When Love Becomes Collusion
Why Defenses Destroy Intimacy
Summary: The article argues that defenses once developed to protect us can eventually control relationships. Compassion for these defenses is essential, but accommodating them indefinitely creates collusion rather than intimacy. Genuine love distinguishes the person from their protective strategies, creating a safe relational space where defenses can gradually soften and deeper selves emerge.
Summary
The modern therapeutic world has given us an important truth: love accepts people as they are. But somewhere along the way, we lost an equally important distinction: the person is not the defense.
Every defense deserves compassion. The schizoid withdrawal, avoidant distancing, anxious pursuit, narcissistic inflation, and compulsive caretaking each emerged because reality once became too overwhelming for the developing psyche to face directly.
The defense was an act of survival. In the environment that required it, it served its purpose well. But every defense also prevents something. It can prevent mutuality, vulnerability, reality, and the spontaneous encounter between two genuine subjects.
And it does something that contemporary psychology has been slow to name directly: it recruits the other person.
The avoidant defense teaches the other person not to need.
The anxious defense trains the other person to reassure endlessly.
The narcissistic defense teaches everyone nearby to walk on eggshells.
Every defense quietly reorganizes the relational field around maintaining itself. Eventually, both partners may find themselves serving the adaptation instead of the relationship.
The living field between two people, with its genuine ambiguity and potential, gets colonized by the defensive system. What could have become a vessel for transformation becomes a container for carefully managing what cannot be felt.
The defense has become sovereign. The Self has quietly disappeared from the relationship.
This is not the absence of love. It is love that has become collusion: a carefully negotiated peace between two survival strategies that can persist for years with the appearance of stability while remaining, in the deepest sense, intimate with nothing.
There is an enormous difference between saying, “I understand why this defense developed,” and saying, “Your defense now defines our relationship.”
The first is love. The second is surrender, not to the person, but to the defense. And it ultimately fails the deeper self the defense was meant to protect.
The purpose of the relational vessel, the temenos, is not to make the relationship safe for defenses. It is to make the relationship safe enough that defenses can gradually become unnecessary.
It creates conditions in which the defended self can discover, through lived experience rather than exhortation, that reality has become safer than protection, and that the other person’s presence can be trusted not to repeat the original injury.
In that vessel, both people can begin to lay down what once kept them alive.
Not because the relationship demands it, but because they no longer need those emotional defenses in the same way.
The deepest intimacy begins not when two people find perfectly compatible defenses, but when two people stop asking to be loved through their defenses and begin asking, together, to be liberated from them.
That is not rejection. It is the most profound form of recognition available in intimate life, and perhaps, if the vessel holds, the beginning of love itself.
In Depth with Dr. Bren is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The modern therapeutic world has given us an important truth.
Love accepts people as they are.
But somewhere in the transmission of that truth, we lost an equally important distinction.
The person is not their defenses.
Every defense deserves compassion. But no defense deserves to become the foundation of intimacy. Because every defense, no matter how brilliantly constructed or how necessary it once was, asks the relationship to organize itself around fear rather than reality. And when two people begin loving each other’s defenses instead of helping one another move beyond them, intimacy does not simply stall. It slowly dies.
Not because either person is bad. Not because either person lacks love.
But because defenses, by their very nature, interrupt the relationship.
Every Defense Was Once an Act of Love
We should begin with compassion. That is not a therapeutic nicety. It is a structural requirement for what follows. Without it, the argument can be misread as a case for demanding that people stop protecting themselves.
No defense appears by accident.
The schizoid withdrawal. The avoidant distancing. The anxious pursuit that cannot stop reaching. The narcissistic inflation that cannot tolerate exposure. The compulsive caretaker who organizes their entire existence around the needs of others because attending to their own needs became too dangerous. The perfectionist who learned that staying above criticism was the only available form of safety.
Each of these emerged because, at some point in development, reality became too overwhelming for the psyche to meet directly. The defense was not a mistake. It was an act of survival, the psyche’s most creative response to the conditions it was given.
In that sense, as Donald Kalsched understood deeply in his work on the inner world of trauma, every defense was once an act of love directed at the true self. It preserved something essential. It allowed life to continue when continuing seemed impossible.
