Why ‘Oneness’ is not codependence
In contemporary Western life, it’s pretty safe to say that it can be hard to figure out what is ‘ours’, vs. what is ‘someone else’s’, vs. what’s happening in the intersubjective field (the field between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’). Beginners to nonduality and Eastern lineages have an added challenge as we start to flirt with the idea that maybe there isn’t even an ‘us’, or a ‘someone else.’ As a psychotherapist, I find myself talking in sessions with clients all day long about boundaries: how they’re important, how we need to have them, how to assert them, how not to let other people trample them. How we’re worthy of them (I could go on but I’ll leave it because you get the idea!). As a nondual teacher, I find myself talking about transcending boundaries– arriving at an understanding of the true Self where the concept of boundaries becomes irrelevant. As you can imagine, it can feel like I’m paradigm-juggling as I go from a psychotherapy session to a nonduality discussion.
But when my ‘psychotherapist hat’ is safely perched on my head, thinking about whether or not we ‘own’ what we’re bringing to perception and to present-moment interaction, takes me to the concept of healthy boundaries (from Family Systems theory). Within this theory, we find two problematic, unhealthy directions boundaries can veer off towards. The first unhealthy direction is if our boundaries are too diffuse, with no differentiation. Family theorists noted that ‘too diffuse’ boundaries signified enmeshment between people—a type of codependent dynamic where it felt impossible to find a beginning or end between two individuals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when people lean towards enmeshed boundaries, they often end up confused about who did what, and where personal responsibility begins and ends. Subsequently, they often end up taking responsibility for ‘stuff’ that isn’t really theirs, simultaneously not knowing when they’re participating in, and actually co-creating, dynamics.
To illustrate a classic example of this type of enmeshment dynamic playing out in a family, let’s imagine a young adult child (let’s call her Claire) of a middle-aged woman (Patti) whose own mother (Iva) was hospitalized for depression. Now let’s also imagine that Claire starts to dip into a career-dissatisfaction -related- slump. Here’s how a phone call between Claire and Patti might go. Claire shares that she’s been feeling down, wondering aloud whether she should look for a new job. Claire notices that Patti starts sounding overly concerned and anxious in her responses to Claire’s musings about job-hunting. From an understanding of transference, we could say that Patti, who probably has gotten triggered to her own
childhood when Iva was hospitalized, has started worrying that Claire will end up catatonic with depression. Given how much mom-guilt and mother-blaming there is in our culture, perhaps Patti starts blaming herself, feeling like if she’d been a better mom to Claire, or a better role model of how to balance career with the rest of life, maybe Claire wouldn’t be struggling so much. To Claire, it might feel like Patti is unable to tolerate Claire’s sadness. Claire (who is just sad, not clinically depressed like Iva) gets confused about whether she’s ‘made’ Patti anxious. She thinks to herself “I need to stop telling Mom when stuff in my life isn’t going well, it stresses her out.”
Nervous-system wise, this also gets super confusing because of how easy it is for us to get hijacked into other people’s nervous system states. If you think of gazelles in the Serengeti, we can grasp how this hijacking happens in a heartbeat. If one gazelle spots a lion, and her nervous system goes into fight/flight, instantly the other gazelles will perceive ‘uh oh! Danger—let’s get out of here.’ The issue is that this type of non-verbal communication of danger is hard-wired into us for survival. We’d be fighting our nature (not to mention kidding ourselves!) to think that it’s not gonna happen. The ‘goal’ of spiritual seeking isn’t to ‘turn off’ our neuroception such that we don’t get dysregulated when another person is dysregulated. But, it would be disingenuous to think that spiritual maturity wouldn’t involve some ‘nonreactivity’, in the sense that residing in the ground of being would help us not get swept up into drama, fear and other people’s distortions.
