Relational Blindness and the Quest to Understand Enemy Mode
It’s important to keep in mind that domestic abuse isn’t an isolated or rare incident of over-the-top marital discord. Instead, it’s a pervasive pattern of behavior that usually increases in intensity and duration as the relationship continues. Domestic abuse consists in the attitudes and entitled beliefs of the perpetrator, not a usually well-meaning partner who says something unkind or even cruel, but later admits their fault in authentic repentance.
Domestic abuse is a pervasive pattern—a series and set of attitudes, repetitive thoughts, and self-focused beliefs. It’s not an isolated relational slip-up, but a “come-up”: the incidences, behaviors, accusations and blame will come up again, and again.
And yet again.
In their book Escaping Enemy Mode: How Our Brains Unite or Divine Us, neuropsychologist Jim Wilder and Ray Woolridge have coined the term “enemy mode” to describe the relational blindness that “keeps us from seeing people as fellow human beings with value.”
This is the same as using people as if they’re objects rather than individuals. Fr. Richard Hogan and Fr. John LeVoir, in Covenant of Love: Pope John Paul II on Sexuality, Marriage, and Family in the Modern World, points out that when St. Pope John Paul II discusses lust and objectification in his masterpiece Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, he’s talking about a lack of inner integration. This lack causes a person to justify their toxic actions or behaviors “by the claim that the body is not part of the person and that it is a machine which can be owned and used as any other property.”
This is relational blindness: a lack of ability or desire to see others as others, due to an overwhelming focus on self. It’s viewing other people as things rather than unique, precious individuals, made in the image and likeness of God.
Bishop Fulton Sheen, in Three to Get Married, comments about such blind individuals:
“Nothing exists but his own ego. The other egos outside himself limit his personality and cross his wishes—and therefore are detestable.”
Enemy Mode
After decades of intensive study into the structure of the human brain and how it affects relationships, Dr. Jim Wilder has hypothesized that our minds can collapse into what he calls “enemy mode.” When in this mode, other people become problems to be solved—or avoided, abused and disparaged.
What happens when a person is stuck in enemy mode?
Before answering that question, it’s important to understand the three different types of enemy mode that Wilder and Woolridge write about.