The defense deserves our genuine gratitude.
But gratitude is not the same thing as surrendering our future to it.
Every Defense Protects and Prevents
This is where I believe contemporary psychology too often stops.
We have become extraordinarily skilled at understanding why defensiveness in relationships exists, mapping their developmental origins, honoring their protective function, and developing compassion for the person who needed them. This represents genuine progress in clinical understanding, and I do not want to minimize it.
But we have become considerably less willing to ask what those defenses cost.
Every defense protects. That is its function, and in the environment for which it was designed, it performed that function well. But every defense also prevents.
It prevents mutuality, the genuine encounter between two subjects that I described earlier in this series as the difference between projection and participation.
It prevents vulnerability, the capacity to be genuinely affected by the other that the Mercurial Field requires.
It prevents reality, the willingness to remain in contact with what is actually emerging rather than with the story the defense provides about who the other person is and what the encounter means.
It prevents, in the deepest sense, the spontaneous meeting of two souls.
Because every defense silently makes the same demand before a relationship can begin:
Before you meet me, you must first meet my survival strategy.
The relationship gradually ceases to revolve around two people.
It begins revolving around two protective systems.
And when that happens, gradually and almost imperceptibly, through the daily accumulation of small accommodations and subtle reorganizations of the field, intimacy quietly disappears.
The Great Confusion
Our culture has made a particular error that presents itself as psychological sophistication.
We have confused the defense with the person.
“Love me as I am” is a genuine and important request. I agree with it. But I immediately find myself asking the question it leaves unasked:
Who is the “I” we are being asked to love?
Is it the frightened adaptation, the survival strategy that developed in a specific developmental environment and has generalized, as emotional defenses do, far beyond the conditions that originally required it?
Is it the false self that Winnicott described, the carefully constructed persona organized around what the environment required rather than what the psyche actually was?
Is it the Anti-Self Care System that I described in The Postmodern Superego and The Anti-Self Care System, the internal organization that keeps the person functioning while keeping the deeper self inaccessible?
Or is it the deeper person struggling to emerge through all of those protective layers?
Jung never confused the Self with the defensive organization. Neither did Winnicott, Fairbairn, Guntrip, or Kalsched.
The defense is real. The suffering that produced it is real. The adaptation it created is real.
But none of these is identical to the deepest person, the living subject beneath the survival strategy, whose emergence is what genuine relationship is actually in service of.
When we confuse them, when we mistake the defense for the person and treat the protective organization as if it were the self we are being asked to love, something tragic follows.
We begin protecting the prison instead of helping to free the prisoner.
Defenses Don’t Just Protect the Self. They Recruit the Other.
This may be the most clinically important insight in the entire essay, and perhaps the one that contemporary relational psychology has been slowest to name directly.
A defense never remains private.
It reorganizes the relational field.
The avoidant defense does not simply allow one person to distance. It teaches the other person not to need, not to reach, and not to express the vulnerability that might trigger the withdrawal. The anxious defense does not simply express one person’s fear. It trains the other person to provide reassurance endlessly, organizing their behavior around managing a state they did not create. The narcissistic defense does not simply protect one person’s fragile self-esteem. It teaches everyone nearby to walk on eggshells, translating their own reality into language the inflated self can receive without feeling threatened.
The schizoid defense teaches the other person to stop reaching.
The compulsive caretaker teaches the other person to become increasingly dependent.
Every defensiveness in relationships quietly recruits the relationship into the project of maintaining itself.
This is the relationship defense mechanism I was pointing toward in Protecting the Mercurial Field in Romance when I described what happens when the Mercurial Fountain becomes a courtroom.
The living field between two people, with its genuine ambiguity, its genuine potential, and its refusal to be organized around either person’s prior history, gets colonized by the defensive system.
Eventually, both partners find themselves serving the adaptation rather than the relationship. Both become caretakers of the survival strategy. The field that could have become a vessel for transformation becomes a container for the careful management of what cannot be felt.
This is not unusual.
In my clinical experience, it is the norm.
