Self-Differentiation and Family Gatherings: Putting Self-Differentiation Skills Into Practice

This is part three of a series on self-differentiation at family gatherings. Here are part one and part two.

1. Practice Awareness

As a social species, we tend to experience unconscious processes like emotions and automatic thoughts as we relate to others. This is especially true when we are interacting with family members since they are our primordial bonds and tend to have the biggest impact on us.

When you’re interacting with your family members at gatherings, practice slowing down and observing your inner experience moment-to-moment. Tune into yourself and notice the sensations and emotions that arise. Notice your instincts and impulses. Notice automatic thoughts and judgments.

Bring conscious awareness to your unconscious experience.

2. Practice Boundaries

Healthy boundaries are a way of helping us manage our energy, protect our well-being, and maintain the best version of ourselves. Family gatherings can be emotionally taxing without healthy boundaries. Emotional maturity requires that we know what our emotional needs and limits are, and then practice setting and holding healthy boundaries to meet them.

In the weeks leading up to the gathering and during the gathering, practice defining, setting, and holding your boundaries. Stay connected to the higher purpose of protecting your well-being and maintaining your best self.

Healthy boundaries could be:

• Deciding what gatherings you will or won’t attend.

• Whether or not you will host a gathering.

• Who you will or won’t bring to gatherings you’re attending.

• Who you will or won’t invite to gatherings you’re hosting.

• How much labor you’ll do for gatherings you’re hosting or attending.

• What conversations you will or won’t engage in.

• What information you will or won’t share.

• What you will or won’t take on emotionally from others.

• When you will leave interactions or conversations.

• When you will arrive and leave gatherings.

3. Practice Interrupting Patterns

The dynamics and unconscious patterns we grew up with tend to be deeply ingrained. The little child inside us comes alive when we go home and we can get pulled back into old ways of interacting when we are back in that environment.

We might find ourselves falling back into playing the roles we were cast into, whether that be the rescuer, the helper, the helpless, the idol, the outsider, or the problem child. We might find ourselves getting defensive, reacting emotionally, or seeking approval and validation.

We might find ourselves soothing others, giving unsolicited advice, criticizing, or judging. We might find ourselves tiptoeing around a certain person, avoiding vulnerability, or oversharing. We might find ourselves shutting down and distracting ourselves or trying to draw more attention to ourselves.

In the weeks leading up to the gathering, and especially at the gathering, notice when you default to old unconscious patterns. Practice interrupting them with new conscious behaviors instead.

4. Practice Noticing Triggers

Emotional triggers are unresolved emotions in us that, when poked at, tend to get emotionally activated. Often times, our family members know exactly how to poke at these sensitive areas in us. This sets off a chain reaction, often informed by past patterning.

When triggered in an interaction, we might find ourselves feeling anxious, frustrated, annoyed, insecure, or angry. We might then become reactive, defensive, or shut down altogether, depending on our learned coping behaviors.

But triggers can be our teachers. They can illuminate for us the parts of us that need attention and processing. So, take note when you get triggered and why. You can later reflect on the triggers and process them with a trusted other, such as a partner or a therapist.

5. Practice Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is the art of taking responsibility for managing our emotional experience, moment-to-moment as our emotions arise. Instead of acting out on our emotions and triggers, repressing them, or dumping them on others, we regulate ourselves back to calm and thoughtfulness.

Use emotional awareness to notice when you are feeling activated and then find healthy ways to soothe and calm yourself. This could mean taking a few deep breaths in the moment, relaxing your shoulders and arms, going outside for a brief walk, or walking into a room to spend time with yourself for a few moments.

It could also mean you need to leave an interaction or the gathering altogether. The key is to know what you need to bring yourself back to calm and doing so.

6. Practice Responding Over Reacting

Oftentimes, we automatically react in our interactions with others. We feel an emotion and go with our default behavior. This behavior is normally based on our unconscious conditioning and it can lead to unwanted consequences.

Emotionally responding instead of reacting means creating space between the emotion and what we end up doing with that emotion. In that space, we have time to think and make a more conscious choice about how to act, instead of going with the automatic default.

To respond instead of react:

1. Stop for a brief moment.

2. Take a few deep and slow breaths.

3. Observe your environment and gather information.

4. Plan your next best move and proceed.

This is ultimately about interrupting automatic reactions and choosing a more constructive response in your interactions with your family members.

7. Practice Self-Validation

Self-validation is ultimately the subtle art of letting go of the need for approval from the external world. It’s about trusting our own inner compass, thoughts, beliefs, and life choices more than we trust anyone else’s. This can be hard with family — especially parents — because it’s human nature to seek the approval of our caregivers.

But, our parents don’t walk in our shoes 24/7, they don’t live in the same context as our generation does, and they won’t be around forever. We must learn to trust ourselves and approve of ourselves. Self-validation helps us build self-trust, authentic confidence, a strong sense of self.

At gatherings, practice letting go of the need for approval and validate yourself when you receive disapproval, dismissiveness, or criticism.

8. Practice Detached Curiosity

Gatherings are a great time to see how your family functions across generations and where you learned your patterns. There’s so much you can learn about the dynamics of larger family system and your place within it by just observing everyone.

Observe how members of the family interact with each other. Observe the different roles people take on. Observe your own role in the family. Observe what comes up for you as you interact with everyone.

If you’re lucky enough to have several generations alive and gathering, observe the patterns that repeat across those generations. Get curious and ask different people about their history, especially the elders in the family who have seen the evolution of the family’s generations over the decades. Express genuine and curiosity and interest in knowing more about everyone.

The key here is to practice being a detached observer, meaning you don’t get caught up in changing how people are interacting. You just watch, notice, and take mental notes. You become your own family anthropologist and historian.

Visit this article for 33 specific things you can observe.

A Final Note

This whole process is about practicing tiny little moments of progress and change. Each moment that you do something different than you’ve always done, no matter how small, new neural connections in your brain and body get wired.

Our original families are the people that will most likely bring out emotional reactivity and automatic patterns in us. They are the relationships that likely have the most emotional impact on us. If we can practice emotional maturity in our families, we will likely be able to take that into other areas of our lives.

This is hard work. It’s not an overnight process. It’s the small habits practiced over and over again that add up over time. Sometimes you will forget and fall into an old pattern, sometimes you’ll regress, sometimes you’ll be too tired to do the hard thing, and that’s alright. It’s a lifelong practice of slow growth.

Happy gathering everyone!

If you enjoyed this piece, I share exclusive content on emotional maturity, intergenerational patterns, and personal evolution in my monthly newsletter. Subscribe here.

Self-Differentiation at Family Gatherings: Understand Your Family's Multigenerational Emotional System

This is part two of a three-part series on self-differentiation at family gatherings. See part one here.

In part one of this series, we discussed how family gatherings offer opportunities for us to learn about our family’s functioning and practice self-differentiation. Here’s an excerpt for reference:

At family gatherings, because they commonly bring together multiple generations, and normally happens during times of heightened family system anxiety, is when the family patterns really come to life. So, it’s a great time to get a deeper understanding of your family’s functioning. You can then self-reflect and see how the same dynamics you observed are still alive in you today. You can then use the information you gather to understand what areas of yourself you want to most work on.

One of the best way to do this is by becoming a participant-observer at gatherings. This means you balance being an active participant of the gathering, while stepping back from time-to-time to observe the larger process. In these moments, just as an anthropologist observes groups with detached curiosity, you observe the dynamics of your family system and your role within it.

I believe there are two-parts of this process. The first is to learn and understand. The second is to practice. To learn and understand, you must observe and analyze your family as a system that is connected by their emotional patterns and dynamics with each other.

Here, I put together a list of questions for you to study that will help you with what to look for and understand during the gathering. It’s like you’re becoming your family’s historian and anthropologist with this practice. Overtime, you should be able to answer these questions with great depth and complexity, and therefore understand how your family functions across multiple generations.

Notice the Dynamics of the Larger Family System

1. Who sets the emotional tone for the family gathering?

2. Who walks on eggshells over whom?

3. Who shuts down and who emotionally reacts?

4. Who fishes for approval and validation?

5. Who jumps into ‘save’ others from their discomfort?

6. Who blames others for their emotions?

7. Who often pulls others into their conflicts and tensions?

8. Who often gets pulled into the conflicts and tensions?

9. Who avoids acknowledging tension by deflecting onto a third person or thing?

10. Who fits into different what roles (scapegoat, rescuer, idol, clown, helpless)?

11. How often does the conversation focus on a ‘third’ instead of the people involved in the conversation (the ‘third’ could be animals, children, weather, sports, politics, TV shows and movies, celebrities, other people)?

