Feeling Stressed? Come Along to Cold Comfort Farm and Stay a Child Forever
Managing Stress by Being a ‘No Self’ in the Family
Could Stress on a Gentle Farm Be the Same as Stress on the Streets of Mexico City?
Actually, yes. Compulsive conformity is the flip side of the same coin on which the other side is compulsive individuality and refusal to cooperate.
Before the promised “Defining a Self and Stress While Driving in Mexico City,” a refresher on fusion or group think is needed because the Sweat Lodge Incident and the Bushman Flying Over Vegas Incident do not address what fusion or ‘group think’ looks like in a family. Since each of us learns our methods of managing anxiety in the family—fusion in the family needs to be fully described. Cold Comfort Farm is the story of a family spiraling down in a near fatal fusion.
Fusion is when you can’t tell where you stop and the other person begins. When another person has an emotion and you are unable to keep functioning in the way you were before the other’s feeling system was activated. Fusion is a natural phenomenon and has plenty of valuable uses. Fusion can also be crippling.
Dr. Edwin Friedman ( A late teacher of mine and his last book–A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, 2007) explained the process this way: “The individuality-togetherness polarity. Persons are constantly pulled in the direction of maintaining their individuality or giving up a little of it to be harmonious group members. The pull toward the togetherness end of the continuum seems to be an automatic, instinctual emotional reaction…. The pull toward togetherness is further strengthened whenever anxiety goes up in an organization. When anxiety is elevated in an organization, the organization’s members huddle even closer together (a herding instinct).”
Now the movie example. Cold Comfort Farm is an English tale of what happens in when a young reformer involves herself in a rural family in which family members have sacrificed all individuality. The level of fusion is so intense that the Starkadders long ago gave up interacting with the outside world. As a result manners and hygiene have deteriorated to the point that utensils are not used at meals. The family’s regression is represented by the rutted muddy roads, the broken down and filthy equipment, the barrenness of the sheep and the non-milk-producing cows.
The invading young woman is a Londoner who decides to visit after her parents have both died and left her Cold Comfort Farm as part of her inheritance. The bright-eyed Flora Poste–determined to learn why the Stakadder children (in their fifties and sixties) don’t seem to be able to have relationships outside the family or leave the property to follow their dreams—learns that their mother living as a recluse upstairs holds a strange power over the family. The family members are emotional prisoners. The process is simple. Anytime anyone in the family makes a move to grow up and move away, Ada Doom, who is supposedly mad because she saw something nasty in the woodshed as a child, starts moaning about the horror in the woodshed and calls for a family “counting” meeting in
which she is reassured that no one has taken a step out of the family emotional deep freeze.
This is a picture of fusion. Talk about your ‘herding instinct’. How able are you to function as an individual when others in your emotional system are anxious?
