BP 107
Zach was an only child. He was born in northwestern North Dakota to a father who eked out a living on a hard scrabble farm and a mother who worked in a nearby town as a paralegal to the only lawyer in a seventy-five-mile radius.
From the beginning, the marriage was a mistake. Zach’s father, Bill, was emotionally young–i.e., egocentric–abused alcohol when work on the farm became too difficult, and, on occasion, was verbally and physically abusive. He even tried to rape his wife on one occasion. At least, that was his wife’s version of the story.
Bill’s wife, Maria, had grown up with a father who was emotionally volatile and with ten siblings, eight of them brothers. Two of the brothers sexually abused Maria when she was young. Understandably, then, Bill triggered in Maria all the fear, shame, and bitterness she still entertained for her father and her two incestuous brothers.
By the time Zach was born to Maria and her husband, Maria had already divorced her husband—emotionally, that is. Also, sexual intimacy had not occurred between the couple since Maria discovered she was pregnant with Zach. The emotional and sexual divorce of her husband opened the door wide for Maria to invest herself in her newborn who was the safest male on the planet for her. So it was that over the next eighteen years, all of Maria’s time, her relational needs, and her love were focused on her little boy.
While her husband milked the dairy cows or watched football with a pile of beers in his lap, Maria would sit with Zach in the other room and listen to him talk for hours. Often, her son would sit next to her on the couch, and she would hold his hand and rub his back. She never grew tired of listening to her son. Zach was her golden boy, 180 degrees different than her no-good husband.
Bill was not very emotionally attuned to his environment, but even he was aware of the growing intimacy between his wife and son. At first, it seemed like a natural bond between a mother and her child. Later, Bill felt that they were way too connected especially when he was regularly left out of the relational equation.
As the years went by, Bill became increasingly resentful of Zach. Not only was the boy taking his wife away from him, but the little guy was also more attractive and emotionally intelligent than his father. Years later, Bill would come to the realization that he was in competition with his own son for his wife’s love.
As Bill’s jealousy grew, so did the amount of his drinking and his anger. If Maria and Zach were already unhealthily close, Bill’s increasingly volatile personality drove them together even more.
Zach’s dependency on his mother was further intensified by his low self esteem due to his father’s demeaning anger vented regularly toward him. The radiant sunshine of his mother’s face and her welcoming presence shone through the dark storm clouds of his father’s rage and bitterness. Her idealization of him made him feel like he was the most special boy in the whole world. He was, indeed, a precious gift, mother’s most valued possession.
Around the time Zach was five, he began to protect his mother from his father’s ugly moodiness and abuse. Whenever his dad became angry or verbally abusive toward Maria, Zach would tell his dad to leave his mother alone. He became hypervigilant to his mother’s wellbeing and would always examine her face to see how she was feeling on the inside. It was easy for Zach to read his mother not only because he was so aware of her but because she wore her feelings on her sleeve—in this case, on her face.
Besides protecting the mother who idolized him, Zach began asking her questions about her life. One day, whether by design or accident, Maria crossed a line. She revealed to her son that she had been sexually abused by her brothers. She went into detail. She wept. She allowed Zach to hold her. It was an unparalleled moment of intimacy between a mother and her son.
It was also the day incest was born between Maria and Zach.
Maria and Zach became like spouses minus any sexual contact (even though they did still hold hands on the couch, and they massaged each other’s back often). Maria and her son talked about everything. Nothing was private. Zach heard a lot of negative things about his dad and the other men in his mother’s life who had demeaned her or sexually abused her.
When Zach remained very close to his mother as a teenager, he began to feel very guilty as a male. At the onset of puberty, he began to feel aroused by girls (and maybe even a bit by his mother’s touch). So, he felt desire and he felt guilt. Wasn’t it the selfish and abusive sexuality of men that had hurt his mother so deeply? So how could he enjoy his own developing sexuality as a male when his mother had spoken so often about the pain it had caused her?
Despite his conflicted feelings, Zach began to date girls—many of them over the next ten years. These relationships were characterized by lots of talking and lots of touching. He never had intercourse with these girls because intercourse is what his mother had wept about so many times. But he did everything else. Touch and talk and eye contact were all very important to him. After all, it was what he had learned over the previous 16 years. He gave so much time, attention, and affection to these girls and women that he became their golden man. He was so much more thoughtful and aware of them than all the other boys and men they had dated.
Little did they know that Zach’s attention to them was not about love but about a deep hunger for being seen and valued. Perfectly.
