The daydream of Crastor and Illyrio raises, among other questions, the question of why we stay in unhealthy relationships. I’m not just referring to partner or family relationships, but any relationship. Whatever your dating history, I’d wager that you’ve probably felt trapped in an unhealthy relationship with someone or something at some point in your life. What makes these relationships so hard to leave? Is it simply that the ratio of benefits to drawbacks is sufficiently high?
Different people stay in different kinds of unhealthy relationships for different reasons. Only one thing is certain: we stay because we are getting something out of it. In extreme cases, that something is survival, i.e. “if I try to leave, he’ll kill me.” More commonly, though, the reward is something more personal, and it speaks to some yearning that is at the core of who we are.
It is this yearning that presently concerns us. We stay in bad relationships for the same reasons that we stay in good ones. The common threads across all our relationships reveal what we are trying to get out of life. In this post, I will describe one of my most prominent common threads. Then, I will propose that we do not necessarily pursue such threads—such images—because the pursuit feels good, but because the pursuit helps us to feel situated in the world.
For better or for worse, I tend to stay in relationships that, among other things, relieve me of the burden of having to think for myself. This brings me back to the union. I’ve already recounted the experience of joining my worker’s union. It was great at first. I felt like I belonged.
However, as I got to know the core team better, doubts crept in. I was put off by their “eat the rich” attitude and their language of “militant organizing”. We canvassed in pairs, and sometimes my partners were so pushy that we got locked out of offices. Sometimes they made rude comments to workers who wouldn’t sign up, teasing those who were financially secure, or making a loud show of saying “Not all of us can afford to just think about ourselves!” When I couldn’t help out with a phone banking or canvassing session, my comrades had a hard time taking no for an answer. Once, I told the union volunteer on the other end of the phone, “I’ve got to go now, I’m at a really important family dinner,” which was true, and she proceeded to barrel ahead, correctly betting that I’d be too polite to hang up on her. Another time, our head steward nearly got us arrested during a protest. I began to feel that the folks in the union were crossing lines that shouldn’t be crossed. That feeling only deepened when I learned our head steward was obscuring several aspects of our finances.
I finally decided that I wanted to leave, but actually leaving was another matter. For months I continued participating resentfully. On the way to each meeting or event, I raged at the union silently in my head, cursing their arrogance and their pushiness. At the meeting, I was all smiles and nods and ‘solidarity forever’. I did my part. I signed up for more responsibilities. When it was over, I’d storm out and rage my way home, literally trembling with fury.
In some ways, this bizarre loyalty reflects Crastor’s relationship with Illyrio. The imagery of potions is central to this feeling that I am trapped with someone who is taking advantage of me. As long as I have had a central male character who is immortal, I always imagined that his immortality stemmed from some kind of fountain of youth or elixir of life. More fantasies cropped up around the potion, fantasies of a cruel father figure who gave the boy an experimental immortality potion without telling him what it was. The core image was that of our gentle, innocent protagonist having something powerful shoved down his throat.
The imagery of absorbing and being changed by a potion captures the effect that strong-willed people have on me. It is the sensation of being invaded and turned into something else. I become who I think others want me to be, though not by choice. I am simply too conflict-averse to contradict anyone to their face. So I laugh at their jokes, and I entertain them with my own. I make liberal use of phrases like “you’re right” and “that’s a good point”. The impulse is automatic. Once I am alone, it’s like the potion has worn off and I am again free to be me.
The centrality of potions in Crastor’s toxic relationship with Illyrio speaks to the particular flavor of toxic relationships I stick with. For me, a toxic relationship usually involves having someone else’s principles shoved down my throat. This is no coincidence of course, because, as we saw in the beginning of my union adventure, I unconsciously seek out lofty principles to which I can give myself over. In essence, I am always searching for that perfect potion, a trustworthy person or ideology that will turn me into something larger and more beautiful than myself.
Illyrio’s role as a father figure is consistent with the dynamic I’ve laid out so far: the one who administers the potion is bigger than I am. Maybe it is a man, an institution, a club or even a corporate brand. They are a provider of some sort, someone who pledges to take care of me. In a way, Illyrio is a masculine counterpart to Crastor’s mother, whose greatest sin is witholding the connection I feel entitled to. Illyrio, by contrast, forcefully impresses upon me the connection I do not want. That my psyche assigns genders to life’s challenges is an interesting topic for another day.
The purple people dream and the Illyrio nightmare have a number of similarities, and I don’t just mean the centrality of the color purple. In both fantasies, Crastor is important or necessary, he is a go-between for the magical and non-magical worlds, the magical people are providers, and his body is being taken over by the magical people for their own purposes. This is what I might call a ‘core image’ for me: a suite of feelings or characteristics that occur together and form a prominent motif in my psyche. These two daydreams are not themselves core images, but variations on a core image.
A core image can resonate with bad (Illyrio) or good (purple people) situations. It’s like psyche is saying, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, this is the way things are, this is what is always consistent about the world.
Now I am ready to answer to the question: why do we stay? In my last post about the union, I laid out a deliberately simplistic theory: we try to enact our favorite fantasies in order to get love and feel good. Now I am contradicting my own theory somewhat, or at least adding some nuance. What we are really trying to maximize is not happiness, love, or even safety. We are trying to maximize concordance between the real world and our core images.
We maximize concordance between the real world and our core images in order to make sense of the world, that is, to establish certainty about where we are, who we are, and what we must do. We accomplish this in at least two ways: 1) we perceive the world in a way that is consistent with the core image, like trying to fit our observations to a mold, and 2) we gravitate toward situations that resemble the core image. Both these strategies are about seeking what’s familiar. When the world resembles our core images, we feel more confident navigating it.
Counterintuitive behaviors like, for example, continuing to live with someone we hate, or continuing to volunteer with an organization we hate, are difficult to explain if we assume that all human behavior is about feeling good or safe. However, if we posit that human behavior is about seeking situations that resemble our core images, then these behaviors make a lot of sense. Even after my relationship with the union had gone sour, it still resonated with the core image we’ve been discussing. I still felt important and necessary, I was still a go-between for the union and my department, the union was still providing me with ideology, legitimacy, and social belonging, and my body (or at least my legwork) was being taken over by the union for their own purposes. The appeal was not so much that the ratio of benefits to drawbacks was high, but that the situation had a high level of concordance with the image. To put it simply, they were the devil I knew.
This is perhaps a radical take on a controversial question. It goes against more conventional explanations such as, “You stayed with the union because they made you feel necessary and important, which made you feel good.” I don’t mean to imply that I disagree with such explanations, only that I dislike them. They de-emphasize the role of meaning-making as a central motive of human behavior.