Why We Have Relationship Problems
Mr. Shankar Vedantam’s February 12 article in the Washington Post, “Plagued With Relationship Troubles? Blame Your Parents!” told how your interactions with Mommy at one year of age can shape your romantic relationships at 21. This article will tell you why.
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? The answer is a concept in Bowen Family Systems Theory called “fusion.” Understanding fusion is crucial because most of us are blind to this instinctive force in our marriages. The good news is that once we understand how fusion works, we can begin to treat the cause of relationship problems, rather than just treating the symptoms.
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.
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 of her own. Many people would view her efforts as noble.
The truth is, we often feel more love from our kids than from our spouses, so we make our children the center of our lives. And they’re paying a heavy price for our anxious focus on them. Instead of being children, they are now shouldering the burden of meeting the needs that only a spouse can fulfill. From the outside, it seems as though this model is child-friendly, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The ultimate result is a double-whammy for the kids: over-burdening them with emotional baggage and (often times) the separation of their parents. It also impairs a child’s independence and survival skills. Without realizing it, we parents may be sending our child mixed messages about whether to grow up or not. A loving parent with the best of intentions may (unknowingly) create his or her own worst nightmare.
The challenge of course, is to walk that fine line between nurturing and smothering a child. 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.
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, or 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.
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.
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.