12. Who gossips to avoid vulnerability?

13. Who interrupts conversations or changes the subject?

14. Who avoids sharing about themselves or overshares?

15. Who makes passive aggressive comments or constant criticisms?

16. Who puts the focus on themselves over and over?

17. Who projects their insecurities onto others?

18. Who truly listens when others are sharing about themselves?

19. What happens when someone sets a boundary?

20. Who shares vulnerably from their personal experience?

21. Who stays calm when the emotional temperature of the family rises?

22. Who clearly responds instead of reacting in interactions?

23. Who sets boundaries even when it’s hard?

Notice Your Dynamics in Relation to the Family System

1. What are your most common triggers?

2. Who do they most often come from?

3. What do you tend to do when experiencing a trigger?

4. What are your most common patterns?

5. What role do you most commonly put yourself in or get cast into (rescuer, scapegoat, outsider, idol, clown, helpless)?

6. Are you able to set boundaries?

7. Are you able to share your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings authentically and vulnerably?

8. What does it feel like inside of you when you set a boundary or express yourself?

9. What do others do when you set a boundary or express yourself?

10. After spending time with your family, how do you feel and what do you need?

A Final Note

Observing your family as a whole and observing yourself as you interact with them can foster incredible self-awareness. You see, our personal development does not exists in a vacuum or in isolation.

We come from something and our emotional and psychological development happens in the context of our relationships. Understanding our evolutionary history gives us a lot of information about how to continue moving forward with our own personal evolution.

And it’s in the home where our patterns were created that we can most easily come to ‘see’ them and evolve them.

As a note, be mindful not to psychoanalyze or therapize your family. Your family members are probably not as interested in this work as you are, so there is no need to let them in on this process. This process is for you. Self-differentiation is an individual pursuit, since that’s part of what it means to work on self-differentiation. If a family member is or becomes intrinsically interested in the work and comes to you about it, then it’s fine to share, but do not project this work onto them, try to get them to see or understand what you see, or try to get them to change and do self-differentiation work.

Take this as a solo journey for now. Model the change and level of self-differentiation you wish to see in your family system. Let everything else unfold organically.

Good luck to everyone this holiday season. Deep breaths. You are not alone.

Self-Differentiation and Family Gatherings: A Critical Time to Learn and Practice

This is part one of a three-part series on self-differentiation and family gatherings.

Family gatherings - whether for the holidays, a birthday, a graduation, a birth, or a death - bring together multiple generations of a family system. They also often happen around big life transitions, which is a time of change and therefore heightened anxiety in the family system.

This is partly why family gatherings can feel so dreadful for those of us who come from family systems with complex enmeshment dynamics and low levels of self-differentiation. We end up getting caught up in the tension, getting emotionally triggered, resorting to old family roles and reactive patterns, and soaking up the anxiety of the family system. We leave feeling emotionally and psychologically drained and wondering if we’ve regressed after all the self-differentiation progress we had made.

This is a common experience among my clients and my students, and it certainly has been the case in my journey as well as my partner’s. Our old self - the one we cultivated in our family of origin and learned to use to survive within that context - doesn’t ever really die. Our solid self - the more mature part of us - just becomes bigger and stronger through self-differentiation work, and has more power to counteract the old patterns.

But it still takes intention and effort to do so in this old family context. Being back in the family environment will test how far we’ve come in our self-differentiation work and will force us to put everything we’ve learned about ourselves into practice. Our family system’s old patterns are likely still in place because they’re probably not doing self-differentiation work, so their old ways will trigger our old emotional sensitivities and elicit the patterns we used back then to cope and survive.

Spiritual Teacher Ram Dass once quoted, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”

Although I believe he was being humorous, there’s a deep truth in that statement. Our families will always test how far we’ve truly come in our developmental journeys.

Our family system is the primordial bond. Our deepest emotional attachments. Our nervous system develops within our mother’s body, and then continues to develop within our family system during the most susceptible and impressionable years of our lives. We are quite literally emotionally wired to our family members. And the much of the emotional sensistivies we carry in daily life were created in the context of our family system during childhood and adolescence. It’s no wonder they can get under our skin so easily.

But here’s the thing, because of this, the best place to practice our self-differentiation skills with our family of origin. Go to the source, do the work there, and it will almost organically carry over into every other context - marriage, parenting, work, leadership, society.

At family gatherings, because they commonly bring together multiple generations, and normally happens during times of heightened family system anxiety, is when the family patterns really come to life. So, it’s a great time to get a deeper understanding of your family’s functioning. You can then self-reflect and see how the same dynamics you observed are still alive in you today. You can then use the information you gather to understand what areas of yourself you want to most work on.

One of the best way to do this is by becoming a participant-observer at gatherings. This means you balance being an active participant of the gathering, while stepping back from time-to-time to observe the larger process. In these moments, just as an anthropologist observes groups with detached curiosity, you observe the dynamics of your family system and your role within it.

Lessons in Self-Differentiation: Ground Yourself in Anxious Systems

Family Anxiety as an Electrical Current

I like to think of the family as an electrical system, where electricity represents emotional reactivity, or Bowen’s concept of anxiety. Understood this way, we can see how each family member in the family system plays a part in conducting - or taking on and passing along - this electricity throughout the electrical system. As such, when one person is emotionally activated, the rest of the system slowly becomes activated, too.

Over time, this becomes an experience of chronic anxiety - sometimes referred as chronic stress - for the different family members. Not only do family members have to deal with the normal stresses of everyday life - like working, paying bills, traffic, caring for kids, and so on - but they also have the added stress of the family system’s anxiety that they take on. Chronic anxiety can wreak havoc on the body and can lead to a number of physical symptoms and illness. It can also lead to a number of psychological symptoms and illness.

In addition to the health implications of this chronic anxiety, emotional reactivity prevents us from doing our best thinking and making the best decisions in our everyday lives. When we’re frequently emotionally reactive - because we’re taking that reactivity on from our family system - we’re more likely to make quick, reflexive moves based on our conditioned patterns and programming. We’re less likely to slow down, reflect, and make conscious moves in the world. We’re more likely to act on the anxiety of the moment rather than on our values, principles and long-term goals.

This process is especially true  when family systems with high degrees of enmeshment, where there is little sense of boundaries between family members and everyone feels responsible for everyone else’s emotional issues: 

• We take on the emotional problems and emotional reactivity of others.

• We get caught up in the family’s constant emotional drama.

• We get pulled out of our center and into the family’s electrical field.

A Ground for Electrical System

Thus, when we are doing self-differentiation work, we must learn to ground ourselves emotionally within the electrical field. When we do this, we reduce the strength and intensity of the emotional reactivity passing through the family system because we’re one less body conducting and amplifying it. Most importantly, we protect ourselves from taking on this emotional reactivity which takes us out of our center - our solid self - and leads to the consequences I mentioned above.

Grounding ourselves is no easy task. Our family of origin is where our emotional functioning was shaped and our family system often knows how to trigger our deepest emotional sensitivities. All the old survival patterns we learned as children - caretaking, defending ourselves, shrinking, deflecting - will want to come back into play. Our family will try to get us back into our old role - the one we’ve always played in their emotional drama. They will try to get a rise out of us when they’re activated as well.

Grounding Through the Body

But, we must learn a new way. We must learn to come back to ourselves and get centered in our solid self. As a long-time dancer, yogi, and now somatic educator, I’ve learned that using our mind-body connection is one of the most powerful tools we can leverage in our self-differentiation work. 

This is because the emotional system of the family is a biological and physiological experience - we are wired to each other’s nervous system - and there’s an actual felt and visible bodily experience unfolding as we interact with our family member’s and our nervous systems and bodies get activated.

If we notice that our body starts to tense and lean forward to prepare to fight back or get in the middle of a conflict between two people, we can perhaps try:

• Leaning back and intentionally relaxing the shoulders and face. 

• Taking a few deep breaths in while slowing down the breath out.

• Engage the core as we exhale and keeping the shoulders relaxed.

• Placing the palm of the hand on the belly keeping core engaged and shoulders relaxed.

The intention of this is to come back to our own body by finding a calm and stable center deep inside of ourselves, in our own body, and let others experience their own reactivity. We do not need to get caught up in their electrical field.

If we notice that we begin to shrink back and go numb because someone is projecting their reactivity onto us or a tension in the environment feels overwhelming, we can try: 

• Opening up our chest and uncrossing our arms while keeping the shoulders relaxed.

• Placing our feet firmly flat on the floor and palms down on our thighs.

• Lifting our head and chin up, while keeping the face relaxed. 

• Taking a few deep breaths in and engaging the core as you exhale slowly.