While enmeshment leads to blurriness, and confusion around who is responsible for what, too rigid boundaries also create confusion. In family systems, with too rigid boundaries, you see a lot of cut-offs, distance and falling-outs. Too rigid boundaries often mean a person ends up not taking responsibility, not seeing their ‘behaviors’ (perhaps distancing behaviors, avoidance, shutting down, dissociating, or going numb) as behaviors at all. This speaks to a phenomenon which has to do with ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ symptoms. Rather than indicating that something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in clinical psychotherapy, we call something a ‘positive symptom’ when we gesture to the presence of a symptom (which is bad) vs. negative symptoms (which are also bad). By negative symptoms we mean the absence of normal functioning. Distancing, avoidance, numbness can all be seen as negative phenomena, in the sense that they signal a lack of presence—but they are less overt than ‘positive symptoms’. Behaviors like yelling, hitting, saying mean things are ‘positive’ symptoms in the sense that we can see them–they constitute the presence of problematic expressions. So a person can be ‘doing’ distancing, but they can pretend that they’re ‘not doing anything’ (just ask half the people in the couples I work with, who are infuriated by their partners’ ‘invisible’ behaviors.)
Balanced, healthy boundaries, (the middle point between diffuse and rigid), are defined by ‘healthy differentiation’, which means: I am able to feel connected, where appropriate, but I also know myself as myself, I know where I begin and end. There’s enough permeability to find connection, but it’s not an open-door. Nor am I a fortress and nothing’s getting through.
Thinking nondualistically, we immediately apprehend some challenges with these psychological conceptualizations of healthy differentiation. Some people (like me, and many clients who started working with me), begin their personal process work with an already diffuse understanding of ‘self’. We start off energetically sensitive; we are children of narcissists and addicts. We have intense, close relationships, and frequently early experiences of trauma and neglect. Attachment-wise, we’re often anxious-ambivalent leaning. Folks who lean quite rigid, on the other hand, have gone all in on the myth of the separate self. In my experience, these clients have very robust defenses, trend avoidant on the attachment spectrum, and are less likely to end up on my couch or at a meditation retreat because of their skepticism and DIY ethos. To quote a dear friend talking fondly about his very hard-working, generous, competent wife, “she lives 3 feet in front of her face—philosophical self-inquiry holds no appeal to her.”
But since I’m bringing in these concepts of boundaries to make the case for marrying nonduality AND healthy boundaries, let me talk about the hazards that can arise if we jump too quickly to throwing out the idea of healthy boundaries in our zeal to get to a construct of nondual oneness. To do so, let’s go to the Enneagram. Although I’m not going to fully get into all the nuances of the Enneagram, as it’s such a complex system that it could, and has, taken entire books just to explain the frame, I’m going to touch on one example to give you the flavor of how boundary confusions, conceptualized from an enneagram understanding, led to misperceptions that engage defenses, stranding us even more in egoic suffering.
In the enneagram model, type 2s (helpers) and type 9s (peacemakers) constitute the ‘merging’ types. From the family systems perspective, we could say that these are the types quite prone to enmeshment. Although 2s and 9s are similar, the underlying aim behind the merge is what distinguishes a 2 from a 9. A 2–who yearns for loving connection above all else– merges as an attempt to find love. 9s (what I used to self-identify as) yearn for peace and harmony. Thinking about the defenses of both, we could say twos use repression of personal needs and feelings to avoid appearing needy, and to maintain a helpful self-image. A 9’s favorite defense is numbing out, or avoiding (some call this ‘narcotization’, which makes sense because sometimes 9s struggle with substance addiction–or, in my case, rom com addiction).
