealthy relationships with their mothers. Three of them come to mind. Lou Gehrig had an incredibly super close relationship with his mom during spring training. Most players brought their girlfriends or wives. He’d bring his mom and then she would criticize and sabotage his relationships with women. He didn’t get married until he was 30, which was pretty late for that time.
Dr. Ken Adams: That age, that time, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then even after he got married, there’s just a ton of tension between his mother and his wife because Lou Gehrig just felt this intense attachment to his mother.
Dr. Ken Adams: And loyalty, no doubt.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Houdini was another one. He let his mother pick out his clothes. Even as an adult man, he would rest his head on her bosom to hear her heartbeat because he found it soothing. And then when his mother died, he wanted to die too. And he actually started trying to contact her through seances. And then another one was General MacArthur, another guy unusually close to his mother. When he was at West Point, his mother moved into a hotel near West Point so she could be by him. So those are some examples. But I was always surprised to see these men you think would have independence, but they had this often weird, kind of unhealthy relationship with their mom.
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. It’s fascinating. I didn’t know about all three of those, but I think we’d find the evidence of the pathology in their romances if we interviewed their partners. They’d have a lot to say about the competition with mother and her unwillingness to let go and his unwillingness and their unwillingness to let go of mother. That’s something that we’ve learned over the years is that we used to assume it was the parent holding on and we had to help the men eradicate themselves from the trap, and find a new way to communicate. But then we realized some of these guys don’t want to leave that golden boy position.
It’s been an elevated position. Sometimes the mother will use the son in competition against the father. The father’s a brute or an alcoholic. I’ll love my son more than you. I’ll elevate him to boyfriend status and I’ll show you a thing or two. I’ll neuter the old man with my son. But in doing so, neuters both the men in terms of their ineffectiveness. And so we definitely see some competitiveness there when the mother turns the son into the boyfriend or the husband.
Brett McKay: How do you know if you’re a mother-enmeshed man? What are some of the characteristics? Overall, it’s sort of an unhealthy closeness with a mother, but what are some other characteristics?
Dr. Ken Adams: Well, I think that you find yourself feeling tethered. That’s entrapped and unable to have any separateness and driven by guilt and worry and having to be on call for your mother’s woes to the point where you find yourself angry, frustrated. You’re preoccupied with your mother’s needs.
You likely reject, distance yourself, detach, disengage from your romantic partner and/or project onto her or him, you know, anger that really belongs to the mother. So ultimately, it’s a set of characteristics in which I feel guilty, obligated, angry, frustrated, trapped around having to caretake. She’s the only person I have or have had, and my wife just needs to understand. And she’s the problem, not my mother. So that’s the core identifier that we see in, you know, probably eight out of 10 referrals that come into our workshop often come in under that umbrella. The other sort of set of characteristics we see is that because these boys have been elevated by their mothers into the golden boy status, that comes with a certain degree of confidence, right? Almost omnipotence in the way they think of themselves.
So they can develop some success in their lives. So the guys you just mentioned, all of them had degrees of high success. So in the effort to please mother, I can become very successful. So I’ve had lots of guys with tremendous success who endlessly try to please their family and their mother, in the meantime, not having much of a romantic life. So the other place that we see the sort of identifier is they really don’t live a life of passion and purpose around what they really want in spite of their success. In other words, particularly in terms of relationships and romance, life seems to organize around me. They may pick the wrong, they may pick somebody like their mother to marry, right?
Because they’re not really free to choose and pick someone like their mother in the wrong way where the partner may have negative characteristics. So they seem to have a passivity, a disempowerment. Sometimes we even go so far as to say feeling neutered when it comes to romance, which is a strong word, but we use it descriptively rather than judgmentally. You can’t be your mother’s good boy and a man, you’ve got to choose. And so they live in sort of an ambivalent state, you know? And so oftentimes they can’t make up their minds which restaurant to go to. Where do you want to go? I don’t care. Where do you want to go, right? The relationship to needs, feelings has been interfered with by having to organize around the first love affair I’ve had. I mean, you know, parents love their children, children fall in love with their parents. It’s a wonderful thing. But the parent must let go. It is their assignment to let go.