The intention here is to bring your presence back into the room while remaining centered in yourself. Sometimes we grow up in family systems where our role is to shrink while taking on everybody else’s projection. This leads to internalizing everyone’s emotional issues and a depressive personality style. We are still getting caught in the electrical field in this case. We combat this by saying - with our bodies - that we are here and we will no longer take on what’s not ours, we will no longer shrink for the system.

If we notice that our body is getting fidgety or we get really talkative, interrupt others, and try to change the subject, make jokes, or control someone’s reactions, we can try:

• Leaning back in our chair and softly closing our lips while relaxing the jaw.

• Practicing visual observation of the electricity moving through the field like a storm.

• Letting our palms relax face up in our laps while keeping shoulders relaxed.

• Taking a few deep breaths in and engaging the core as you exhale slowly.

The intention here is to lean out of the emotional field and to learn the art of surrendering. Sometimes we begin to take on the electricity and become agitated because we want to control or change the way things are happening in the system, but this is still a way of getting caught up in it. The best thing to do in these moments is to control our own response, grounding and centering ourselves inside our own body, and letting the system do what it does. 

Final Thoughts

One of the most powerful, yet subtle changes we can make in the system is changing our role within it by not getting caught up in it in the ways that we always have. When we change our role, the system inevitably has to change around us.

It does so not because we are trying to control how it functions. Simply because we are literally being different within it. We are doing the act of self-differentiation in real time in the system. And there are long-term benefits to this that are not always obvious at the moment, but are quite powerful.

Lessons in Self-Differentiation: Shift Toward an Internal Locus of Self

This is lesson one in series called Lessons in Self-Differentiation: 50 Short Essays for the Journey.

Healthy Differentiation is a Gradual Process of Moving Toward the Inner Self

In early development, looking to others for a sense of self is a normal part of our development as humans. We look to our caregivers to reflect back to us and validate what we feel, think, and believe about who we are. Slowly, overtime, our family system helps us develop a sense of who we are in the world. They help us cultivate our solid self, or the inner core of our identity that feels most authentic, stable, and secure.

But our family system can only take us as far in our identity development as they themselves have gone. For whatever reason, should we not receive the psychological and emotional resources required to develop a healthy level of self-differentiation through our family system, we will reach adult life constantly looking to the external world for a sense of self.

This can look like:

• Working hard to be liked by others. 

• Performing for attention and praise.

• Molding ourselves to fit the expectations and standards of others.

• Looking to others for how to think, behave, and present ourselves. 

• Looking to others for guidance and direction in all life choices.

• Looking to others to fix our problems, save us, and soothe our discomfort.

• Being highly sensitive to the approval and disapproval of others.

In essence, the authority of our lives will lie in the hands of others, versus within ourselves.

Making the Shift Toward the Inner Self

Thus, when one decides to commit to self-differentiation in adult life, moving inward and strengthening the inner self - what Bowen referred to as the solid self, is one of the most important parts of the process. This means shifting from an external locus of identity to an internal one. The word locus in Latin means place. 

Thus, when we shift our locus of identity, we are shifting the place in which we find our sense of self from the outside world to our inner world. We go from being defined by others and finding our sense of self through the external world, to defining ourselves and finding a home in ourselves.

This means we learn to:

• Look to ourselves for approval and validation, versus constantly looking outward and molding ourselves to be liked, approved of, praised, and validated by others.

• Start relying on and believing in ourselves to make the necessary changes to create the life we want.

• Evaluate ourselves based on our own values and principles. For example, before looking to others to see if we did well at something, we sit with ourselves first and ask, “Did I perform according to my own values and principles? Did I move toward my own long-term goals and vision?”

• Listen to ourselves first for guidance and wisdom to make important decisions for our lives.

• Work through our own emotions and problems first, versus dumping them on others or expecting others to save us, fix our problems, or soothe our discomfort.

• Trust ourselves to choose our own path and to be able navigate the positive or negative consequences of our choices.

• Live and behave according to what we truly value and care about, versus molding ourselves to look and act like in the world.

• Think things through for ourselves

• Follow our own path according to who we uniquely are instead of following the known and comfortable path that everyone has taken or expects us to take.

• Pick up the metaphorical pen to write the script of our own life instead of letting others write our script for us.

• Find a safe place and grounded center in ourselves in that we can always come back to when things in the external world get rocky.

We Are Still Inherently Relational Beings

That all being said, it’s important to understand that humans are relational beings. We learn how to be in the world in and through our relationships. They play an intractable role in our growth and development and they inevitable influence and shape our sense of self.

As we do self-differentiation work, however, the point is that the center of gravity of our sense of self shifts inward, while still allowing meaningful others to influence us. And as we do this, we become much more mindful and intentional about who is allowed to influence our sense of self as well as when and how we allow them to do so.

For example, here are some guidelines for reference:

Our inherent worth as a human is strictly derived internally.

This is a big one and one of the most enduring and important ones. No one - not one person - in the world is allowed to make us feel like we are not worthy to be alive, to have a decent quality of life, to be safe from harm, and so on. This is about our inherent worth simply by virtue of being a living being. Our inherent worth must always remain internal, never external.

Listen to ourselves and our inner guidance system first. 

Before looking to others for guidance, wisdom, and advice, hear what your inner self has to say about it first. What does your inner self want? What do you think you should do? If you had to do it completely without the input of others, what direction would your inner self tell you to take? Get clear on this first before ping-ponging around to others, have them tell you what to do and how to do it.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek counsel ever. It is humble and wise to do so. The point is to first go to ourselves and get clear on our perspective first. Again, the center of gravity is in ourselves, while still allowing others to help us move through the dance of life.

Get clear on our motivations to seek others and approach with intention. 

In addition to this, get clear on what you’re seeking from others. Sometimes our inner self knows exactly what it should do and how, but we are afraid of moving forward without the reassurance of others. We are afraid to take the risk and bet on ourselves. We are shaking in our bones and want to soothe our anxiety about things. So we reach out to others and - as Bowen would say - borrow some self from them. 

Reflect on your motivations. Understand why you are seeking other and what you’re seeking from them. Are you just looking for some attention? A few likes on your post? Validation that you’re right? Reassurance that you’ll be alright? 

Seek others with intention, as a part of a decision-making process to consider, not as the whole truth, and not as a mechanism for soothing.

Consciously and carefully choose whose reflection matters to us. 

The last part of this is to understand how to seek wise counsel from people who we genuinely trust, understand our values and long-term goals, and won’t just give us what we want to hear. This is likely a very small number of people in our lives, but their input is more valuable than the masses (though not more valuable than your own).

So, it’s important for us to learn how choose the right people to listen to and the right people to model - for the right reasons. We should choose those who have proven to be “in the arena” with us, those who have shown they’re capable of providing wise counsel and direction, those who have inner character traits and values that we respect and want to emulate and embody.

These people will not be there to soothe you, they will be there to help you in your truth-seeking process. You won’t be borrowing self from them, rather it should feel like they help you come back to your inner self and find an even greater sense of gravity inside of you. They will help us come back home to ourselves over and over again.

Wishing you strength and wisdom on your journey.

Lessons in Self-Differentiation: Persist When the System Resists

This is lesson two in series called Lessons in Self-Differentiation: 50 Short Essays for the Journey.

Self-Differentiation is Disruptive by Nature

I often get questions like:

• How do I get my family to understand my boundaries?

• How do I get them to accept my new way of being?

• How do I differentiate without upsetting them?

I’m going to be brutally honest: I do not believe that this is possible. 

Some family systems will have less of an “inflammatory response” than others depending up their degree of enmeshment with each other and average level of reactivity, but there is normally always some kind of resistance when one member begins to differentiate a self, change their functioning in the status quo of the family system, and become more mature in the context of their family system. I actually think this is innate to the process of self-differentiation.

Murray Bowen, the pioneer of Family Systems Theory, once made a video on this which I’ll link below for those of you interested. In it, he quoted, “Anytime anybody makes a significant step toward differentiating a self, the rest of the emotional system attacks. This is my notion of why it is so difficult for a person to differentiate from another person. It upsets the other and it upsets self to have the other upset.” 

Understanding the Family as a System That Seeks Equilibrium

There’s a delicate balance of roles and patterns for things to be maintained as they are. In family systems theory, we refer to this as equilibrium, which the system seeks to maintain. You could think of this also as the status quo, and every one plays a part in keeping the status quo as it is. The network of relationships, the interconnected emotional patterns, the role each person plays. Those all function to maintain the current configuration of the family system.

When one person changes their roles and patterns, because of this interconnectedness in functioning, the whole system is shaken up and must reorganize itself with new patterns and roles. Other members of the family system most likely don’t want to deal with this, they will feel threatened by it, and they will resist.

