I was in my early teens when I first heard the clinical term “enmeshment” – not from a psychotherapist, but my best friend at school who, like me, was a precocious child of divorce.
This was in Toronto in the late 90s – a city once accurately described as “New York run by the Swiss”. My friend and I were classmates at a selective state-funded secondary school for the arts in the city’s north end. I lived with my single mother (a magazine journalist) in a basement flat in Chinatown, having followed her to the city from the small town where I’d grown up. My girlfriend and I were the free-range children of urban intellectuals in a school that worshipped at the shrine of Antoine Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty – breaking the fourth wall (the dissolution of boundaries in general) was the order of the day along with high self-esteem and “being yourself”. My mother, in particular, took this to heart.
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