Zach ended up breaking up with all the women he dated. Was it the nagging guilt about being sexual with them? Was it that none of them were quite as perfect as his mother had been and that they all ended up disappointing him? Both were probably true.
Psychobabble tells us that Zach cherished enmeshment. He wanted to be very close to others—especially women. He wanted them to see him, touch him, value him, meet his every need when he wanted and how he wanted. His mother was always good at that. Shouldn’t he expect the same from other women?
Zach had very little patience for women who failed to give him what he wanted.
When his mother died suddenly in a car accident, Zach immediately moved to Fargo for graduate school in pharmacology and began dating another girl. He bonded to her very quickly. As usual, they became sexual within days—everything but the intercourse. Zach became very attracted to this woman because she, like his mother, listened to him and gave him what he wanted. In short, she made him feel special.
Maybe she did not disappoint him like all the other girls had done. Or maybe it was because his mother was gone, and he needed an immediate replacement. Or maybe she was more attentive than all the other girls, the best one ever. Whatever it was, Zach decided that Cassie was perfect. So, they got married and had two children—boys. All seemed perfect.
But a storm began brewing within five years of their wedding day.
Cassie and Zach entered the marriage with an unspoken, subconscious vow/contractual agreement. Zach focused all his emotional energy on Cassie, protected her from other men who he perceived as being attracted to her, and spent hours every day listening to her every word.
Cassie was attracted to this intense version of attention from Zach since she had grown up in a home where her mother was unavailable due to her own depression and her father was a nice man but did not possess a high level of emotional intelligence (similar to Zach’s father). So, Cassie was hungry for love and initially responded well to the marital enmeshment where she was available for her husband 24/7 even at the expense of the boys.
Because she was rewarded with Zach’s amazing connection with her, Cassie was willing to tolerate Zach’s need for frequent sex during which he demanded that she be completely engaged and the marathon late-night talks. Besides, she did not know what normal or healthy was after growing up in a disengaged family system. It is difficult to know how far to swing the pendulum in the other direction when most of your life has been fixed at one extreme end of the continuum. So it was that Cassie tolerated the pendulum swing from disengaged to the other extreme: enmeshed.
As time went by, Cassie began to notice that her role with Zach was to always give him what he wanted (especially sex on demand and her undivided attention). She also realized that her husband had no patience with their two boys. He was easily frustrated by them if they took her away from him and his need for attention.
The day eventually came when Cassie saw that the boys represented competition for Zach (the dynamic between his parents was repeated). They were not sons but interlopers who took the wife away from her husband.
For the first ten years of the marriage, Cassie gave Zach what he wanted even though she began to have an inkling that Zach loved her for what she did for him. He did not actually love her as a person who had separate needs. He loved her for her function—to make him feel good, seen, and special.
Due to her husband’s increasing irritation with the boys and her own growing sensation that she was trapped and depressed, Cassie sought out a counselor in Fargo. It did not take her therapist long to point out that she was in an enmeshed relationship with a husband who wanted her not to be her true self but to be a mirror on demand (like his mother) who would reflect his value through perfect listening and would replicate the golden boy status he had experienced with his emotionally needy mother.
Cassie’s counselor suggested that her husband’s mother may have intentionally bonded tightly with Zach as a way to passive-aggressively make her abusive husband jealous and that Cassie herself needed to be aware if she was unhealthily investing in the children as a way to spite her husband.
More than anything else, Cassie needed to stop being her husband’s object of gratification and separate from the enmeshed relationship. The marriage, indeed, was not built on love but on merger. Instead of healthily becoming one flesh, they had unhealthily become one person. Cassie could only exist in the marriage if she continued to be the woman Zach demanded she be. True Cassie was not welcome because she was selfish (separate from Zach).
As Cassie began to disengage from the enmeshed marriage, Zach began to grow more irritable. He accused his wife of being selfish. He demanded sex every day. He threatened to divorce her (which in some ways is what was needed—healthy separateness within the marriage) or even to kill himself if she did not give him what he wanted because her boundaries were a sure sign that she did not love him anymore and was going to leave him. He even proposed an open marriage where he could find other women to give him everything he wanted while at the same time remaining married to Cassie.
As Cassie grew healthier–setting consistent boundaries and asking Zach to love her as the person she was instead of loving her for the functions she provided (as his mother had done)–Zach began to decompensate to the point that he had to be hospitalized due to strong suicidal urges and an inability to slow down his racing mind enough to sleep. Being separated from his wife turned out to be extremely distressing for the man who had always found a woman to be merged with since he was born. He discovered that it was very painful to be surgically (psychologically) severed from his kindred spirit and to rely on his own ego strength instead of parasitically relying on his wife.