Differentiation is an act of change, change that upsets the balance of the status quo, change initiated by you and it upsets the system, most times, the people in that system don’t want things to change, they’re comfortable with how things are, even if things aren’t ideal, they’ve found a way to function through patterns in the status quo.

Theory and the Higher Self Will Guide Through Rough Waters

This is why I believe it’s so important to: 

Study the theory

“Theory tells you where you’re going. You’re much less likely to govern your course by what feels right, governed by the demands of the moment, rather than what you know to be right. So, theory is a blueprint to guide you.”

This was a seminal quote from Bowen in presenting his theory. I have found it to be true in my own journey. Studying the theory, understanding how relationship systems work, and using it to work on myself has been key. The theory will offer you a map, a compass, when the path looks unclear or the waters get stormy.

Define your own long-term vision, values, and goals

If you’re clear on what your long-term goals are for doing this work, and if you’re connected to some higher purpose or intention, you can keep coming back to it for strength and resilience. Defining what this looks like for you is key.

For me, a big part of my motivation has been to a) be physically and mentally healthier, given almost everyone in my family history struggled with chronic physical and mental illness and b) to ensure my children and future generations in my lineage have a greater chance at a healthier patterns and relationships, given almost everyone in my family history did not. My values are self-awareness, emotional balance, physical and mental health, lifelong learning and development, and authentic relationships.

Find what your motivations are. Connect to a higher purpose that endures for the long-term in life. Define your values. And let these continue to offer you strength over the journey.

Work on both dimensions of self-differentiation

That is, both the intrapsychic and the interpersonal. The intrapsychic differentiation is going to help you work on your emotional reactivity as your family members react to you changing. The interpersonal differentiation is going to help you to not take on or personalize their emotional reactivity. 

The higher awareness, more conscious, deliberate, reflective, critical thinking, and principled part of you is going to draw on theory, on your long-term goals, on a higher purpose, to navigate the stormy waters of the emotional reactivity that will happen in the process of differentiation.

Tolerate the discomfort necessary for growth

Cultivate distress tolerance, sometimes referred to as emotional stamina by other self-differentiation experts. This is a point I talk about in a whole separate lesson because I find it to be so important in an of itself. The going will get tough at times, this is a given of the process of growth.

Part of self-differentiation is learning to endure temporary emotional discomfort so that we can live according to our values, principles, and long-term goals. And that will prove to be true in self-differentiation work as the emotional systems you’re a part of resist your attempts to do something different than you’ve always done.

Wishing you strength and wisdom on your journey.

Outgrowing Enmeshment: The Higher Purpose of Self-Differentiation Work

Outgrowing enmeshment can be long and challenging journey. For this reason, I find that it’s important to have a higher purpose for doing the hard work and regularly coming back to this purpose throughout the journey.

Understanding and staying connected to the long-term benefits of this work can help us keep going, even when the going gets tough. Over the years of doing this work, here are some of the concepts that kept me grounded and pushing forward during the hardest parts of the journey.

Self-Differentiation is the Natural Process of Life

First and foremost, I think one of the higher purposes of undergoing the process of working through enmeshment is honoring the natural course of development of a human life. Those of us who are engaged with life and find meaning and growth will resonate with this higher purpose. It’s simply what it means to become one’s own person, to grow into a mature adult, and to pursue becoming the best version of yourself that you can be in your lifetime. So, that’s one reason to work through enmeshment: to self-actualize.

Self-Differentiation Leads to Better Mental and Emotional Health

Secondly, it’s important to understand the impact that enmeshment can have on our long-term mental and emotional well-being. It’s absolutely draining to keep putting up with our family’s drama and emotional mess. It can leave us feeling bogged down, stressed, overwhelmed, burnt out, the list goes on. When we work through that enmeshment, we learn to not get caught up in the emotional chaos, we learn to set boundaries, and we learn to calm ourselves down. We free ourselves from taking on the emotional burden of others. We develop coping skills, emotional regulation skills, and relational skills that carry over into other areas of life. This, over time, can significantly improve our mental and emotional well-being.

Self-Differentiation Improves All of Our Relationships

Third, working through enmeshment in your family of origin will change how you show up in all of life’s relationships. Your relational patterns were learned and maintained in your family of origin. Inevitably, you then carry your learned relational patterns into other relational contexts — marriage, friendship, work relationships, parenting, and so on. Addressing your enmeshment in your family of origin will change and improve the way you relate to others in your adult life.

Self-Differentiation Helps Future Generations

Fourth, we heal for future generations. Enmeshment patterns are transmitted and inherited unconsciously from generation to generation until one generation decides to break the cycle. So, by working through this, you save your kids the pain of experiencing it, but even more than that, you significantly reduce the chance that they‘ll be enmeshed with your grandchildren, and your grandchildren with their own children, and so on from there down your genetic line.

Self-Differentiation Helps Us Move Forward in Life

Fifth, you’ll free up more energy for your personal pursuits and life priority. This is important, as to become the best version of yourself you really have to channel your time and energy wisely. We have limited attention spans as humans, and we wake up with a limited amount of energy each morning for the day. We have to be mindful of where we choose for that energy to go if we want to become the best adults we can become in our lives.

Constantly getting caught up in our family of origin’s drama or attending to emotional care-taking of adult parents (who should be taking responsibility for themselves) can be quite an energy suck. It can leave us feeling depleted and take away from other important areas of our adult lives that need our time and attention, including and especially our relationship with ourselves and time for self-care.

In adult life, you create your own family, with a new family culture. You pursue your own dreams and professional achievements. You choose your own friends (sometimes even a chosen family) that help you grow and contribute to your values and long-term goals for yourself.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your family your time and energy, but there’s a difference between having a mutually beneficial adult relationship with your family members and just getting sucked into their emotional drama and having a one-sided relationship with them where you must constantly attend to their emotional needs or play emotional caretaker and validator.

When we work through enmeshment and learn to set boundaries with our time and emotional energy, we free up a ton of energy to focus on what’s most important in our lives, and we choose to move forward with our adult lives. We choose to give ourselves over to our spouses, our children, to work we care about, to friends that reciprocate, to hobbies that invigorate us, to our health, to our values, to our long-term goals, and to working toward becoming our highest selves.

Self-Differentiation Leads to Better Decision-Making

Lastly, we live with more emotional maturity and objectivity. We are more calm and less caught up in other people’s madness. We learn to control our emotions. We learn to extract ourselves from the emotional reactivity of others. And this makes us more capable of observing situations objectively making wise decisions over emotional reasoning and acting out.

• You develop the ability think for yourself instead of getting caught up in group beliefs.

• You can tolerate the emotional discomfort required to hold the tension between multiple perspectives instead of taking sides in a polarized emotional argument.

• You can recognize emotional reasoning in yourself and others and take a step back before acting on it.

So much of what you see happening in society — the polarization, the emotional reactivity, the mob mentality, the acting out, the public display of adult temper tantrums — is a product of people just being enmeshed with others, having a poorly defined sense of individual self, and getting incredibly caught up in group emotions. Working through enmeshment helps us move out of this contagious emotional reactivity into being more objective, self-possessed, grounded, autonomous, and wise adult.

Final Thoughts

I like to write these points down in my journal and reflect on them from time to time. Sometimes my partner and I will remind each other of them when we’re struggling with doing something hard, like setting an important boundary with a loved one. This has kept us going throughout the years, and as I look back and see how far we’ve come, we realize how rewarding the hard work has been. How much it’s given us that’s immeasurable - more peace, more calm, more health, more confidence, deeper connection, more purpose, and more life.

I hope you’ll also find these useful on your journey. More importantly, I hope you’ll find your own self-defined reasons and motivations for doing this very challenging and rewarding work. Whatever you find works for you, I hope you’ll stay connected to your higher principles as you do the work, as that’s a huge part of the work itself.

Random Reflections on the Parental Projection Process

There’s an interesting unconscious phenomenon that happens in families that has an enormous impact on the development and life trajectory on the children born into that family:

Parents pass on their fears, insecurities, unresolved processes, and unrealized potentials onto their children.

To be clear, I am not parent-blaming here. All human beings do this in one form or another. It’s a product of being an imperfect, ever-evolving being, and that’s a beautiful thing. No child is born into a family of parents that are perfectly mature and enlightened adult parents. We’re all figuring it out as we go and doing the best with what we know and the cards we were dealt.

So, naturally, this projection process happens for all children, and all children will go on to pass something else onto their own children. Such is the mysterious process of human evolution. This process is also largely happening out of our conscious awareness. Parents are not intentionally doing this. They are living and adapting based on the current circumstances of their lives. With whatever emotional inheritance has been passed down to them throughout the generations that came before them.

