Emotional Cocoon Analysis

The separate paths that my husband and I took prior to our marriage could be the textbook examples for the concepts of the "emotional cocoon" and "the opposite process of the emotional cocoon." This marriage is the second for each of us and we lived through similar pain but with different origins to get where we are today.
Joe's first marriage was a very happy one but his first wife had been through a lot and was emotionally fragile (as he puts it). To "protect" her they centered their lives around each other and their two sons. They we in such close contact that she even worked part-time at his place of employment. The arrangement worked great until she died, as Bowen explains:
This is the kind of situation, however, where if one partner