It is not the adult child’s responsibility to cushion the blow of the emancipation. And ultimately, these men will compromise. We call it troublesome compromising in the workshop. They’ll put one foot in and try to placate mother, try to placate the wife, try to placate the kids, try to placate friends. In the meantime, nobody’s happy, most importantly themselves. So placating, ambivalence, difficulty with commitment, living in this dark space of I don’t know what I want, so I’m just going to keep working at what I know I can do, whether it’s being a magician or a ball player, right? I can do that, but I can’t really figure anything else out like what restaurant to go to.
So I’d be curious about these guys if you were to have them take the screening we have on our website, whether they pick things that would indicate that they don’t do well with identifying their own personal needs. So that’s a big issue. And living in guilt and projecting a lot of guilt onto other relationships. So they pick up the dinner tab more times than they should of their families. They, feel obligated and guilty to caretake and take care of other people as well. So transferring that sort of guilty, loyal subjugation to others also is a telltale sign.
Brett McKay: So they can carry that over, that guilt from their mother to other relationships as well. Could be their employer.
Dr. Ken Adams: Oh, it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. So we’ll get guys who their mothers have passed away, and they’ll join the workshop. And what you’ll find is they have transferred the whole dynamic to their partner. And they can’t figure out how to stand up for themselves or whether what they’re doing is giving in. And they wind up being in extremes.
They either subjugate themselves to their partner’s needs, or they get angry and rejecting. They don’t have a way to discern how to be in relationship because their mother has taught them, you’re obligated to me. I want you to absorb my feelings, my needs. So there’s a lot of conflict when it comes to intimacy for these men. So having to learn to differentiate their inner sanctum where their mother still lives is really the key.
Brett McKay: Is this related to this idea you talk about in the book, the disloyalty bind?
Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Exactly. If I give to my wife, then I’m being disloyal to my mother. Yes. So I’m torn between that I tend to organize the way I think about things in these dimensions of loyalty, where someone else might just say, well, that’s not a big deal.
I don’t have to gauge my decision based on emotional loyalties. It’s just a decision to be made. And sometimes people will be disappointed. So yeah, the disloyalty bind is that I really can’t move in my own direction because I’ll leave my mother behind. One of the things that we have learned and we have been teaching in the workshops is that what we’ve noticed is that the men don’t want to disappoint anybody. They want to figure out a way to get mom to co-sign their emancipation. So they’re, I’m chuckling.
It’s not funny. I’m not making fun of these men, but it’s just so ironic. So they’ll arrange a therapy session with mother and they’ll try to sort of say, look, mom, I need to be my own man. I need you to understand and not call me five times a day. And what happens is, is that therapy session turns into a marital counseling session. And these men have worse problems afterwards because they’re seeking their mother’s co-assignment. The truth is, is that emancipation always means someone’s disappointed.
There’s no way around that. My son is 22. He’s moving across the country. He’s in New York now. We’re in Michigan. He’s moving to LA. I’m going to miss him. You know, it’s my job to make the adjustment. It’s not his job to disrupt his unfolding. So in emancipation, somebody always is getting disappointed. And the parents’ last, I’ve always said this, parents’ last spiritual assignment in parenting, which is really hard to do, I’m doing it right now, is they have to take the loss. It’s their job to take the loss. It’s not the adult child’s job to cushion the blow. Now, we hope your adult children return, but here’s the irony.
And if you look at the family’s therapy system literature, the more you let go of your children, the more they want to circle back around. The more you hold on, the less they want to be with you. So we try to remind the adult enmeshed man that he has to be willing to disappoint. Otherwise, he’s going to live in that disloyalty bind and try to balance out his loyalties to everybody, which never is successful, frankly.
