Collusive Games In The Couple

It is often said about marital relations that “there is always for a broken one, a ripped one . ” This maxim as a guide for choosing a partner tends to obey unconscious patterns, derived from the affective relationship that has been had with the parents in childhood. Thus, dysfunctional relationships between parents and children could harm the children’s relationships in the future, resulting in what is called collusive games in the couple.

In its origin, the concept of collusion is found in the studies of the Austrian psychologist Paul Watzlawick, who applied it in his theory of human communication. A posteriori, the psychotherapist Henry Dicks, in his work Marital Tensions , introduced the concept of collusion in marital relationships.

However, it was the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Jurg Willi, who popularized the term collusion or collusive games in the couple to refer to involuntary and dysfunctional behaviors between members of a couple.

These behaviors are manifested in marital conflicts. Furthermore, these toxic and unconscious dynamisms per se unite the two members of the relationship.

According to Willi, collusive behavior forms a “common unconscious” in the couple relationship, in which the conflict is constantly repeated in a succession of distance or proximity.

The members of the couple cannot bear separation, but neither can intimacy. This means that, in proximity, they feel asphyxiated and that, when they move away, they begin to suffer from the distance.

The couple goes from being an “individual me” to a “hermetic us” in which individual limits overlap, establishing the unhealthy. Thus, it is no longer possible to speak of an individual pathology, but rather of the existence of a pathology of the relationship.

Collusive polarity in the couple

In collusive dyadic dynamics, each member of the relationship manifests a polarized role. That is, each member of the couple recreates a behavioral division function of activity / passivity, submission / dominance, dependence / independence. Tacitly, what is active in one member of the couple causes inactivity in the other.

The weak member tends to a regressive and immature attitude and the more active member represents a progressive role or a false maturity, due to the fact that they necessarily act in the role of adult with respect to the other. The couple collude into a vicious defensive circle.

The origin of collusive games in the couple usually comes from repressed, similar and unhealed childhood emotional wounds. Both members need the other for a mutual healing of frustrations and unfulfilled wishes in childhood.

Each of the spouses hopes that the other will save him from his own internal conflict and free him from past fears, and to be able to heal the existing wounds of all the love or parental relationships that were not satisfactory.

In the attempt to want to heal each member of the couple their own emotional wounds, they again have the same ineffective patterns and the same difficulties to solve their marital and individual problems, leading to pain, disappointment and projecting their own fears and fears onto the other. blaming him.

In this situation, typical phrases are usually reprimanded, such as “I am like this because you … “. What is paradoxical about this marital situation is that neither member of the couple really wants to change anything about themselves, further accentuating the seriousness of the situation.

Collusion exit door

Collusive games in the couple are a trap that maintains toxic mechanisms of guilt, reproach and insecurities, and rarely does the couple find a way out by themselves.

Thus, in the marital crisis, it is possible to remain in an unhealthy relationship in a collusive way, or to no longer participate in said game and break up the marriage.

In another case, there is also the possibility of going to a specialized psychologist who guides the members of the relationship to a solution based on the wear and tear suffered by the couple.

However, love can only be built when the members of the couple abandon expectations and begin to recognize each other as an equal.

Forging expectations impossible to satisfy and not taking responsibility for your own injuries causes frustrations and introduces the couple into a sick chaos capable of destroying the self-esteem of each spouse.

It should be borne in mind that a couple is the great classroom of love in which we can learn to fall and get up. It is also possible to learn to develop all that human potential that is carried within, always from the respect and responsibility of each one.

There is usually the belief that the success of the couple is to last “a long time”; however, the secret could be quite another. For example, last “as long as it is healthy.”