The bottom line: Zach had to grow into a separate person who was strong in his own strength. The healthy goal was not to become totally independent and self-sufficient, just interdependent instead of smotheringly dependent.
After the hospitalization, Zach began his own therapy and slowly realized what Cassie was telling him, namely, that he was controlling her and shaping her into the person he demanded she be instead of learning to love her for being herself. He learned (very slowly) to accept that his wife might say no to him, have different opinions, and not always be available to him. What was most challenging for Zach to believe about the breakup of the marriage merger was that Cassie was leaving the enmeshment behind, not leaving him.
As he continued to grow, Zach learned that the only way his wife could truly love him willingly and genuinely was to be separate and not enmeshed because enmeshment was about caretaking, not love.
Initially, Zach’s counselor was present with a lot of listening and empathy because he knew his client was too fragile to be challenged too much. The therapist had to engage Zach a bit carefully because if he ever made him feel bad or angry, Zach would want to get up and walk out of the room.
Only after two years did the counselor actively address Zach’s personality disorder grounded in fear and abandonment that led him to demand that people be what he needed them to be. The therapist knew that for Zach, enmeshment meant that he would never be alone while being separate from others was tantamount to being alone forever and was almost unbearable for Zach.
Over time, Zach began to tolerate boundaries even if they triggered fears of abandonment and panic. He grew enough to see that he had walked away from God years ago because God had not always responded the way he wanted. When Zach felt like God was not hearing him or helping him, he angrily assumed that God did not love him and so He turned His back and walked away. Of course, he then perceived that God had left Him, not that he had left God in his boyish impulsivity.
Zach came to see that he had an open marriage with Jesus built on conditional love. His relationship with God was similar to the one he had with his wife, namely, if you give me what I want and always respond the way I demand, then I know you love me, and I will stay close to you. But if you do not give me what I want or show your love for me by answering all my prayers the manner I want and in the timing I want, then I will assume you do not love me. I will then walk away from you and find someone else to meet my needs.
Zach grew up with poor or no boundaries between him and his mother. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the relationship was emotionally incestuous and even physically sketchy. When he got married to Cassie, he demanded the same type of relationship, namely, one based not on love but on a merger where she became Zach’s alter ego, his shadow, his ever-present incestuous mother. He wanted to repeat with Cassie the unhealthy closeness he had experienced with his mother. Such a relationship could only work if Cassie “died”.
What can we learn from Zach’s life?
If we only love God because He answers our prayers and gives us what we want (the prosperity gospel for some), we are in danger of demanding that the God of the universe become who we want Him to be and that we will only love Him if serves us. Insisting that God be at our beck and call is not mature faith and love but the conditional love of a two-year-old child or a hormone-driven teenager who declares that he hates his parents if they do not give him what he wants (e.g., enough time on screens).
Immature people demand objects of gratification, the opposite of healthy love. When we insist that God and others give us what we want and take care of our fragile egos according to our demands, we are objectifying them, making them into beings who exist totally for our satisfaction.
All of us must grow out of our young fears, our merger desires, and our using of others. Instead, we must learn how to love God and others in a sacrificial manner that leads to trust in God and a servant love toward others. If you see this immature demand for gratification in you, do not hide in shame or project it onto God and others, but choose to grow.
Invite Jesus into every nook and cranny of your heart and your relationships. We are all born broken, as are our parents, and so we will struggle with mature intimacy skills. The issue is not whether we need to grow. The issue is if we will choose to grow or not. So, allow the Holy Spirit (through someone you trust) to expose all your conditional love and demanding selfishness because to do that is a step toward becoming like Jesus–mature.
Lastly, it is true that some people will struggle more than most with the issue of merger and enmeshment. Psychologists might even diagnose them as narcissists or plagued by some other personality disorder. If you are in such a relationship, recognize what is going on. Set boundaries. Get professional help as needed.
Always remember that Jesus came to bring us abundant life as beloved daughters and sons while Satan came to kill a person’s spirit and to convince her that she exists to make the creature happy instead of to glorify the Creator.
We encounter in this blog post yet another amazing reason that Jesus is in the world, namely, when we are unconditionally loved by the God of the universe, we do not need to suck the life out of others to fill our emptiness. He loved us first and will fill us with His love. Then and only then can we go and love others instead of using them to fill our primitive needs and calm our fears of abandonment.
Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen ~ Romans 8:24, 25
Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony ~ Colossians 3:12-14