Unconscious and automatic processes have driven the survival of our species for hundreds of thousands of years. But each generation experiences a whole host of situations in life based on the environment and time they live in. Throughout life, they accumulate certain unresolved wounds, fears, and insecurities. There is also some form of a life they didn’t get to live, some sort of sacrifice they made, and therefore some unrealized potentials that they currently house within them.

Of course, unconsciously, they end up living this out through their children.

In my family, for example, I am the child Brazilian immigrants. I was raised by my mother alone. She had a rough life back in Brazil, and didn’t have much opportunity to be educated or have a stable life. The American dream was the ideal for her, and she wanted her children to become everything that she never got to be. This put a ton of pressure on us as her children to be something for her as a sort of homage to the sacrifices she made in her life to continue her own generational destiny.

But in many ways, we couldn’t meet that for her. We had different circumstances. We lived in different times, in a different environment, in a different context. We had our own evolutionary predicament to attend to. Living out the American dream was not as important to us as it was to her, and this created a chasm between who she wanted us to be and who we actually were.

You see, parents, if you can’t see your child for who they actually are, versus who you idealize them to be, you can never experience authentic intimacy with them. And you can’t let go of your idealization of them until you realize that what you’re projecting onto them is what you actually want for yourself. Children are their own people. They belong to the world, not to their parents. They’re here to fulfill there own individual purpose, not their parents’ ideals.

And if you can see them and accept them for that, it is a beautiful thing. It will be hard work to let go of your fears and projections, hopes and idealizations for them. But it will be life-giving. Your connection with them will flourish.

And for the children of parents receiving this type of projection, and feeling stuck and guilty because of it, I feel you. It’s hard. we don’t want to disappoint. We want to appreciate everything they’ve done to get us this far. But we cannot live in their shadow forever. We have to eventually individuate and grow into ourselves. We have to go live out our own unlived lives and unrealized potentials.

If we don’t, we will continue passing on these projections to future generations until someone is willing to tolerate the discomfort of breaking the cycle. So if nothing else, instead of looking back with guilt and worrying about what you owe your parents, look forward to what you owe your children and grandchildren instead.

• You owe them your own inner work.

• You owe them the hard work of your individuation.

• You owe them you becoming the most authentic and best version of you that you can become, so that they can feel the freedom of doing the same.

Every human is trying to survive and adapt. This looks different in each life. Each life has a different set of things they need to direct their energy toward.

My mother was doing her own part to move her lineage forward. She did something different than the rest of her family did. She took the risk to come to a new land in search of a better life, and she saw it as our duty to do the things that she never got to do because of the sacrifices. She wasn’t aware she was doing this. Again, this is a process that’s happening automatically, out of our awareness, driven by the survival instinct produced by our gut and limbic systems.

When you didn’t get to become who you wanted to become in your life, you live vicariously through your children. And this is a recipe for disaster, because they can never be the things you wanted to be for yourself but didn’t get to. They are not you. They are them. They have their own unique set of things to become, based on the context of their lives which likely differs from yours.

If nothing else, they live in a different generation and era than you did. They cannot fulfill what you wanted for yourself in your era. They need to do what’s best for them in their era. This puts enormous pressure on your children and strain on your relationship with them. Because they either sacrifice their own fullest, authentic expression to try to mold to yours and what you want for them, based on your projections.

Or, they will go on to live their own and that might cause a rupture in your relationship with them if you resist their dissent from your ideal and they find it necessary to rebel against you to pursue their own individuation.

But, if you can accept their unique path in this life, and take charge of pursuing yours, you may just find an intimacy with your children that is greater than any other type of connection with them you thought possible. You would come to know their soul and they would come to know yours.

• • •

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”

— Carl Jung

People Will React to Your Boundaries When You're Differentiating, Keep Going Anyway

One of the questions that I often get from clients and readers who are learning to set boundaries in their enmeshed family system is along the lines of:

What do I do if the other person reacts? How do I set a boundary without upsetting the other person? How do I get the other person to understand and accept my boundary?

My short answer to all of the above is often: You can’t.

If it were going to be easy, you probably wouldn’t be here learning how to set boundaries in the first place. You might not even have to set boundaries explicitly with a person who understands healthy boundaries. However, most members of enmeshed families do not understand, practice, or respect boundaries.

For whatever reason, in their lives, boundaries were never modeled for them and they never learned how to practice healthy boundaries. Therefore, boundaries are experienced as rejection. It requires a paradigm shift to understand that boundaries are actually an act of love:

• We set boundaries so that we can be healthier people, both for ourselves and for our loved ones.

• We set boundaries to honor our limits, so that we don’t overextended ourselves and then burnout and check out of the relationship.

• We set boundaries so that we don’t subject ourselves to hurt and then grow resentment for the other person, which then distances us emotionally from them.

• We set boundaries to protect our physical, emotional, and psychological integrity, as well as those of our vulnerable children.

• We set boundaries to not tolerate certain behaviors from others that we know will affect the relationship, and to show them that we expect more from them and trust that they have the capacity to be a better version of themselves in the relationship.

And yet, still, you can pretty much bet on the fact that setting boundaries with family members who have spent a lifetime crossing them will stir up some feelings. This is largely unavoidable with most families in which there is a decent degree of enmeshment. They may very well react. They likely won’t understand. They’ll probably resist and pushback on you.

And in those situations, you’ll need to…

Remember the Purpose

Oftentimes, we end up feeling really bad when people react to our boundaries. We don’t want to feel like we’re the ones causing others pain or discomfort. We don’t want to deal with their emotional reactions. We don’t want to feel like we’re bad people.

However, boundaries are a tradeoff of short-term discomfort for long-term well-being. In the short-term, it’s often going to feel uncomfortable, otherwise the boundary probably wouldn’t need to be set in the first place. But, in the long-term, boundaries can help you live by your values and principles, reach long-term goals, and create emotional, psychological and relational health.

That’s why it’s important to be clear on your reasons for setting certain boundaries. You have to understand what the long-term goal or higher purpose for that boundary is:

• Is it to prevent burnout?

• Is it to create more respectful and reciprocal relationships?

• Is it to protect you from emotional harm?

• Is is to be more deliberate in how you spend your time and energy?

When we are connected to the long-term, we can more skillfully and gracefully endure the short-term discomfort.

Empathize but remain firm in your position.

It can be tempting to cave into the guilt trip or to become convinced by the person’s attempts to talk you out of your position or rationalize why you shouldn’t be

When you set boundaries with others, it can feel really uncomfortable for them, especially if they’re not used to people setting boundaries with them. Sometimes, this is the first time you’re setting a boundary with them and they’re surprised because they’re used to you being a different way. It can be hard for them to understand or accept your position.

Additionally, people might have experienced a history of rejection in previous relationships and boundaries feel really threatening for them. They might personalize it and think it’s because they are a bad person or because you don’t want to have a relationship with them anymore.

They’re not used to experiencing boundaries as a way to strengthen relationships, so they experience boundaries as a threat to the relationship.

It’s important to contextualize their experience so that we can accurately empathize with their reaction. However, empathize with their reaction is mutually exclusive from caving into their reaction. We can empathize with their reaction and stand firm in our boundary at the same time.

Like when your teenager asks to stay out late with his friends and you say no because you know he has an important school project to finish the next day. He might get really angry at you and upset that he’s going to feel left out of the gathering. This is a real emotion for an adolescent at this stage of life.

But, if we cave, we understand that the long-term consequence — which he is not yet primed to understand as clearly as you are — will be much worse than the FOMO of not attending. You can both empathize with his feeling left out and his misdirected anger at you, while still holding firm in your position of saying no.

My favorite phrase is, “I can imagine this feels hard for you and I can understand how my position might be hard for you to accept. However, I stand by it.”

Understand, too, that if you go along with what they expect even if you strongly need something else, this will likely not only drain you but affect your relationship with that person due to your growing resentment. This is worse for the relationship in the long-term.

Resist reacting to their reaction.

Its often the case that the relationships that we most need to set boundaries in are the ones in which people don’t respect them. So, we need to be prepared for their reaction:

• They might experience negative emotions, such as anger, disappointment, frustration, and sadness.

• They might make up a story in their head that paints you as the bad guy in the middle of it all.

• They might try to convince you you’re wrong and give you a million reasons why you shouldn’t be setting the boundary.

• They might try to guilt you, threaten you, or use other covert manipulation tactics to get you to change your position.

• They might pull other people in that you wish wouldn’t get involved.

All these things can then trigger a reaction in you. You might react to their reaction and feel upset that they didn’t respond in an accepting way. You might find yourself:

• Getting defensive and trying to explain or justify your position.

• Trying to convince them they’re reacting in the wrong way.

• Making up excuses or white lies to soften the blow.

• Venting to others and getting them to side with you.

We want to convince the person that it’s acceptable for us to be setting this boundary, and we want to convince them that they’re wrong for the way they feel about our boundary.

