Differentiation: Don't Relate Without It
Not as in calculus. Not as in economics. Not as in cellular biology. As in psychology.
I was already twenty-nine years old the first time I encountered the word “differentiation” in the psychological sense. I was sitting next to my first husband in a couples therapy session - we were the clients, obviously! - and we didn’t know it at the time but we were just a few months away from deciding to get divorced. The reason we were breaking up, broadly speaking, was poor differentiation. It was a concept I’d never even heard of, and the lack of it was killing our marriage.
I’m sad for past-us, that we made it all the way to the end of our marriage before I ever even heard the word for what we needed.
I want to tell you about differentiation partly so you can go get some if you’re lacking in it. I don’t want you sitting on that therapy couch learning about it when it’s already too late. Let’s get out ahead of that.
But also, differentiation is so fundamental to how I think now that I have trouble writing essays without talking about it. If I do a good enough job explaining it here, I can link back to this essay forever.
Definition
Differentiation is the ability to experience both closeness and individuality simultaneously, balancing thoughts and emotions.
One word is doing an awful lot of work, but there’s nothing spare to trim away, every part of that definition matters, so we’ll just have to take it apart and then put it back together again.
Closeness and Individuality
Imagine yourself as a fancy sound system, with speakers and a volume knob. You have your own thoughts, feelings, and desires, and you play those on your speakers all the time.
What happens if you get close to another person who is also a fancy sound system with speakers and a volume knob?
Well, it gets confusing, that’s what happens. The yellow music gets all mixed up with the blue music and it’s hard to hear either one of them clearly.
The same thing happens with thoughts, feelings, and desires. When you get close to another person, you can get really mixed up about whose thoughts are whose, whose feelings are whose, and whose desires are whose.
Sometimes you might make yourself really big and loud to make sure you’re going to be okay, to assert that your thoughts and feelings really matter and you’re going to get what you want.
Sometimes you might make yourself really small and quiet to make sure you don’t interfere with anybody else.
And sometimes you might just not stand next to anyone else, because you don’t like overpowering other people with your music, and you don’t like making yourself small either, so it’s easier just to be alone.
This part of differentiation is about being able to stand close, to hear your own music clearly and hear the other person’s music clearly too.
It’s okay if you tune into one and ignore the other, and then switch - you can focus on one at a time - but you never lose track of the idea that both exist.
You know what your own thoughts, feelings and desires are. You can understand the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and desires when they express them. You know which is which and they don’t get muddled together.
Thoughts and Emotions
The other part of the definition has to do with thoughts and emotions. I am going to get extra pedantic for a moment and explain what the difference is.
An emotion (also called a feeling) is an affective experience that can be described using individual words. Examples of emotions are: sadness, fear, delight, joy, apprehension, rage, despair. You can absolutely have a cocktail of more than one feeling at the same time - you might be feeling three parts excitement and one part fear. Feelings are tied to physiological responses and sensations: your heart pounding, your fists clenching, a prickling on the back of your neck.
A thought is a cognitive experience that can be described using phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. Examples of thoughts are: “If I say something stupid, Peter won’t like me any more,” or “We aren’t going to have enough money for the car payment.” Both of those statements might be linked to the emotion of fear, but they are not actually emotions, they are thoughts, they are ideas.
People mix these up all the time.
Some people are more comfortable with thoughts. They don’t know how to identify emotions, they don’t have a rich emotional vocabulary, they can’t guess what other people are feeling, and they might distrust or push back against emotions. They don’t know what emotions are for, and maybe they sort of wish emotions would go die in a fire. When these people notice emotions cropping up, they retreat into the intellectual or logical space where they feel more comfortable.
Some people are more comfortable with emotions. They feel their emotions strongly and take them very seriously; attending to emotions has a lot of value to them. When they are very emotional, they may have trouble thinking logically and working rationally with what they observe about what’s happening. They may feel pushed around or dismissed when others try to reason with them. When these people notice too much logic cropping up, they react emotionally.