And it is one reason the Fisher King’s wasteland is such a precise image for what unresolved defenses produce in relationship: a field organized around a wound that cannot be named and sustained by everyone’s silent agreement not to ask the question that would disturb the arrangement.
Every Defense Wants Sovereignty
The deeper I have worked with the psychology of intimate relationships, the more convinced I have become that every defense asks for the same thing.
Sovereignty.
The defense wants to become king.
Not through conscious intention. The person rarely knows this is happening and would often be genuinely distressed to learn it. But through the cumulative logic of its own self-preservation.
Conversation begins serving it.
Conflict begins to organize itself around its sensitivities.
Sexuality begins navigating its requirements.
Scheduling accommodates its demands.
Truth is filtered through what it can tolerate.
The entire relational apparatus gradually reorganizes itself around maintaining the defensive system.
Both people become its caretakers.
The Self, the living, deeper person beneath the adaptation, quietly disappears from the relationship.
This is why defenses destroy intimacy.
Not through malice. Not through the absence of love. But because they slowly become the organizing principle of love itself.
The relationship that began in the genuine mystery of the Mercurial Field, in the living ambiguity that belonged to neither person and could not be controlled by either, becomes a negotiation between two survival systems.
And the third reality that could have emerged between them, the soul of the relationship, the living entity I described in Mercury and the Field Between Us, cannot take shape inside a container that has been organized around preserving two people’s defenses.
Compassion Without Collusion
This does not mean the defense is evil. It does not mean the person should be challenged, confronted, or shamed into exposing what the defense was built to protect.
Quite the opposite.
Compassion is essential, not as an alternative to honesty, but as its prerequisite. Without genuine compassion for what the defense was protecting and what it cost to build it, any challenge to its sovereignty becomes simply another form of the relational violence that produced the need for protection in the first place.
But compassion must never become collusion.
There is an enormous and clinically consequential difference between saying I understand why this defense developed and saying your defense now defines our relationship.
The first is love. The second is surrender, not to the person, but to the defense. And it is a surrender that, however kindly motivated, ultimately fails the deeper self that the defense was ostensibly protecting.
Love says: I see how hard you had to work to survive.
Love also says: I refuse to mistake your survival strategy for who you actually are.
That is not rejection.
That is differentiation, the same differentiation I described in From Polarity to Alterity as the precondition for genuine relationship. It is the capacity to remain in genuine contact with the other without being organized by the other’s defensive requirements.
It is the capacity to hold the distinction between the person and the protection, and to refuse, with compassion, patience, and genuine care, to conflate them.
The Alchemy of Freedom
This is where the alchemical frame I have been developing throughout this series becomes directly relevant.
The purpose of the temenos, the protected relational vessel I described in Who is Carrying the Relationship?, is not to make the relationship safe for defenses. It is to make the relationship safe enough that defenses can gradually become unnecessary.
That is a precise distinction.
A relationship organized around the careful management of two people’s defensive systems is not a temenos. It is a truce, a negotiated peace between two survival strategies, managed well enough that neither person has to feel the full force of what they are protecting themselves from.
This can persist for years, even decades, with the appearance of stability. But it is not transformation. And it is not intimacy.
A genuine temenos, a relational vessel with enough structural integrity to hold the tension of genuine encounter, does something different.
It creates conditions in which the defended self begins to discover, incrementally and through lived experience rather than through exhortation or insight alone, that reality has become safer than protection.
That the other person’s presence can be trusted not to repeat the original injury. That exposure does not produce the annihilation the defense was designed to prevent.
In that vessel, both people can begin, slowly, to lay down what once kept them alive.
Not because they are forced to. Not because the relationship demands it as a condition of its continuation. But because they no longer need it in the same way, because the field between them has become, through genuine tending, safer than the isolation the defense was providing.
This is the alchemical work of intimate relationship.
Not the management of two defensive systems alongside one another.
Not the increasingly sophisticated accommodation of what each person cannot yet face.
But the slow creation of a field in which the person beneath the protection, the deeper self, the one Jung was pointing toward when he distinguished the ego from the Self, can gradually emerge.
The Beginning of Love
Every defense deserves compassion.
Every defense deserves understanding.
Every defense deserves patience far beyond what the culture of instant intimacy tends to allow.