This is understandable, of course, because in ideal situations in a healthy relationship, people listen to, accept, and respect our boundaries. But you can’t control how people react and it’s not your place to tell them how.

You can only manage you and your reactions. So the best thing you can do in these moments is to try not to react to their reactions and to hold firm in your position in a loving way.

Tolerate the temporary emotional discomfort.

To do the above, you basically have to learn to tolerate the discomfort necessary to stick to your values, principles, and long-term goals. The discomfort that’s often necessary to create the types of relationships you want to have with others.

When people react to your boundaries, it’s likely going to feel uncomfortable for you, especially if you care about those people, and especially if you have a history of being sensitive to the emotional reactions of others.

Discomfort is often the admission price to a good life. Maturity requires to be strong and remain steady in the face of opposition, so that you can stick to living by your principles and values, and so that you can create the type of life and relationships you envision for yourself.

This means you will need to take a deep breath, bite your tongue, regulate your emotions, and surrender to the process of their reaction to you. You will need to stay calm amongst the storm of their emotions. And you will need to trust that the emotions will pass and this person will eventually calm down. You do not need to cave into their reaction or soothe their emotions about this.

It’s like breaking up with someone that you care about but know you just isn’t right for you in the long run. They’re going to feel upset. That’s a very likely thing. But should you cave on your decision because they’re upset?

Or, for a simpler example, you’re kid wants to eat his fifth cookie for the day and you say no because, well, come on, it’s the fifth cookie. They’re going to feel upset. That’s a very likely thing. But should you cave on your decision because they’re upset?

And it sucks to see those we love upset. It sucks even more when we feel like we’re the one’s causing that upset. But, emotions pass, despite being very uncomfortable in the moment. Maturity is being able to tolerate that temporary emotional discomfort for something more important or more worthy in the long-term.

Allow the relationship to change organically.

Often times, people are in relationship with us because they are benefitting from our lack of boundaries. You need to be prepared that when you set a boundary with someone, and they can longer benefit in the way that they were, their reaction might actually be leaving the relationship altogether.

And this might be incredibly painful to you. Firstly, the loss of a relationship is never easy, simple as that. Additionally, it sucks to realize that a relationship was actually transactional and a person’s connection to you was conditional.

This is also why it’s so important to be clear on our values and our reasons for setting certain boundaries. Are you prepared to lose this relationship? Do you value yourself enough to risk losing it in order to stand up for what you want or will no longer tolerate?

If you’re setting a boundary, you have to be ready for the relationship to shift and change in ways you might have not predicted or wanted. The other person might shut down on you, they might get petty, they might get distant, they might hold a grudge, they might seek revenge.

A number of things can happen that are out of your control. You’ll need to allow the person to have whatever reaction they have and allow the relationship to change organically.

Because this is the only way to guarantee the positive version of setting the boundary, which is creating a healthier relationship with greater levels of understanding of each others needs and respectful of each others limits.

Final Thoughts

We set boundaries so that we can have stronger and closer relationships with others. The are an act of both self-care and care for the relationship. And, it’s unfortunate, but people are going to react and misunderstand. Expect that as a part of this process and trust that it’s a necessary and healthy thing to do anyway.

It’s hard work. It often doesn’t feel good in the moment. But maturity is about living by our values and principles over allaying the anxiety of the present moment. It’s about setting long-term goals for our lives and pushing past the discomfort necessary to get there.

It’s about understanding the higher purpose of saying no to what’s not helping us have the types of relationships we want, both with ourselves in others. That might not always feel good, but many things that don’t feel good in the short-term are actually what get us to feeling great in the future.

• • •

“Anytime anybody makes a significant step toward differentiating a self, the rest of the emotional system attacks. This is my notion of why it is so difficult for a person to differentiate from another person. It upsets the other and it upsets self to have the other upset.”

— Murray Bowen, Pioneer of Family Systems Theory

Enmeshment is a Developmental Pathology and Self-Differentiation is the Antidote

Development

To properly understand enmeshment, it is necessary to understand both human development and human evolution at a basic level. This is essentially because enmeshment is a pathology of a particular stage of normal development in human life, which is driven by evolutionary forces that are millions of years old.

Psychological developmental unfolds through a series of stages, the first of which is a state of symbiotic union with our mother before we are even born. We are first dependent on our mother’s literal body for survival as we grow and develop inside the safety of her womb, fused to her through an umbilical cord. After birth, we physically differentiate from our mother’s body. We become a separate physical being capable of self-sustaining bodily functions on our own, such as breathing, eating, and digestion.

However we remain highly dependent on our caregivers for our physical and emotional needs, and for our psychological development. We are psychologically and emotionally undifferentiated from our family attachments, depending on them for our development of emotional regulation, cognitive processes, mental models, belief systems, adaptive behaviors, and much more.

Unlike many species in nature which are born ready or almost ready for life out in the wild, human beings are altricial, meaning we come out of the womb with with much of our development left undone. We depend on our social environment to help us finish that development throughout the course of childhood and adolescence. We are born highly dependent and remain dependent for a very long time, more so than any other known species. This gives our brains ample time to explore our physical and social environment and learn how to be a human being before we are launched out into the wild as an adult.

This is presumably an incredible evolutionary adaptation which gives us ample time to develop a certain degree of complexity that’s adaptive to whatever environment we are born into. Childhood and adolescence offer young human beings a safe environment where they can experience, test out, and simulate the world around them as their brains develop and prepare for life out in the wild as mature adult member of the species. During this time, our social environment passes on information to us about how to be in the world. They help us develop our sense of self. They socialize us.

As such, development unfolds slowly over time, as we pass through many of its stages, facilitated in the context of our family, social, and cultural environment. As a note, genes play a fundamental role in who we become. However, we are both nature and nurture, both hardware and software. In fact, more so than any other known species, who we become in the world is very much shaped at the software level. We are not blank slates, but we are the blankest slates in nature.

For much of recorded scientific history in the psychological sciences, we’ve studied developmental processes a great deal, but only in childhood up to and just slightly past adolescence. We assumed, therefore, that development ends after a person has reached, the age of 18 or so.

But as we are starting to see through the work of developmental psychologists like Robert Kegan and Susanne Cook-Greuter, psychological development can continue throughout our entire adult lives if the individual is aware and motivated enough, or if the environment that surrounds them calls upon it. As it does, we become more complex in the ways we understand ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it all.

Stages

Stage 0: Symbiotic Fusion (Physical dependence in mother’s womb, “fused” through umbilical cord.)

Stage 1: Sensorimotor-Undifferentiated

Stage 1/2: Emotional-Relational

Stage 2: Magical-Impulsive

Stage 2/3: Opportunistic-Self-Protective

Stage 3: Mythic-Conformist

Stage 3/4: Conventional-Interpersonal (Enmeshment normally manifests here.)

Stage 4: Rational-Self-Authoring (Self-Differentiation leads to here.)

Stage 4/5: Relativistic-Sensitive

Stage 5: Integrated-Multi-Perspectival

Stage 5/6: Ego-Aware-Paradoxical

Stage 6: Absorptive-Witnessing

Non-Stage: Non-Dual Identification

Embeddedness

Research suggests most humans live within the stage 3/4 - or the stage of embeddedness with others - for most, if not all, of their adult lives. This means they live by rules, standards, norms, and expectations of the groups they belong to. They are defined by the views others have of them and look to others for approval and direction in their life choices and everyday decisions. Difference is not tolerated well and whatever falls outside of the norms, expectations, and standard scripts of the group is seen as other or experienced as threatening and is often criticized, shame, rejected, and oppressed.

The identity and sense of self of individuals in this stage rest largely on their group affiliations and their relationships. They are their relationships and their relationships are them. There’s little to no sense of individual identity that differs from the group, difficulty with setting boundaries and making decisions that will disappoint others, a sense of responsibility for the problems and emotions of others, and a reliance on the group for acceptance, reassurance, soothing, and emotional regulation.

Demands of Environment

For much of human evolution, we operated from the stage of development from which the pathology of enmeshment emerges. You could call this tribalism, group-centeredness, or the embedded self, but it is a stage of development that all humans must pass through to get to the stage that comes after it - the stage of individuality, self-authorship, and differentiation.

As a social species, one of the primary mechanisms we’ve used throughout our evolutionary history to both survive and learn how to navigate our environment is social learning and connections to others. Call this family, culture, or tribe. Our social connections are key to our survival and functioning, especially in childhood and adolescence.

Our environment placed high demands on us as a species, and banding together, caring for each other, sacrificing ourselves for the group, and transmitting important learnings socially from generation to generation is arguably why we are even still here in the first place. This stage of development is an achievement in the evolution of consciousness. It was an enormous feat.