Brett McKay: So in the book, you provide some questions that people can ask themselves to figure out if they’re mother enmeshed or not. So yeah, if you feel obligated or guilty about taking care of your mom’s problems, if you feel like your mother is perfect or is a martyr, but it goes beyond that. If you put other people’s needs above yours all the time, if you feel guilty when pursuing your own wants or needs, that might be a sign that you are mother enmeshed because you’re taking that relationship you had with your parent as a child and projecting it on your other relationships.
Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly.
Brett McKay: You mentioned earlier that sometimes you’ve seen patients or clients you’ve worked with, their enmeshment can display itself in passivity. I think it’s probably the more common one. You’re just a doormat because you’re just ambivalent about your decisions because you don’t really have a sense of self. So you’re just like, whatever you want to do. But then also you talk about how it can manifest itself in hyper-aggressiveness. Have you seen what causes a mother-enmeshed man to tip towards passivity or hyper-aggressiveness?
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. So let’s start with the latter. The sort of hyper-aggressiveness we might want to sort of put under the umbrella of a more self-centered, narcissistic, what we might say is a counter phobic response. I don’t want to risk ever getting caught up in anybody else’s needs. So the hell with you. I’ll just focus on myself. Right? And so what we see in those backgrounds, not uncommonly is that one of the parents, it could be the mother, is also in addition to being dependent on her son, she’s very self-centered and narcissistic. She needs him to be an extension of her. So that sort of precedes his own aggressive narcissism where then he gets involved with a romantic partner and it’s all about him because he can’t tolerate the risk that he’s going to get subjugated underneath another dependency. So usually there’s a little mix or a lot of mix of narcissism from the parent that will drive that. We see that in over-sexualization, these sort of counter phobic, I’ll just have a lot of women, right?
I’ll have sex with a lot of women, prove that nobody can control my sexuality when in fact mother has been controlling it. The more passive response is more typical, although you might see a mix. And often there, the child has been very burdened with responsibilities and caretaking. So the caretaking dynamic.
My mother’s depression. My brother and sisters, I had to take care of them. My father was an alcoholic. I had to fight with him. So usually the more passive enmeshed man has had a burden, excessive responsibility. So by the time he gets into his youth, young adulthood, as you said, there’s no self. My self is strictly organized around how I can take care of you. So when I search out a romantic partner, I search out somebody who has problems who I can take care of. So, nobody’s home inside of those men, sadly. Which is a little dramatic to say, but that’s just a way to say it. I mean, they have some sense of self, but many of them feel very neutered, very passive, disempowered, because I’ve been so weighted down by the problems of my mother and family that I don’t even have it in me to protest for myself. So best just to just give in. Right? It becomes its own trauma response, it becomes its own coping reaction just to say yes when I mean no. I don’t even know how I can say no so I’ll just say yes and agree with you and let’s get this over with.
Brett McKay: And you talk about, like, sometimes it can be a mixture of both the passive and aggressive.
Dr. Ken Adams: Yes.
Brett McKay: So, sometimes you’ve had clients and patients who are like, I’m just gonna be passive. I’ll just do whatever my wife says, whatever my mother says. But then I might have like a secret porn addiction or something.
Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Precisely. Yeah. So, it is not uncommon. Probably I’d say 60% of the guys coming into… So I’ve had this workshop going, oh, since 2013. So 11 years now. See close to about a thousand men and women from all across the globe. So it’s been an interesting journey to watch them. And so they have kind of what you’re saying here for sure.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And it could also manifest itself, I think you talked about this in the book. It could be like a gambling addiction, like a secret gambling. It’s like, I got this one area of my life where no one tells me what to do.
