The Conflict of So-Called Compatibility in Marriage

Part 3 of a 5-Part A Christian Counselor on Becoming Series

 

When Sarah and Frank were a married couple on Earth, long before encountering one another in the afterlife of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce (see Part 2), they together enacted one of the core truths of “differentiation” – or maintaining a separate Self in relationship.

Namely, that people at higher and lower levels of differentiation will not seek long-term relationship with one another.

We all have more and less differentiated “parts” of ourselves. But in general, people enter into close relationships only at the same level or degree of differentiation (emotional maturity) – because this suits their zone of relational and stress tolerance.

On the surface, this “sameness” is sometimes hidden by the differences in our relationship roles.

Conflict as a Cue

As “the Lady” in heaven, Sarah has fully realized her differentiated Self. But in her earthly marriage, Sarah’s weaker ego self was lock-and-key ‘compatible’ with Frank’s undifferentiated self. Their dysfunction was co-created.

This reality is largely obscured in the honeymoon phases of relationships, both in dating and early in marriage, when brain chemistry is still firing to impress and see the best in each other.

Relational conflict is inevitable – and good. It’s meant to cue one’s awareness of the need for a more firmly defined Self, which will nurture deeper desires and safer connection.

However, instead of differentiating early in marriage, the earthly Frank and Sarah retreated into emotional merger or “fusion.” In the dance of marriage, partners can turn to a tango of hide-blame or pursue-withdraw. Or, maybe one plays the helpless or heroic martyr to the other’s dutiful repairing or rescuing. Instead of learning to Self-soothe, partners leverage for emotional control and security through this subtle role-playing – which keeps them “fused.”

Borrowing and Dealing

This fusion often reflects an ingrained pattern of what psychologist David Schnarch calls “borrowed functioning,” in which partners are expected to prop up the other’s “reflected sense of self.”

As babies we couldn’t survive without this early reflected-self, in which we see and discover ourselves through our caregivers’ eyes and their mirrored facial expressions. A baby’s first reaction to the realization of a separate “me” and “not me” – then “me” and “other” who doesn’t always meet my needs – is not pleasant. It’s a full-throated protest.

Distress is naturally a differentiating force. But it’s best absorbed in a bonding environment where normal, everyday attachment “ruptures” are well “repaired” by a caregiver who calmly reconnects with the child. From this trust-building, attachment-reinforcing experience, a child begins to internalize a healthy sense of self-in-relationship, and gain the confidence to explore.

Wanting Before Needing

Babies have innate drives towards both attachment and autonomy. These drives are never mutually exclusive, even in adulthood. However, healthier adults learn to seek connection from the base of a core Self that respects healthy “difference” (separation) – instead of operating from the reflected self’s need for sameness (fusion).

Preserving this emotional “space between” two people allows for a safer, vibrant, more supportive interdependence (I want you more than I need you) as opposed to a fragile, volatile codependence (I need you to need/want/sustain me).

Silent Vows

Ultimately this codependence diminishes both people, and results in “emotional gridlock,” Schnarch says. It destroys freedom and desire by reducing relationships to a series of murky, backroom emotional deals that are rarely acknowledged or named.

Usually, this deal-making is a survival strategy rooted in family-of-origin dynamics being replayed in the present. In marriage, wedding vows are often usurped by unconscious childhood vows. We all carry into adulthood those wounded or distrusting ‘parts’ of ourselves that feverishly work to protect us from re-experiencing rejection and loss.

However, these fragmented parts – from which we fashion distorted “false selves” – don’t function in mature ways that can tolerate risk and take responsibility for feelings and actions.

The Shadow Called Out

We are usually blind to the dysfunction of our ego personas, also known as “imposter” or Shadow selves. Especially when they are “ego-syntonic,” or insulated in comfortable patterns and belief systems that we don’t view as problematic. Until, that is, a loving partner dares to confront us – while still respecting our choices.

With her separate-and-together Self, “the Lady” called forth Frank’s humanity from the Dwarf Ghost and chained-up Tragedian. As the narrator observed:

I do not know that I saw anything more terrible than the struggle of that Dwarf Ghost against joy…For one moment, while she looked at him in her love and mirth, he saw the absurdity of the Tragedian. For one moment he did not all misunderstand her laughter: he too must once have known that no people find each other more absurd than lovers. But …this was not the meeting he had pictured; he would not accept it.

Chained by Need

Frank could not bear those humanizing glimpses of growth when his true face had shown through his ghostly persona. In an act of self-consuming sabotage, the Dwarf again “clutched at his death-line” and incited the Tragedian’s histrionic twisting of Sarah’s words. No, the Tragedian crowed, he has too much “self-respect” to stay where he clearly isn’t “needed,” where his suffering would infringe on her “self-centered little heaven.”

As the Tragedian spoke, the Dwarf began to shrink – until he was soon a speck dangling on the end of his chain. Sarah’s love stiffened, and she pointedly named Frank’s strategy of using his misery to elicit and exploit other’s pity for emotional blackmail (much like did as a child with his older sisters).  “Let go of that chain,” Sarah urged him. “Quick. There is still time. Stop it.”

But Frank’s Dwarf soon disappeared, chain and all. He had so identified with his theatrical persona that it had swallowed him whole. The Tragedian, now fading himself, faintly bleated one last time: “You do not love me.” Sarah replied:

If it would help you and if it were possible, I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me… I cannot love a lie.

Christian Counseling: Finding the Genuine Self

Part 4 of this series examines the pitfalls of a love that relies on others for validation or completion. The poetic brilliance of The Great Divorce is that, in numerous conversations between Solid People and ghosts, it reveals how often the ideal of “sacrificial love” is romanticized, conditional and idolatrous.

As one Bright Spirit explains to a ghost, earthly love is sometimes thwarted – with hopes that, “in the loneliness, in the silence, something else might begin to grow.”

That ‘something else’ is what Christian counseling helps to facilitate: namely, an awareness of the core Self, and its capacity for a more differentiated, genuine love. If this is the story you find yourself in, you are welcome to contact me here.