Bowen Family Systems · Free Assessment
How Differentiated
Are You?
A self differentiation assessment for people who are ready to understand with real depth how they show up in their closest relationships.
You want to grow. You just don't know
exactly what you're growing from.
You can feel it — the way you react before you can think, the way you lose yourself in the people you love, the way your sense of who you are shifts depending on who's in the room. You've read enough to know this has a name. But knowing the name has not yet changed the pattern.
Self differentiation is not a concept. It is a developmental capacity. And like all capacities, it exists somewhere on a spectrum — and it can be built, slowly, with the right understanding and the right conditions.
This assessment will show you exactly where you are on that spectrum, across nine dimensions. Not to label you — but to give you a precise, honest picture of your patterns and your strengths, so the work ahead has a real direction.
You sense there is a version of you
that is more grounded than this one.
More than a score.
A complete picture of your differentiation profile.
A single score situating you on Bowen's differentiation continuum, with a full explanation of what that range means — including the context Bowen himself provided about where most people land.
A detailed breakdown across four challenge patterns and five relational capacities — so you can see not just your overall level, but precisely how differentiation shows up (or breaks down) for you.
Tailored insights for your primary challenge patterns and a clear picture of your existing strengths — the ground you already stand on, and the direction your development wants to move.
Nine Dimensions. Four Patterns. Five Capacities.
Most assessments tell you what is wrong. This one also tells you what is right — what you already have, and what you are building toward. Understanding both is what makes growth possible.
Challenge Patterns — Where Differentiation Breaks DownFind out where you are on the scale of differentiation.
Enter your name and email to access your free self differentiation assessment. Your detailed profile will be delivered immediately — along with resources matched to your score.
About Deborah Lara
I created this assessment from nearly two decades of studying Bowen Family Systems Theory — as a clinician, a researcher, and a person who has done this work from the inside. Differentiation is not a concept I hold at a distance. It is the framework I use to understand my own relational patterns, and it has shaped everything about the way I teach.
My lens on Bowen has been deepened and complicated by parallel study of developmental trauma and somatic healing — which shaped how I understand the nervous system's role in differentiation; ego development theory, particularly the work of Kegan and Cook-Greuter, which situates self differentiation within a broader arc of adult psychological growth; and Jungian psychology, which illuminates the archetypal and unconscious dimensions of relational patterns that Bowen's systemic model alone does not capture. These frameworks do not replace Bowen — they make him more precise.
My work sits at the intersection of theory and lived experience. I teach these frameworks not as self-help content but as precision instruments — because understanding your pattern at the root changes what is possible in a way that surface-level insight never quite does.
Marriage & Family Therapist Adult Development Researcher Bowen Family Systems Jungian Psychology Ego Development Theory