Dr. Ken Adams: Absolutely. It could be food too.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Dr. Ken Adams: Sex is, I meant to say that sex is common about 60% because sexuality is in the erotic template, if you will. And when I say erotic, I don’t just mean sexual, I mean romantic, falling in love. The whole gamut of what drives our pursuit of partners, right? Is that it’s burdened. I have to take along my mother or my caretaking feelings or my guilt. So I’m not really free. But if I go over here and gamble or use porn or pick up sex workers or have an affair or overeat, no one’s gonna tell me. ‘Cause it’s, I’m not emotionally obligated to them. So I’m free sexually. So sometimes we see this splitting, we call it, sexually, where I begin to shut down with my committed partner, because my committed partner begins to feel too much like my mother. And through no fault of the partner, oftentimes it has more to do with the projection from the man. So what’s the best offense against an intrusive mother who wants to turn you into her husband or boyfriend? Is shut yourself down sexually. So sexuality gets shut down, but then it goes out the back door.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So a man who is a pleaser, who otherwise doesn’t feel like he can act for himself, he might get into something like porn or gambling to feel like he’s rebelling, to feel like, yeah, I’m my own man. I can do what I want, even though he is not able to break free. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. So this whole enmeshment it happens in childhood. So what goes on in childhood that a mother would want to enmesh with her son?
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s… In most cases it’s a more innocent unfolding where frankly the parent is also trapped. They’re not unfolding their true selves. All of a sudden their needs become completely dependent upon their son. In most cases, although we do have some parents, some adult children who report their parents as cruel or deliberate, but in many cases it’s really more unconscious in which maybe there’s an unhappiness with the marriage or the relationship, or there’s maybe single parenting. Although most of the people we see come from families in which aren’t single parents. As a parent, you probably know this. I mean, your kids adore you, right? Until they get to be adolescents and they have problems with you. But they adore you and it’s a love that has no match. And so it’s easy for a needy parent who’s beginning to feel empty or lonely in her marital bond or her friendship community, to begin to overuse that adoration from her child and begin to depend on it. And so you might have slowly over time increased dependency in which now what do you mean you’re going to a dance? No, you shouldn’t. Pretty soon he’s talking about having a crush at somebody at school and she’s all of a sudden shaming him for something that he’s just feeling innocent about.
So she may find herself in the trap of dependency of enmeshment through no conscious decision to do so, but kind of a slow holding onto that which can’t be matched. Again, children love their parents in ways that just can’t be matched. I think that’s just normal. So I think that’s what happens mostly. But we also have a percentage, I don’t really have a number for you that I’ve heard over time. I mean, it’s more than 5%. It’s probably not 50%. So I’m placing between, probably close to 25% of the parents we hear reported about who are deliberate, they particularly get more deliberate over time. Although you’ll see some of it in childhood. No, I don’t want you playing football. No, I want you here at home. Be careful out there.
So there’s an excessive hold and carefulness that begin to wrap around the child we see in early, which is why I saw these kids, these school phobic kids at 5 and 6 years of age, right? Is they had already been caught in the web of their mother’s worry and they couldn’t leave. Most of the time, the children who are most prone to getting caught in this are the kids who have the highest degree of empathy and sensitivity. So it’s not gonna be the kid in the family who is more able to say, buzz off, I don’t wanna deal with that. Right? They have a little more feistiness in their temperament.
These are typically the kids who are nice boys, nice girls, sweet boys, sweet girls, loving, caring. The parent’s job is not to over solicit that. So what happens is, is that if you’re dealing with a marital bond that’s problematic and your partner is not being particularly solicitous about how you’re doing, and you’ve got this wonderful sensitive boy who says, mommy, I’ll never leave you. I mean, she just latches onto that, right? So the easy-tempered, sensitive sweet boy is often targeted. And so it’s this increased bonding over time that begins this mutual dependency that is, by the time we see these guys, it’s really hard to unravel although it’s possible.
Brett McKay: As I was reading your book, this idea of enmeshment and it’s caused by maybe the mother having a bad relationship with her husband. So she’s trying to create a, like a pseudo husband relationship with her son. It reminded me of from Bowen Family Systems theory, the idea of triangulation.
Dr. Ken Adams: Right.
Brett McKay: Right. So it’s like, there’s a tension in between a dyad between the husband and wife. And so to alleviate that tension, mother looks to son to sort of dissipate that.
