When “We Are One” Really Means You Disappear

A personal reflection on enmeshment and an abuser's inability to see you as separate

When I left my abusive husband, I told him that he had never tolerated me having a different opinion, that disagreement was treated as defiance, and that my emotional reality had been repeatedly corrected, minimised, or dismissed altogether. He replied with this:

“I thought that we were one and that we had the same thoughts, feelings, and opinions.”

I remember sitting with my phone in my hand, reading this message over and over, and feeling a strange mixture of clarity and unease. In that moment I understood something I had not been able to articulate during the marriage. He had never truly experienced me as separate.

It explained the bewildered look on his face whenever I disagreed. It explained why he would confidently tell me what my intentions were, even when I knew they were something entirely different. It explained why my staying calm when he was angry seemed to provoke him further. In his mind, we were meant to operate as one. If that was the expectation, then any divergence in my thoughts or feelings could only register as being “wrong.”

At the time, I did not have the language for what I was witnessing. I did not yet understand that this was a mindset of enmeshment. It is a way of relating in which abusers do not recognise their partners as psychologically separate. The boundary between self and other is blurred, not in a mutual or healthy sense, but in a way that centres their own internal world as the only valid one. Their partner is experienced not as a separate individual but as an extension of their identity.

This mindset rests on a deep expectation of sameness. The partner should think what they think, feel what they feel, and want what they want. When that does not happen, difference is not processed as normal individuality. It is experienced as defiance or rejection. Attempts to assert a separate reality are dismissed as irrational, selfish, or wrong, rather than recognised as legitimate expressions of another individual.

When My Different Perspective Left Him Bewildered

One example that stays with me happened during a falling out with a close friend. We had been friends with another couple who lived nearby, Louise and Benjamin, and one evening my husband told Louise, in his typically tactless way, how she needed to parent her children. She was understandably offended and chose to distance herself.

He came home furious, replaying the conversation, dissecting her tone, listing all the ways she had wronged him. What unsettled me was not simply his anger, but his assumption that I would share it.

For weeks, he spoke badly about her, detailing why she was unreasonable and why I should cut her off too. When I calmly said that I understood why she had taken offence and that I still valued her friendship, he looked at me as though I had violated an unspoken rule.