So let’s take a perception/misperception example with a type 9 ( I’ll always have a soft spot for type 9s 🙂) that demonstrates boundary blurriness and subsequent confusion about what is mine, vs. what is yours, vs. what’s happening in the intersubjective field. In a slippery way, if my working understanding of peace is that everyone is in alignment, I might merge to avoid conflict, to keep us in the illusion of alignment. If I know that you like pizza, and you come downstairs at 6 pm and ask what I’m thinking about dinner, before even consciously considering what I want, I might have deduced that we won’t have conflict if *I* want pizza. Voila! I am likely to suggest pizza. Given that we’re talking about these issues to focus on misperceptions, what I’m suggesting here is that because our conditioning runs so deep, we might have no conscious awareness that a part of us has suggested pizza out of a desire to remain in alignment, to people please, or to anticipate what the other person wants (a projection in the medical scrubs of the pathological caretaking part). So instead of perceiving what we ourselves authentically want, we’re in the misperception that we think we’re articulating what we want, but we may have no idea what is actually true for us.
So, continuing on with this example, let’s say I’ve said ‘let’s go get pizza!’. But then we go to the pizza place, and it’s noisy, and overpriced, and I happen to remember I’ve been trying to eat less carbs because I don’t want to end up obese like my parents. And let’s say the person who my unconscious mind predicted wanted pizza then expresses impatience with how crowded it is at the pizza place. I might feel vaguely dissatisfied, or irritated, or get confused about who even suggested pizza. If I went in the direction of having thoughts like: “ugh, it’s so annoying that you always want pizza” Or, “I never really wanted to come here–this was a bad idea”, I’m likely to end up in suffering, feeling genuinely frustrated, maybe resentful, like I’m the innocent party. It would be very challenging to figure out who did what, who contributed to what, and how not to stew in the yucky feelings.
As with all enneagram types, the defense (which is unconscious) represents the near enemy of the actually good thing (conscious awareness of the truth of our nondual nature, where we are both not separate, in our beingness, and unperturbed about working out respective shakti preferences, in our becomingness). While we could consider the ‘pinnacle’ of spiritual seeking an entirely different merge, a unity, or expansiveness, or, to go all the way back to Prendergast, a sojourn to the y dimension, this type of defended, chameleon-compromise merge, where I’ve forgotten or erased myself in order to ‘keep the peace’ and avoid conflict, is a superhighway to keeping things in shadow. And keeping ego parts in shadow is a surefire way for me to stay ‘stuck’ in a lower level of consciousness, lusting after a concept of awakening, a desire for oneness and non-separateness.
While 9-style behaviors, or these kinds of chameleon-shapeshifting merges might superficially look like a relinquishing of a separate self, I would argue that they’re driven by fear, not a true understanding of ourselves as non- separate in our Beingness. And, paradoxically, this type of merge reinforces separateness. A dear friend (who identifies as an enneagram 2) brought up a hilarious metaphor of a skill he learned in childhood which involved superficially aligning with the person with emotional power in a given situation. He likened the experience to a bank robbery, imagining that he would go over to the masked gunmen robbing the bank and make it seem like they were best friends, and that he was so charismatic, sympathetic to the gunman’s situation, and on the gunman’s side, that the robber couldn’t possibly hurt him.
Some writers have distinguished how merging can represent antithetical phenomena, even while on the surface looking exactly the same. I appreciate the distinctions they offer. For instance, Cicci Lyckow Bäckman expresses that, especially in the English language, by merge we mean “two things…becoming one, blending into one another and, permanently or temporarily, losing their separate identities.” She writes: “what …we mean by that… depends on whether we’re referring to what we might call active or passive merging — or, perhaps, expansion on the one hand and shrinking on the other.” Bäckman’s point speaks to the way that the type 9 ‘chameleon’ merge –fueled by defensive fear –is actually a passive shrinking, functionally resulting in one making oneself smaller or being absorbed by the other. Paradoxically, this type of merge actually reinforces separateness and duality, rather than dissolving it, as it’s only in the paradigm of separateness that a merge could even exist.
What started to become more clear to me as I worked with this issue first with myself, and then in the practice lab with clients, is that having a better understanding of the misunderstanding we find ourselves in helps us find the antidote, the way back to the truth of our essential, nondual nature: both rigid (in form) and diffuse (in formlessness).