Dr. Ken Adams: And may use him, using that language of triangulation, may use him as, weaponize him against the father. And then you have two attachment failures for the son. He’s got an involvement with the mother that feeds the mother, but not him. And then he has a distant, competitive, if not angry relationship with the father. The father begins to feel jealousy towards the boy. And so then he gets some hate and the mother wins in that battle. Which is really sad to watch.
Brett McKay: Oh, yeah. You can see like mom turns son against dad. She tells her son…
Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Your dad isn’t this, and he doesn’t do that. And the son starts thinking, yeah, my dad is a bum.
Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. I remember a story I heard once, you may be familiar with the now passed poet Robert Bly, who did a lot of men’s work over the years, and which is where I first got a little bit of my introduction to looking at men’s issues a little differently than what I had learned in graduate school and so forth. And so I remember him telling a story about, and this was a secondhand story, so I don’t know the real details, but he told the story of a man who surprised his father, flew across the country, surprised his father with a visit, knocked on his father’s door and said to him, I no longer accept my mother’s version of you. I no longer accept my mother’s version of you. I might be angry with you, I might have issues with you, but they’re not my mother’s.
Oftentimes we see these adult men who have been enmeshed with their mothers carry a layer of rejection and anger towards the father that’s not theirs. And that’s another piece of differentiating. Is to say, No, I’m not carrying my mother’s anger. That’s her job. Which might be as straightforward as having a boundary when she calls and says, Your father once again fell asleep in front of the tv rather than going out on our date or going to bed with me. He’s gotta say, Look, I don’t want to hear that anymore. We’re done with that. There has to be a clear, fairly rigid boundary around that kind of stuff.
Brett McKay: So we’ve kind of mentioned some of the problems that these mother-enmeshed men can experience in their adult life. I guess the primary one you see, it affects the relationship with their romantic partners. It could be their girlfriend or wives. What have you seen are the most common complaints in the relationships of mother-enmeshed men?
Dr. Ken Adams: From the men themselves or from their partners?
Brett McKay: Either, it could be both.
Dr. Ken Adams: Well, the… Let’s start with the men. Well, no, let’s go reverse. So the pro… Most of the time when we get complaints from the partners and what the men will report is that their partners are frustrated with their less than co-equal status in the marital bond or the relationship bond. And so that the mother has taken priority all… Where the son will call the mother and discuss vacation plans or financial plans or have a secret bank account. I mean, I can’t tell you the stories I’ve heard. They just kind of… It still kind of blows my mind when I really see it. And then I realize, oh, we’re really talking about a specific issue here that needs clarifying. So the women, mostly the women and or we’ve had some gay men who have had similar, very similar dynamics of partners, the same. They’ll complain about not having a voice, not having a vote, and having to live with losses over the course of their relationship.
Sometimes the parents, the grandparents will then usurp the spouse and become the parental figure to the children, criticizing the man’s wife or partner. So usually the spouses have had enough, I’m tired of this, I can’t live with this anymore. So that’s a common complaint of… And where they have felt overt hostility sometimes from the competitive mother-in-law. The man will initially complain that his wife doesn’t understand. It’ll be his initial complaint.
I’m laughing ’cause it’s not funny, but it’s always, it’s fascinating to me to see how frequently that occurs. She just won’t understand. I just, I’m not being disloyal to her, but I have to take care of my mother. My mother didn’t have anybody growing up. My father left when I was 10. So I’m the whole world to my mother. She just has to understand. So the first complaint by the man is that he wants his wife to accept more loss, but he’s not calling it that way. He wants his wife “to understand.” So he’ll report initially a conflict with his partner. Following that will be a fair degree of frustration with the mother and that he finds himself shutting down with his partner, with his romantic partner, and a sexual complaint. So sexuality is, again, in about 60% of the cases, a problematic issue. So the men will also report not being able to feel sexual, be sexual and/or I’m excessively acting out or acting out outside of my marital or relationship contract with other sexual partners or porn. So that’ll be a common report of complaint too. So sometimes the couple will be fighting about mother and the betrayal by the mother or what the partner will talk about. And then they’ll also, right along with that, be talking about the betrayal by their sexual behavior. So when you get both of those, it’s really an intense conflict.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then you’ve also, you encounter men who haven’t been able to get into a romantic relationship or a long-term one because mom always gets in the way.
