Controlling Anxiety is About Managing Relationships
Anxiety is the result of merging too much, either in relationships or in our internal systems (the emotional system versus the thinking brain).
Anxiety is universal to all humans. It’s a complex idea that is best understood as a problem between systems. Systems exist between people (relationships) and inside of us (the emotional system versus the thinking brain).
Since anxiety is natural and necessary for all of us, it’s not anxiety that is the problem, it’s fusion. Fusion results from the merging of people into each other, or the merging of the emotional system versus thinking brain. When our emotional systems take over our thinking brains, an emotional hijacking occurs; our brain is no longer doing the driving, the emotional system is.
The result (or symptom) of fusion is the anxiety we feel. Imagine you’re in a group of people minding your own business and suddenly the person next to you starts yelling and ducks. You immediately respond in fight, flight, or freeze mode. The people around you feel your response and respond as well. Everyone is feeling the effects of fusion. One person’s experience influenced their behavior, and then it influenced your behavior, and then your behavior influenced those around you. The individual systems inside of us merged. And then the systems between people start to merge. Reactivity is contagious.
Anxiety and fusion are responsible for individual symptoms and relationship problems.
If we take this to a personal scale, imaging you’re in a relationship with your partner. They come home from work grumpy. You feel that and immediately start responding with caretaking behavior, negativity, or distance. Their experience had an impact on you, even if you have nothing to do with their grumpiness. This contagious experience (anxiety) is driven by the merging of one person’s system to another’s (fusion).
Think about last time you fought with your partner. One person started with a bid for their needs, and it escalated from there. Visualize a tennis game. One person serves the ball. If they serve it nicely, we send it back relatively nicely. If someone gets competitive or angry, we start lobbing it at each other with force. How we make a bid for our needs influences how our partner responds. How they respond influences how we continue to interact or escalate. A series of micro-transgressions from one interaction to another can escalate a request to an argument. Our systems, once again, merge (fusion). Fusion drives us to merge and then results in distance; nobody wants to be around each other after a big argument.
Fusion and anxiety are normal and only problematic when imbalanced.
Fusion is the force that drives all humans into relationships, even from birth. We have to find a balance between the parts of ourselves we need to give up in order to be in relationships, and the parts we want to keep. This causes a lot of internal conflict which is felt as anxiety.
Fusion is necessary. Without giving up certain parts of ourselves, we would never keep social order or survive. We would hit, punch and kick to get what we need long past toddlerhood. We would not self regulate well enough to create peace. We fuse to belong or fit in in a variety of ways. Fusion is normal, but when it’s not within functional limits we see a host of problems including anxiety, impulsiveness, arguments and conflict, difficulty getting things done, shame, self-doubt, self-criticism, stress, depression, trouble sleeping, loneliness, fear, violence, and even war.
The key to managing our internal systems is about learning to keep the thinking brain “hands” on the steering wheel.
Skilled anxiety counselors who understand fusion and anxiety help individuals learn how to maintain a separation between their emotional systems and thinking brains through a series of repetitive exercises designed to separate the two. This concept is also applied in couples counseling to decrease conflict and restore a balance between two people who are trying to remain individuals while having a successful connection. Relationships demand fusion, but too much merging causes all the symptoms you see in relationships from repetitive arguments to affairs, abuse, and divorce.
When the emotional system hijacks the logical system, or one person is influenced by the other’s anxiety, we loose our grip on the steering wheel of who we want to be and what that behavior looks like. The thinking brain is no longer doing the driving. Learning to transcend the automatic experience of the emotional system is hard.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT’s) are likely to be the practitioners you will find most well-versed in the subject of anxiety and fusion because they are experts in relationship systems. The LMFT is a subspecialty in therapy that focuses on understanding the complex balancing between being an individual and an individual within other systems (work, school, relationships).
Everyone deserves a chance to be happy and calmer. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. These are difficult concepts to understand and apply. Anxiety therapy is effective and rewarding when it targets the core problems and promotes lasting change. Feel free to call to discuss your concerns and needs.