But no defense deserves sovereignty.
The deepest intimacy begins not when two people find perfectly compatible defenses, though this is often mistaken for compatibility, but when two people stop asking to be loved through their defenses and begin asking, together, to be liberated from them.
That is not rejection of what each person has been.
It is the most profound form of recognition available in intimate life, the recognition that the person is more than the protection, that the Self is larger than the survival strategy, and that what stands between two people in the Mercurial Field is not simply two adaptive systems negotiating terms.
It is two souls, tentatively and courageously, discovering whether the field between them can become strong enough to hold what they have never yet been able to show.
That is not the beginning of accommodation.
That is the beginning of individuation.
And perhaps, if the vessel holds, if the compassion is genuine, and if both people can tolerate remaining present to the field long enough for it to do its work, it is also the beginning of love.
This work continues inside my free community:
https://www.skool.com/the-genius-circle
Recommended Reading
Protecting the Mercurial Field in Romance — On what happens when the Mercurial Fountain becomes a courtroom — and why protecting the living field between two people from premature certainty is the first task of relationship.
Mercury and the Field Between Us — On the soul of the relationship as a living third entity — and why it cannot take shape inside a container organized around the preservation of two people’s defenses.
Who is Carrying the Relationship? — On what the nervous system may be carrying that the relationship has not yet become capable of holding — and what it means to build a vessel strong enough to hold it consciously.
From Polarity to Alterity — On the structural difference between belonging built on sameness and the genuine encounter with otherness that this series is moving toward.
The King and Queen Before the Mercurial Fountain — On the collapse of projection and the dangerous interval that follows — the moment when defenses most aggressively rush in to fill what projection has vacated.
The Postmodern Superego and the Anti-Self Care System — On the internal organization that keeps a person functioning while keeping the deeper self inaccessible — the intrapsychic version of what this essay traces in the relational field.
When the Soul Never Grows Its Hands — On the developmental arc through which the interior ground is formed that makes it possible, eventually, to lay the defense down — not because it is demanded, but because it is no longer needed.
Dr. Bren Hudson is a Jungian-oriented analyst in private practice with a Buddhist orientation. This essay is part of an ongoing series exploring interiority, the anti-Self structure, and the collapse of relational being in contemporary culture.
About the Author, Dr Bren:
Dr. Bren Hudson is a holistic psychotherapist, life coach, and couples counselor specializing in Jungian depth psychology and spiritual transformation. With a PhD in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, she integrates Jungian analysis, Psychosynthesis, and somatic practices to help clients uncover unconscious patterns, heal trauma, and foster authentic self-expression. Her extensive training includes certifications in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), HeartMath, Reiki, and the Enneagram, as well as studies in archetypal astrology and the Gene Keys. Formerly a corporate consultant, Dr. Bren now offers online sessions to individuals and couples worldwide, guiding them through personalized journeys of healing and self-discovery.
Connect with Dr. Bren:
FAQ's
-
It means partners can become so accommodating of each other’s defenses that the relationship starts serving those defenses rather than fostering genuine intimacy, vulnerability, and growth.
-
Defenses protect against emotional pain, but they also prevent vulnerability, mutuality, spontaneity, and authentic connection. Over time, they can make both partners organize their behavior around avoiding discomfort.
-
No. The article emphasizes compassion. Defenses often developed as necessary survival strategies. The problem arises when those strategies continue to control relationships long after the original danger has passed.
-
Compassion means understanding why someone developed a defense without confusing that defense with their identity. Collusion occurs when others continually accommodate the defense and allow it to dictate the terms of the relationship.
-
Rather than demanding that defenses disappear, a healthy relationship creates enough safety for them to become less necessary. Through trust, vulnerability, and genuine connection, both partners can gradually access parts of themselves that their defenses previously protected.
Need Help? Contact Dr Bren
Animate your Soul for Life!
Send me a message right now to get started on your soulful journey. Together, we will create a coaching plan that is unique and perfect for you.
DR BREN | Buddhist and Jungian Psychology
6 Skyview Ct, Asheville, NC 28803, United States
Mobile +1 828-708-0045 Email Bren@drbren.com