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, yeah. So, it means we’ve got men. Not that being married is the representation of relational health, but we’ll use it as an example. So, some men haven’t made any commitments, they’ve had short, they’ve had transactional relationships and they’ve not been able to really open up their hearts to intimacy with a romantic partner because it feels too engulfing, too confining. And so I’ve learned to live my life alone. And while there might be advantages to that, it’s a very lonely experience. So we’ve definitely seen that.
And we’ve seen too, interestingly enough, as these men emancipate from their mothers and families, and when we say emancipation, we don’t mean cutting off a family. We mean, look, I’m a man and I need you to treat me as that. And if you don’t, it’s gonna be hard for me to circle back and visit with you. So I need to operate differently with you and I need a different response from you. The more the man can do that, the more available he is to his romantic partner in his own sexuality. As these men embody themselves and say, No, no, I’m gonna put a stake in the ground. It’s just as my space. Nobody gets in without my permission. And most importantly, you mother. As he does that without raging or grabbing the mother by the lapels, you don’t need to confront your mother or your family to do this. It’s an internal shift. I now become more available erotically, romantically to my partner.
Brett McKay: Something you mentioned earlier is that enmeshed men can get into relationship with someone who’s like their mother. Is that common and do they tend to repeat the relationship patterns that they had with their moms with their romantic partner?
Dr. Ken Adams: Well, so there’s a acronym called three Ps, pick, project or provoke, meaning we recreate the past through picking someone just like our parent, we provoke them or we project onto them. I’m not sure I can give you the percentages, but yes, sometimes we see that a mother-enmeshed man will pick a partner who is over controlling, over dominant, over intrusive, and there can be a familiarity in that the man gets caught up in a bond with a woman who is like the mother. And unfortunately, he may have to divorce both of them if there’s no changes. Divorce in the sort of differently, I’m using divorce in sort of a general sense here, but separate out, I don’t know what that would mean with the woman. Sometimes the man will project onto the woman feelings of engulfment that aren’t there. Then she’ll say, what are you talking about? I didn’t need you to do that. You don’t need to keep pleasing me. I just wanted to know what dinner you wanted to go to, right? So sometimes it’s a projection and his job is to pull that back so that he can be in relationship with the woman that’s independent of the ghost of the mother. And then other times the man will provoke the woman to be like the mother.
So I’ll betray you sexually, I’ll have an affair and then you’ll become controlling. See, you’re just like my mother, but I’m responsible for that. So I would urge the men to look at the three Ps, pick, provoke and project, and figure out where the line is. It’s not easy to do. All three could be operative in the same relationship.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then we’ve also talked about this mother enmeshment can affect your career too, ’cause you project that desire, need, unhealthy need to please onto your employer. So it might cause you to stick with a job that’s just awful. ‘Cause you’re like, Well, I gotta be loyal to my boss, or I just, I gotta do this just sort of out of obligation.
Dr. Ken Adams: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Or I find myself sort of even at a deeper level in a career or a job or a path in which my mother wanted me in, but I never wanted. And so now I’m struggling. And we’ve had guys change horses in the middle of the stream as part of their emancipation, change careers, fascinatingly enough.
Brett McKay: And so yeah, the response to this, so let’s say if you are a mother-enmeshed man, the idea is you have to unmesh and you’ve been calling it emancipation. And I’ve seen a lot of articles lately about children cutting off parents. My parents are toxic, I need to cut them off completely. And cutting off is different from emancipation, so what’s the difference and why do you think this whole cutoff idea, it could be healthy in some situations, but maybe it’s not the most healthy thing to do either?