So differentiation is also about being able to balance thoughts and emotions, to attend to both, to take them both seriously. A differentiated person can continue to think rationally even when feeling emotions, and can notice when the emotions are so powerful they’re interfering with thought. They are aware of and can correct for emotional reactivity without cutting off emotion completely and retreating into numb intellectualism.
Putting it Together
Going back to our definition:
Differentiation is the ability to experience both closeness and individuality simultaneously, balancing thoughts and emotions.
The more differentiated you are, the better you are at keeping track of who you are, what you think, how you feel, and what that all adds up to for you, even though you are standing close to someone else with their own thoughts and feelings that may be very different from yours.
It turns out differentiation really helps a lot in adult intimate relationships.
Cautionary Tales of Poor Differentiation
What kind of things can go wrong with poor differentiation? So many things. Mix and match from the following!
Coercion, overpowering, domineering, bullying, and abuse!
Resentful compliance, martyrdom, and loss of individual identity!
Lies, omissions, broken agreements, and infidelity!
Constant painful hostility and aggression!
Misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and long twisty conversations that never resolve anything!
Obliviousness, lack of attunement, and carelessness!
Coldness, distance, and avoidance!
Explosive emotional reactivity!
Kerr and Bowen described it like this:
“Well differentiated people can tolerate and enjoy intimacy and aloneness. Less differentiated people, when intimate, tend toward enmeshment (fusion) in which they eventually experience a terror of engulfment that compels them to take flight. When they are alone, they tend to suffer an unbearable sense of abandonment and long for fusion. (When undifferentiated people are seen from an interactional perspective, their intimate relationships are usually characterized by cycles of enmeshment and flight.)”
It’s basically the worst.
How to Improve Your Differentiation (TL;DR version)
Getting more differentiated is not easy work.
You can start by noticing what your go-to moves are. Like, do you tend to knuckle under and comply with ideas you hate? Do you steamroll other people who get in your way? Do you go lock yourself away from the rest of humanity? Do you tend to fly off the handle and start yelling when you’re upset? Do you get ice cold and analytical? What is it, what’s the thing you do?
Then, notice when you’re on the verge of doing that thing.
Then do Something Which is Not That.
Anything, really. Change it up. Get out of your old pattern. Become more flexible and adaptive to the situation.
Eventually, your goal is to find that balance point, that center where you feel grounded, connected to yourself and the other person and the earth all at the same time. But you might need to try a lot of other wrong things before you find your center.
This is a very short description that is unlikely to help anyone. You will probably need to do a lot of introspection, observation, and experimentation. It takes a long time. Having support from people who are further along in this work than you are can be very important. It is pretty hard to rise up out of the Swamp of Low Differentiation when you are surrounded by people who are clawing at you and trying to pull you back down into it with them.
More Differentiation Fun “Facts”
Note: “Facts” gets scare quotes because differentiation is fuzzy, nobody has a good metric for it, and we haven’t actually proved anything about it in any rigorous way. Feel free to argue with me about any of this!
You get your starting level of differentiation from your family of origin. If you grew up with differentiated caregivers, congratulations, you won the psychological lottery and you might be fairly well-adjusted too. But if they were a mess, you probably inherited low differentiation.
It is difficult but possible to improve your differentiation.
If two people with different levels of differentiation try to form a relationship, they may have fun getting to know each other in the early days, but they will tend to “bounce off” one another relatively quickly.
As a corollary, any couple that has been together for a long time are probably at similar levels of differentiation.
If one person in a relationship begins to differentiate, it often causes a crisis in the relationship in which the other partner must now also differentiate or the relationship becomes untenable. Sometimes the less differentiated partner manages to drag the one who is trying to grow back down again.
Most couples who come for couples therapy are struggling with issues related to differentiation.
My own viewpoints about differentiation were informed by Murray Bowen, David Schnarch, Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson.
Thanks for hanging in with me on this foundational essay! If you liked it, you could
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You’re the best. Thanks!