But consciousness can and does evolve. Our physical and cultural environment has evolved even more so.

Enmeshment

Enmeshment is essentially the pathological version of embeddedness. Enmeshment is a result of the togetherness force impairing the very thing it evolved to do - promote our survival, growth, and adaptation. It is what happens when a given individual’s growth, development, and well-being are impaired by their need to abide by what the group wants and expects of them. Of choosing the group’s needs and demands over the individual’s need to chart and walk one’s path, to grow into him or herself, to develop agency, to learn to think and choose for oneself, to live according to one’s nature, and to pursue the development of one’s consciousness.

Symptoms

Enmeshment can cause or exacerbate conditions like anxiety and depression by impairing our ability to fully grow into our own agency and authenticity. We can’t express the truth about who we really are, what we want, what we need, what we believe. Out of fear and obligation, we can’t set boundaries or say no to things we don’t like or don’t want. We can’t express our thinking if it’s different or disagree with the groups perspectives and beliefs. We look to them for constant validation, approval, and reassurance.

We fear what they think of us and live in a way that tries to shape and protect their image of us. We feel responsible for the happiness, their pain, their loneliness, and their problems. We feel responsible for making them proud and living up to their expectations. We can’t choose ourselves, think for ourselves, decide for ourselves, otherwise we’re riddled by guilt and fear.

By consistently trying to live out the expectations of others, gain their approval, and avoid their disapproval, we either experience overwhelm and chronic stress (anxiety) or feel come to feel stuck, depleted, and weighed down by it all (depression).

Coping Mechanisms

We often resort to coping mechanisms to deal with the symptoms. Sometimes these coping mechanisms are an attempt to soothe the chronic stress and counteract the feeling of being down or numb. Sometimes it’s an unconscious attempt to rebel against the sense of authority controlling our life trajectory and gaining back a sense of our own agency. Coping can be anything from substances, food, and sex, to lying, hiding, affairs, and living a double life in the shadows.

The Antidote

The marker of the stage of embeddedness is that the authority for our sense of we are and how we should live lies outside of us - in the external environment. Differentiation allows us to begin bringing some of that authority inward. Where before, we live according to the scripts authored by those in our external environment, we now pick up the metaphorical pen and begin authoring our own lives. We start to see where we are separate and different. Their emotions don’t have to be mine, I can have my own. Their beliefs don’t have to be mine, I can question them and decide which I will keep, and which I won’t. Their values and principles don’t have to be mine, I can bring those into question, reflect critically, and consciously decide through my own thinking which values and principles I will live by.

The Pain and Confusion of Differentiation

Differentiation often leads to a lot of pain and confusion because we are so deeply attached to the social environment we come from. Parents, especially, are the primordial bond. We are literally wired to our parents’ nervous systems, and their’s wired to ours.

When we grow up in a family system and culture that live within the stage of embeddedness and we start to feel the pull for our own differentiation, it can be scary to feel like we’re putting such powerful emotional bonds at risk. In our evolutionary history, going against the group was a recipe for emotional chaos and disaster at best, an alarming threat to our survival at worst.

When we initiate the differentiation process, we will more than likely experience resistance from the relationship systems we’re a part of. We must be ready to face the pain of this process. Which brings me to my last point.

Increasing Autonomy and Authenticity as a Natural Life Process

Embeddedness is state and stage of comfort for most human beings. In some cultures and society, most people will be able to live within this order of consciousness for most of their lives. However, human life on earth and the demands associated with it are becoming evermore complex, and the development of consciousness might be necessary for all human beings, all cultures, and all society. The capacity for differentiation likely evolved for adaptive reasons. Some will choose the arduous path of differentiation and beyond, of lifelong learning and self-development, of undergoing the infinite process of maturation and complexification.

And, in my humble view, to truly become the best version of oneself in the world, to experience deep purpose and meaning, it is necessary to attempt to develop the full extent of one’s consciousness, and that requires first that we differentiate and emerge from our embeddedness with our family and culture.

How to Manage Emotional Contagion in Enmeshed Family Systems

Humans Evolved for Emotional Contagion

Emotional contagion is the process by which one person absorbs the emotional state of another. Humans evolved for this ability. It’s is an adaptive mechanism that has helped us survive throughout our evolution. As a social species, we are wired to emotionally affect each other for good reasons:

• Babies communicate their needs to their caregivers through emotions. Caregivers must be attuned in order to respond quickly and appropriately to the baby’s survival needs.

• Humans in groups emotionally bond and band together to take care of each other and collaborate in their survival.

In a family system, emotions spread from person to person like electricity and influence its members as to act in unison. One person’s emotional state in a family activates every other member to one degree or another.

Emotional contagion is the essence of empathy, or the ability to attune to, ‘feel’ the emotions of others, and connect with them. It’s how we experience shared joy, parent-child bonds, and mutual love. This is a wonderful thing.

However, there is a dark side to this process when it’s not managed with healthy boundaries…

The Consequences of Emotional Contagion Without Healthy Emotional Boundaries

Gone out-of-whack, this important evolutionary mechanisms can lead to a lot of suffering in families, relationships, and even society at large.

• We get stuck in cycles of drama and overwhelming emotions.

• We sacrifice our well-being and authenticity to protect and soothe the emotions of those we acre about.

• We get caught up in group reactivity and mob mentality, then end up acting out in destructive ways.

One family member’s emotional state can activate the whole family. This is often a result of poor emotional boundaries due to the family’s enmeshment. This often leads to reactivity, drama, conflict, and acting out. The helpers and fixers then jump in to emotionally caretake and bring the family back to balance. This also often leads to family members walking on egg shells or not being authentic and honest in order to protect from triggering an emotional reaction in the family.

This then leads to a lack of authenticity and true intimacy in family relationships. People become afraid to share the truth about who they really are because of an oversensitivity to the emotions of others. They protect others from discomfort as a way of protecting themselves from taking on the upset of others.

Emotional contagion can become problematic when it leads an individual to become overwhelmed and affects their physical and mental health. It can also be problematic when emotions spread across a group of people like wildfire over perceived — not real — threats. This is because people generally lose some ability to think properly and make good decisions when our emotions are highly activated.

Empathy and compassion without healthy separation can quickly become self-destructive. Emotional contagion without healthy boundaries can lead to emotional fatigue and exhaustion, distorted thinking, emotional decision-making, and even emotional burnout and dissociation.

If you grew up in a family system where you were the helper, fixer, peacemaker, or emotional caretaker, you might go through life being extra sensitive to the emotions of others and taking on the responsibility to help them feel better. This can lead to sacrificing your own needs in order to focus on others.

How to Keep Emotional Contagion At Bay

So, what do we do with such a paradox? The paradox that we evolved to emotionally affected and be affected by others, yet too much of it becomes maladaptive?

The best way to prevent the negative consequences of emotional contagion is to practice four simple steps: emotional awareness, discernment, healthy boundaries, and self-regulation.

1. Emotional Awareness

Simply being aware of how this plays out in our relationships with others can help us introduce a pause and reflection. Oftentimes, emotional contagion happens unconsciously and reflexively. Our instincts are programmed to do it naturally, so it often happens without us even knowing it.

However, by practicing the skill of emotional awareness, or becoming aware of emotions in ourselves in others, it becomes possible to interrupt the instinctual reaction.

2. Discernment

It’s important to ask ourselves in the moment of the pause whether or not it’s worth us getting caught up in the turmoil or not. Sometimes, it’s adaptive to do so because the situation is an emergency and it calls for reflexivity. Most of the time, however, staying calm will be a more strategic move. Discerning this in the moment will help you decide how to move forward.

3. Healthy Boundaries

If the answer to number 2 is no, we must set emotional boundaries with ourselves and others. Having boundaries does not mean that you need to block the emotions of others out. It simply means that you become thoughtful of when and how much you do let them affect you. In essence, the process is now drive by your conscious choice than your unconscious instincts.

Boundaries can be set two ways. The first is the emotional boundary you set with yourself. For example, if your partner comes home really frustrated from work, you set a limit with how much of that frustration you will allow yourself to take on. Your ability to remain calm in the situation and not take on her frustration might actually help her calm down as well.

The second is in setting a physical boundary where you choose to remove yourself from a situation. For example, if you’re at a family dinner and one of the family members start yelling angrily at each other, you might choose to leave the situation altogether.

4. Self-Regulation

The last step in this process is self-regulation. This is about the ability to calm yourself down once you know that you have become overly ‘energized’ by the emotions of others. There’s so much power in being the one who can stay balanced and clear-headed amidst the chaos and turmoil.