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s acknowledge that certainly there are people that we shouldn’t have in our lives because they’re abusive to us. Right?
Brett McKay: Right.
Dr. Ken Adams: And one of the strategies, and often if the person can’t change, the strategy is to get away from them. Right? And being a family member doesn’t permit you to be abusive. You don’t get a license to do that. So there is a percentage of people who need to look at, look, I can’t have you in my life if you keep doing this, but let’s set that group aside. I just wanna acknowledge that that can happen. But most of the guys coming into our workshop, and sometimes the spouse will try to demand it. Look, I want you to cut off your mother, but that’s not a solution. And because it’s really a phobic response. In other words, I’m so afraid that if I talk to my mother, I’ll get swallowed up by her worries. I’m just gonna cut her off. There’s nothing particularly empowering about that. It’s really phobic. So the man never really emancipates, he just stiff-arms the family, cuts ’em off and it gives him a pseudo sense of power. But then he is over here subjugating himself to his friend who wants to borrow a thousand dollars that he doesn’t have. And he says yes when he really can’t do it. He hasn’t really emancipated. So emancipation really is, look, I might need some separate time. I have new boundaries. No, you can’t talk about your loneliness with dad anymore. I’m out of that. You wanna talk about the weather or sports? We’re good. We’ll skip politics too these days.
But we’ll, we are not talking about your loneliness with dad, mom. And you say you love me, and so I need you to respect me. So we begin to have adult conversations because we are no longer held hostage by the fear of disappointing mommy, I’m now willing to be a disappointment to her. So emancipation is changing the role assignment that you’ve been burdened with. And it might have periods where you have more separateness, but it might be, We’re not coming to the holidays this year, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever. We’re gonna be in Hawaii and your mother’s disappointed. And you saying, you know what? We’ll probably visit with you next year. You’re able to tolerate that disappointment. You don’t need to stiff-arm her and you don’t need to subjugate her.
Emancipation is, I’m my own man. My commitment is to myself, to my partner, to my kids, to my unfolding, and now you mother and father. Notice they’ve come down the list, so that’s really emancipation. So cutting somebody off, stiff-arming somebody is a temporary pseudo freedom in my experience. Although as I said, there are a certain population, and I’ll leave that to people to sort out where obviously not having contact if the parent’s cruel and sadistic, it’s trouble. You might need to have a more rigid boundary. So emancipation may have boundaries on a continuum, cutting off your family is a one trick pony, right?
It’s just stiff-arming. And what we see, I… So here’s what we see. We begun to see this with reporting from the adult. This is all reporting from the adult-enmeshed man. So we’re not getting the direct report from the parents. So it’s a little bit secondhand, of course. But what they’re reporting is initially the parents will resist, mom won’t be happy, but if she’s got any moxie of self to her, she will understand that she doesn’t wanna lose her son or her daughter. So she’ll, she or the father will learn to keep quiet. So there’s a resignation. My kid wants his own space, I don’t like it. I’ll shut my mouth. We hope they get at least that. It’s not ideal.
The second phase is that in time, parents begin to accept, Okay, I see now my son doesn’t want to cut me off, he just wants some space. I get it. I’m gonna go out and join a bridge club. I’m gonna get a better marriage going with my husband here, so I’ll do my own life. So ideally, we like to see parents move into acceptance. I don’t know how often that occurs. And then finally, the stage that we really look for, which we don’t get a lot of reports of, is that parents really come to terms with and celebrate and bless their children’s departure. And we say to the adult-enmeshed man, the adult man emancipating, Look, emancipation is not a negotiation.
You do not need your parents’ approval. Don’t seek it. It’s not necessary. In fact, it’s counterproductive. You deserve their blessing, but you might not get it and you don’t need it. You deserve it, but you may not get it. Don’t wait around for it. So that really is an emancipated man. I’m my own man.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it sounds like… This reminds me of, going back to family systems theory, this idea of differentiation. It’s being a self while still maintaining relationships with people.
