We all get anxious sometimes
Most of us carry some degree of anxiety for much of our lives. Earlier in this series I explored why our anxious responses can become almost automatic, especially when events affect those closest to us. In the last article I looked at one of Murray Bowen’s observations: our tendency to form triangles under stress. Bowen identified other equally automatic responses, including fusion and emotional cut off. In this article I want to explore the first of these.
Melting Melting!
The process of fusion brings two elements together to create something new. Their previous separate identities, while they may still be visible in some form, will be lost. In the core of the Sun, extreme gravitational pressure and intense heat force hydrogen protons to fuse together into a stable helium nucleus, releasing the energy that gives us life. In fusion cooking, different culinary traditions are brought together with sometimes surprising results which may not be to everyone’s taste! When I was younger, I often thought it would be good to have chocolate coated crips but I’m not sure I would want to try them now. It’s as if all these things melt into each other, which is where the word comes from.
People Melting?
In anxious relationships, when we are stressed, our automatic response may be to turn to other people in the hope that they can manage emotions that we are struggling to regulate ourselves. This may make us feel better in the short-term, but it comes at a cost because it weakens our ability to regulate our own anxiety. Not only that, because the other person is now fused to us, it becomes harder for them to think clearly and regulate their own anxiety independently. This means that the anxiety is no longer contained in one person but gets amplified through the system.
This is getting uncomfortable
As we have seen, in the natural world fusions can be positive (none of us would be here without the sun) and some are questionable (chocolate crisps anyone?) but Bowen observed that fusions in family systems could be enormously destructive.
Once we become aware of this pattern, we notice it in many other emotional systems, including churches. The discomfort it creates often pushes us towards familiar coping strategies: drawing another person into the relationship (creating a triangle) or trying to escape the relationship altogether through emotionally cutting them off.
Not good to be alone. Not good to be fused.
In a fused system the anxiety doesn’t stop; it gets intensified. As we shall see, cutting off won’t work either. How can we find a way to stay connected yet keep our own distinctiveness? In Genesis 2:18 God recognised that it was not good for the man to be alone but the solution for that problem was not to offer the man a conjoined twin but a mutually beneficial relationship. Bowen called this capacity to remain connected while maintaining our distinctiveness differentiation. And it was going so well until the snake got involved.
If this article has resonated with you, and you would like to explore how this way of thinking might help you develop your leadership, enhance your wellbeing, or reflect more deeply on your ministry, I would be delighted to have an initial conversation with you.
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