Family: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them!
When “Brian” (not his real name) leaves on a business trip, his initial sentiment is relief. Life is so simple and easy when he doesn’t have to deal with his wife and kids. He only has to worry about himself and the mission at hand.
But when he walks down the street and sees another parent with kids about the same age as his children, his heart aches to be at home with them. And at the end of the day when he tucks into his hotel bed, he tosses and turns without his wife beside him. Why is it so stressful to be around his wife and kids, and yet it’s so hard to be away from them?
“Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.” We love our spouse and kids, right? So, why do we fight with our spouse, avoid our spouse, or pass our baggage onto our kids? Because we don’t know why we do it, and therefore we can’t stop ourselves.
Today we’re going to examine why we behave as we do in marriage and in parenting. This is crucial to you because most of us are blind to an instinctive force in our marriages called Fusion. The good news is that Fusion is truly the “goose that laid the golden eggs.” Once we understand how Fusion works, we can begin to treat the cause of marital or parenting problems, rather than just treating the symptoms. In other words, if we learn to spot Fusion, we can reduce its negative impact on our families. We can have a better marriage, and pass on less of our baggage to our kids.
Bowen Family Systems Theory asserts that we humans have four ways we (unconsciously) deal with the anxiety that builds up in our marriages. In previous articles, we have already explored “Why Marital Conflict is your Best Friend” and “The Blame Tango: In Marriage There Are No Angels or Devils.” Before we examine the last two ways we deal with anxiety in marriage, we need to learn WHY we do what we do. At the root of all four marital behavior patterns is a concept called Fusion.
Fusion is the answer to one of life’s big questions: Why do some people we know seem to thrive, while others don’t? One significant factor among all primates, including our chimpanzee cousins, is the process of weaning a child from its parent. Fusion comes from an incomplete weaning process. Perhaps you’ve heard of Jane Goodall’s studies of chimpanzees in Africa. She tells the story of a mother chimp “Flo,” and her son “Flint.”
Flo was an Alpha female. Of all the chimp mothers, more of Flo’s offspring went on to become leaders of the chimp colony than any others. However, Flo was getting quite elderly and tired when she gave birth to Flint. Goodall noticed that Flint would cling to his mother, and she carried Flint around many months longer than was typical. The two seemed to have an intensely close relationship, which we humans might view as beautiful and loving. However, Flint showed many behavior problems in relating to his peers.
When Flo got sick and died one day, Flint stayed beside her body for two weeks, refusing to eat and drink, until he finally died on the same spot as his mother. Flint was an example of incomplete weaning from his mother. He couldn’t go on clinging to her, but he couldn’t live without her.
You’ve probably heard how eagles teach their young to fly by pushing them out of the nest. This may seem cruel to us, but the eagle instinctively knows that its offspring cannot survive if they don’t learn to fly. Growing up on a farm, I often watched a cow kick her calf away from her udder, as he grew older. “How mean!” I thought, but then I noticed that the calf was now eating more grass. He was being weaned, and learning independence.
The mother/child relationship is obviously more complex in humans, but we share some of the same instincts. When a child is born, the mother-infant bond is a powerful instinct that guarantees that child’s survival, feeding, and protection. However, picture a marriage where the father is distant and critical, and the mother is insecure. She may take too much comfort in that mother-infant bond, and get stuck in it (unknowingly, through no fault of her own). She may become over-involved with feeding and protecting her young. She may “sacrifice all” for her child, rather than pursuing goals and a life of her own. Many people would view her efforts as noble.
For example, “Amanda” and her mother were very close. After three sons, her mom was overjoyed when she gave birth to a girl. “I’m going to give her the best upbringing possible,” she thought to herself as she rocked her newborn daughter in her arms.
As Amanda grew up, her mother showered her daughter with attention, especially since things had grown increasingly cool with her husband over the years. Her mom found that Amanda was the one she could confide in, much more so than her distant husband. Amanda and her mom became best friends, even to the point of finishing each other’s sentences.
All this positive attention seemed to be paying off for Amanda. She was a straight-A student and the apple of each teacher’s eye. She was admitted to an Ivy League college, but her mother was surprised that she seemed reluctant to go. Amanda would telephone frequently from her dorm in tears, saying that she was miserable.
During final exams of her first semester, Amanda suffered a nervous breakdown, and withdrew from college. Her mother was stunned. She asked herself, “How could such a talented daughter, whom she had supported every step of the way, end up like this? Was it really just bad luck?”