Dr. Ken Adams: Exactly. Yeah. Differentiation is really the sort of the inner piece of the process. The first is boundaries, I can’t talk to you about dad anymore. The last stage is emancipating, I’m my own man. But the middle part, which is most difficult is this differentiation. Wait a minute, why am I picking up the bill all the time for 10 people?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Dr. Ken Adams: I don’t have to do that.
Brett McKay: So what does a healthy relationship look like with your mother? We’ve talked about like when an unhealthy relationship, like what would a good relationship with your mother look like as an adult?
Dr. Ken Adams: Well, I think it shifts from sort of you’re my little boy is now you’re my adult man, son. And I have to sort of regard you as an adult. And so we have to renegotiate how we talk, what we talk about, how we visit. So we have more of a consulting friendship, and a love relationship, but not, You’re my little boy and I need you to do what I want. So we see a shift in the way both the parent and the adult child deal with each other where there’s a greater respect and tolerance for separateness. My son, he’s visiting this weekend, he was gonna show up the other day. He didn’t, he came a day late and he’s moving across the country, so we wanna get as much time as possible. So, both of my… I’m not a perfect parent. He’ll remind me of that. But, so both my wife’s response was, Great, we’ll see you when you get here. Right? As was mine. Versus, why can’t you make it here?
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Dr. Ken Adams: Just move that appointment aside. Laying on the guilt. So again, we’re not perfect parents. He reminds us of that. But that’s the difference. Is the adult parent now begins to disengage from a dependency that was once there. And they’re both agents, the mother and the son are free to move in and out of the connection lovingly without feeling guilt for their times of separateness. And they can circle back out of choice. And sure, there might be disappointment or missing, Oh, I miss you, I haven’t seen you in a while. Can we put something on the books? Versus, Don’t you think about me anymore? You’ve been spending too much time with your wife. So there’s the difference is that both the adult man and the mother are separate agents in the relationship and they come and go out of love and out of choice. Not out of guilt, demand or inappropriate loyalty.
Brett McKay: Anything dads can do to help their sons develop a healthy relationship with their mother and not get enmeshed?
Dr. Ken Adams: Well, one is, is to get in there and have a relationship with your son, independent of the mother so that he can learn to turn to you and the mother can witness that she doesn’t get to be top dog. Right? And you’re not doing it competitively. You’re just doing it lovingly. And I think too, to be solicitous of your partner and say, Let’s go out on dates and reconnect, rekindle the love affair that was there before you had kids, which most of us know is tough to do, but with the help of good marital therapists and counselors, you can do that. So you begin to put your energy towards your partner and you build a relationship with your son, independent of the mother. And if necessary, you create some challenges to your wife and say, Look, you can’t keep doing that. You’re gonna lose him. So you have to be a voice of reason there.
Brett McKay: Well, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, so you could go to the website overcomingenmeshment.com, all one word, overcomingenmeshment.com. I have lots of podcasts on there. Hopefully I’ll get yours on there if you’ll send me a link. It’s been great talking to you. We’ve got workshops, educational workshops for men. We have ’em for women who are enmeshed. What’s interesting is we did some interviewing for qualitative research, we interviewed men and women, and I did some of the interviewing with the women. I was shocked. The women were just like the men. They’ll report things like when they’re enmeshed with their mothers and fathers, my boyfriend wants too much of me, I’m gonna run the other way and start a new relationship. I thought, Oh my God, I’m talking to the, just like the men. We also have workshops for the partners and the spouses of these individuals who need help sort of getting their head back on straight and feeling valid and so forth. So the website will walk you through all that.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Ken Adams, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Ken Adams: Yeah, likewise, Brett. I appreciate your working with me and talking. It’s been a great conversation and I hope to get a link so I can upload it on my website too.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Kenneth Adams. He’s the author of the book, When He’s Married to Mom. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, overcomingenmeshment.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/marriedtomom. You can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or family member who you think might get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Till next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
