Fusion Merger Part 1 – Bad Love and Good Love

Of course, it is never simply good or bad love. There is always a spectrum and most of us fall somewhere in the middle. The point is to understand those aspects of the individuals and the relationship between them that might be improved and with that improvement move toward the healthier side of the spectrum. There is an appendix attached to this article that gives alternate characteristics on either side of the spectrum. I have significantly modified Dr. Eekhoff’s original appendix and I hope it is useful as a tool for couples to evaluate their relationship together.

I think this material will also allow all of you to take a good close look into your history of relationships and get a fairly honest evaluation of what went wrong and why. The goal, of course, is to move toward relationships that are healthier, last longer, and are the sources of great joy instead of great sadness.

But first a bit of history: Combining Freud and recent developments in Evolutionary Psychology, we understand that humans were not creatures that survived in isolation. For thousands of years, humans only existed in small tribes throughout the entire world. We desperately need companionship of one kind or another. We desperately need family relationships and a community to survive at all. The worst punishment a traditional society could impose on one of its members was banishment. Even today, solitary confinement is punishment for a reason – it hurts. We are creatures who, often desperately, need connection with each other to survive at any level of of health, so we keep trying. And that is why the Greeks wrote tragedy.

I want to emphasize an important point here. This way of thinking about individuals in relationships is really about a style of relating derived from infant and child development and the characterological style of relating that evolves from early in life. It is not a label of pathology. On a bad day we can all get a little primitive. On a bad day we can all get a little crazy and we struggle on a daily basis to continue to be integrated, to become better human beings.

We can only get better and continue the developmental process when we are in relationships. There is no development accomplished in isolation; character development requires connection. Purely intellectual development might be furthered when alone reading good books, but character development requires healthy relationships.

So I will call the love that exists between two people who are mostly whole, healthy individuals with a relatively sold sense of themselves and their identities, Good Love or Merger. If it is down on the fusion end of the spectrum we are talking about two people who very rarely have a well-developed sense of their own identity and they glom on to each other as a substitute for that identity. The relationship ends up substituting for a solid, stable self. That is the primary reason those kind of relationships are often volatile. A threat to the relationship, then, is felt by the parties as a threat to their very identities and that, sadly, often results in a great deal of verbal and emotional conflict and abuse and, at times, very aggressive behavior and even violence. Fusion style relationships are volatile, sometimes dangerous, and most of the time unpleasant. They are always drenched in anxiety. This is Fusion or Bad Love.

Psychology as a field has never been very good at describing health. We were pretty good at describing pathology. We know mental illness when we see it, we know how to help people who are diagnosed as mentally ill. But no theory of mind has has ever done a good job of describing what mental health is. I think that is one of the great advantages of Dr. Eekhoff’s paper in that she is one of the first I have read to describe what healthy love means. While the poets have been working for thousands of years on the meaning of love, it seems like it has taken a psychologist to make a profound addition to the poetic history of discussions of love.

Before we get into the details of the difference between good love and bad love, it is essential to understand a little bit about child development. The assumption is of the primary importance of development from birth through 5 years. There is even good research recently that prenatal development is where development really begins and that the experience of the fetus in the womb has a profound developmental impact on all post-natal mental health. If your needs were not adequately met at any of the several early developmental levels then development gets derailed and the sense of self ends up symptomatic. And relationships are, to that extent, troubled.

( I am not going to cover the ground I have already thoroughly covered on the various infant and child development lectures available on this web site. Understanding them is essential to have any appreciation for where you are as an adult.)

One of Dr. Eekhoff’s great insights is that two people never get together, never form a relationship, unless they are very close on the continuum. This is absolutely central to understanding relationships at every level. I am a psychotherapist in private practice for over 20 years. People come into my office all the time with something like the following, “Mr. Bigelow, can you help me fix my partner, I am actually in pretty good shape. My partners the one that is really troubled.” My answer is if your partner is that troubled, why are you with them? You may have a different level of trouble in terms of the style, but people do not get together in even medium-term relationships where they are not substantially equal in psychic structure. The style of their illness may be different. You may get a masochist that tends to hook up with a narcissist, but their psychic structures are always going to be about the same and on the continuum from bad love to good love, fusion to merger, you are going to find that they are almost always right next to each other wherever they are on the continuum.

This little bit of inconvenient truth frustrates people and causes anxiety because almost everyone can see the faults their partners so much easier than they can see the faults in themselves. This is both a problem and an opportunity for a real solution to the relational problems. It puts the problem squarely in your own personal lap if you are in a relationship with problems – and who isn’t?

Step one is to fix yourself. You must recognize how you are contributing to the dynamic that is causing you both stress and trouble in the relationship. One of the great insights is this: You cannot change your partner. You cannot make them do something that they do not want to do. You cannot force them to be someone they are not or to grow beyond their defense mechanisms or their psychic structure. In some ways this is a bit tragic and perhaps unfortunate, but it is human nature and there is no way around it.

We have only one way to influence any partner we are in a meaningful relationship with and that is to inspire them with our shining example. In any relationship with a problem, the partner’s first effort is to look inside him or herself. To look back into your own development and decide more honestly where you are and how you got there. If you think your partner is somewhere on the Fusion-Merger spectrum, you need to recognize that you are probably standing right next to him or her on that continuum for the same reasons or similar reasons that he or she is. It is humbling and sometimes we are in denial about our own issues. Okay, we are always in denial about our own issues. It is always so much easier and so much more convenient to see other people’s problems rather than our own. My hope is that this article will give many of you hope and will give many of you, perhaps, the motivation to take this way of thinking and improve your relationships.

A final note: This material is not just about romantic relationships. This is in some ways how we all relate to each other regardless of the nature of the relationship. This is how humans relate wherever we are on the continuum and wherever our developmental trajectory has left us.

In Part 2, I will begin the analysis of the details of each relationship style.)