The positive over-focus that Amanda’s mom gave her may seem loving, but it actually hurts the child in the long run, because it impairs her independence and survival skills. Without realizing it, we parents may be sending our child mixed messages about whether to grow up or not. There may be a difference between our verbal and non-verbal communication. Verbally, our message may be, “Do well at things, and develop skills!” Non-verbally, we may coddle our children, over-protect them, or infantilize them. Whereas we may struggle mightily to make sure we don’t pass our baggage onto our kids, somehow that’s exactly what happens. A loving parent with the best of intentions may (unknowingly) create his or her own worst nightmare.
Does all of this sound like an anti-feminist blaming of the mother? I don’t see it that way. Characteristics that make mammals unique from most other animals include the nurturing behavior of the mammalian mother, and the primal bond the infant feels towards its mother. Humans are mammals, and sometimes a mother may be over-nurturing, which leads the infant to become over-dependent on his mother’s care.
The challenge of course, is to walk that fine line between nurturing an infant while promoting its eventual independence. The stakes are high, because the more dependent a child is on his mother, the more over-focused he will be on her every cue. This leads to a high level of chronic anxiety in the child. Why? Because since he was born, the only reality this child has known is that the mother-child bond is essential to his survival. Thus, he will react to any threat that jeopardizes this bond, and he will use any means to preserve her focus and attention. This includes positive behavior to please his mother, or negative, rebellious behavior that grabs her attention.
To summarize Fusion: the initial, primal bond of mother and child is an instinct that ensures the child’s survival. In marriages with a distant, critical, or passive husband, an insecure wife may lean too much on that primal bond with her child. If mother doesn’t wean the child from this primal bond, he STAYS focused on mother. If a child grows up with such a “focus-on-mother” and her every cue, this programs him to “focus-on-other” in all his interactions with people. This makes him oversensitive in his adult relationships, leaving him uncomfortable, anxious, and volatile. In other words, the less a child is emotionally “weaned,” the more his attachment to mother is played out in all his future relationships. Therefore, the more he is “hardwired” for chronic anxiety as an adult. His intense relationship with mother may become an intense relationship with his spouse.
Fusion in a marriage is like the magnetic field between two magnets. The pull is irresistible, and the two stick together. Likewise with an “emotional” magnetic field, opposite people attract and stick together, in the passion of the mating ritual. Unlike magnets, however, couples do not REMAIN stuck together indefinitely. Being stuck together eventually becomes uncomfortable for one or both parties. Disagreement, tension, or conflict emerges, and this discomfort becomes a repelling force that pushes them to distance from each other. It’s as if the polarity of the two “magnets” shifted, and now two people fly apart.
After a while, however, the distance becomes uncomfortable, and they think, “I miss you!” Thus, the two find themselves pulled irresistibly together once more. This pattern can go on indefinitely, back & forth. The fusion between these two lovers is just like the fusion each has with their own parents. The greater one’s fusion, the more doomed they are to replay the same pattern in relationships over and over again. It’s like Bill Murray in “Ground Hog Day”!
So, how does one reduce the legacy of fusion that has been passed down to us? We must learn to become observers of our own families, because we can’t change what we can’t see. If we can see the fusion in the marriages of our parents and grandparents, that is a big step toward becoming more accepting of fusion as a natural process that is nobody’s fault. We may be tempted to blame our parents or ourselves. Blame is not only incorrect, it’s counterproductive. Once we have moved from blame to acceptance, that’s when we can begin to rise above the legacy that we inherited, so we don’t have to pass the same baggage onto our kids.
Knowledge is power, and Bowen Theory can help us learn to spot this pattern of fusion that is handed down in our own families. The more we can learn to observe fusion as it is happening, the more we can control it. The more we can control ourselves, the more easily we can observe ourselves–and so on, in a positive escalation to achieve more grace under pressure.
Right now, fusion is an automatic process in our families, like our breathing or heartbeat. Most of us are unaware of how fusion with our parents currently runs our marriage, or how we contribute to an incomplete weaning in our kids. Bowen Theory helps to bring that primal, automatic process into our awareness, so we can control more of it. This can help us to reduce the drama in our marriage and in our parenting. Slowly, inch-by-inch, we can begin to take control of the instinctive behaviors that create tension and conflict in our relationships. “Taming the Fusion within us” is not an overnight process, but the truth can set us free.