Understanding the Parental Projection Process in Bowen Family Systems Theory

Today, I want to talk about projection, one of the most important concepts in Bowen Family Systems Theory as it relates to the mental health and proper development of an individual in their lifetime.

Projection is the process by which one generation transmits their unresolved emotional issues onto the next generation.

Parents see children as an extension of themselves instead of as a separate and unique individual that has their own thoughts, feelings, aspirations, insecurities, strengths, and limitations. As a results, parents end up having all sorts of anxious expectations of their child.

I see projection happen in three main ways…

1. Parents live vicariously through their child.

Often, parents become overinvolved in raising their children and lose sight of their own identity outside of their role as a parent. They stop pursuing their own goals and dreams, investing in their own learning and development, strengthening their own talents and skills, and nurturing their sense of self.

Parents see their child’s talents, skills, successes, and achievements as their own. As a result, they end up living vicariously through their children’s development, vitality, and achievements. They project the talents and skills they wish they had in themselves or the dreams they wish they could fulfill onto their children.

Most of the time, parents don’t realize they’re doing this. It’s often unintentional and implicit, but children experience the subliminal emotional messages nonetheless. Parents often believe they mean well and want the best for their children.

However, what they want is based on their own view of reality and the context of their own life, not on the actual child’s reality given the generational and environmental context of that child’s life.

A parent who always wanted something for themselves but didn’t have the opportunity to achieve it or develop it in themselves — a career, a social life, a perfect marriage, an economic status, a hobby or passion, a skillset or unique talent, and so on — might push their children to achieve that thing so that they can live vicariously through them.

“I want my children to become everything I never got to be.”

Oftentimes, this is masked under the guise of making huge sacrifices for their children so that their children can achieve these things. They might even throw this in the child’s face when they’re upset or not getting what they want from the child.

This makes the relationship with the children transactional and puts a lot of pressure on the children to become something that might not feel natural for them to be. This might suppress the child’s authentic talents, inclinations, wishes, and potentials.

For Example

An immigrant parent who never got the chance to go to college and had to work a blue collar job their whole lives might push their child to go to college, get an MBA, get a corporate job, and climb the corporate ladder.

Meanwhile, the child is uniquely skilled for blockchain coding, grows up in the information age with ample access to free or low-cost learning resources on the internet (thank you, Reddit and YouTube), teaches themselves how to code at a young age, and wants to be an indie freelance developer in the gig economy.

This makes perfect sense in the context of the child’s generation, and the child might go on to be very successful by his own definition. However, there will be an emotional and mental disconnect with the parent if the parent is projecting their reality onto their child’s life.

The parent will never be able to see or accept how truly successful their child has become. They would need to temporarily suspend their understanding of reality based on the context of their life in order to step into their child’s perspective and accept who their child wants to authentically become.

If the child has enough courage, they will push back enough on their parent’s projection and pursue their own individuality, but this will create tension in their relationship and leave both feeling misunderstood and emotionally distant.

However, if the child is really sensitive to the parent’s disapproval, they will sacrifice their true desires to live out the parent’s vision for them.

This could be things like:

• Playing certain sports or having certain hobbies.

• Having a certain appearance and dressing a certain way.

• Displaying certain personality characteristics, like extroversion or intelligence.

• Choosing a certain type of romantic partner or certain friends.

• Choosing a certain career path and a certain definition of success.

• Participating in a certain religion and having certain beliefs.

• Having certain values and general lifestyle choices that align with what the parents want.

Children will live to make their parents proud and to fulfill the dreams their parents had for them. They’ll also live in fear of upsetting the parents if they don’t live up to those expectations.

Parents project their unlived life and their development onto their children and then live vicariously through their children even if their children don’t actually want those things for themselves. This leaves children in a tough spot because they feel pressured to perform for their parents versus living out their own individual choices.

They allow their parents to be the authority on their life course, versus learning to think and decide for themselves, and picking up the metaphorical pen and authoring their own lives. It might even feel threatening to go against what parents want because this could mean disappointing them, rejection by them, emotional reactions from them, or even worse consequences.

Parents often also getting a sense of energy and aliveness from their children. Children have a natural impulse toward exploration and engagement with the world around them. They are playful, risk-taking, curious, and full of energy.

As adults, we often lose this impulse if we are not intentional about nurturing it in our own lives, and end up living through our children’s vitality. We outsource our sense of aliveness into their developmental process. Ask yourself, how often do you find yourself engaging in play in your life if not with your children or from watching them engage in it?

2. Parents fear their child’s failure and pain.

Just as parent see their child’s successes and achievements as their own, they experience their child’s failures, struggles, and pain as their own. This can lead to the parent being very sensitive to any sign that something might be wrong with the child and anxiously worrying about the child.

Because of the lack of clear separation between self and other, they take on their child’s emotional discomfort. Protecting their child from emotional discomfort is actually a way of protecting themselves from their own emotional discomfort from seeing their child struggle.

Even if the best thing for the child long-term is to experience that discomfort because it will strengthen them and help them learn and grow, the parents will jump in and stop that process.

They might try so hard to protect the child from making mistakes or becoming a failure that they end up inhibiting the child from taking risks and making the mistakes that are necessary for learning and development. Children have to make mistakes, they have to learn from trial and error, they have to feel things on their own skin so that their knowledge and wisdom are experiential and embodied.

If children can’t take their own risks, think through their own decisions, and work through the consequences of those decisions, they will have a hard time developing the autonomy and resilience necessary for adult life.

In fact, childhood is meant to be experimental. It’s like a dress rehearsal for life out in the wild. A simulation of sorts where they get to test out their skills. The more they can try and fall within the context of the family environment, the more their brain and nervous system become complex and prepared to adapt to life out in the wild. Failure, adversity, and non-traumatic psychological discomfort is actually really good for a child’s development into a robust and resilient adult individual.

Of course, some degree of this protect and caretaking is perfectly healthy and adaptive. Children do need parents to be attuned and protect them from trauma or serious injury. As a social species, we evolved for this kind of emotional sensitivity because it helps parents care for and protect their children, who are normally vulnerable in their developmental years. However, like too much of anything good, too much of this can impair the well-being and long-term development of the child.

Ways This Shows Up

• They constantly try to protect their child from failure which makes the child anxious about making mistakes and taking the risks which are necessary for learning and normal in the development process.

• They constantly try to save the child from their pain which makes the child highly reliant on parental soothing and validation and impairs the child from learning to self-soothe

• They’re constantly perceiving certain problems in the child or overreact to the child’s limitations and might be highly critical, pathologizing, or anxiously try to change and fix the child.

Oftentimes, whenever a parent comes in and tells me their child is lazy or underfunctioning at home or outside the home, my first curiosity is: “In what ways might the parents be projecting their anxiety onto this child in way that makes this child feel hesitant or unmotivated to move forward in life for fear of failure, criticism, or disappointing the parents? How might the parents be overfunctioning for the child which then manifests as underfunctioning in the child?”

What often looks like lethargy and laziness on the outside is actually paralysis from an anxious family system on the inside. Children who are “babied” are actually anxiously projected on by the parents and end up manifesting the very things their parents fear, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. Parents compensate for their insecurities.

Parents work our their insecurities through their children. They compensate for the parts of themselves that they feel “less than” for by concentrating on those parts in their children. This is largely an unintentional process in which they unconsciously try to “heal” these insecurities and increase their self-esteem by filling their perceived lack with their child’s qualities.

As a result, children might go on to develop those qualities in themselves to the exclusion of others. They might become overly focused on getting their sense of worth from those qualities that the parents focus on. And, in the end, this method doesn’t actually help the parents resolve the insecurities in the long-term.

Parents might seek attention and validation from others for those qualities in their children. They might overly display those qualities in their children to others in their life. They are essentially trying to receive the validation they’ve always wanted for those qualities through their children.

For Example

A mother who was heavily criticized for her weight and looks might come to be heavily critical of her own daughter’s looks and push her daughter to focus on her appearance:

• She might push her child to model and post modeling pictures of her all over social media.

• She might be really sensitive to the way other’s talk about her daughter’s appearance.

• She might bask in any compliments her daughter receives related to her appearance.

The projection process here is simply a result of the parent externalizing this unresolved part of themselves onto another person versus doing their own inner work on it.

4. Parents transfer their unresolved emotional attachments.

The other manifestation of unresolved pain is a result of the parents own emotional attachment with their own parents. Whatever they didn’t get from their own parents they will unconsciously repeat and try to work out through their attachment with their children. This often leads to a cyclical pattern across the generations because children then go on to do the same to their own children, unless they become aware and interrupt the pattern.

These parents can’t relate in a securely attached way to their children if they are anxiously projected their unresolved emotional attachments with their own parents or with their spouse. The children of these parents will then go on to try to resolve whatever lack was in their attachment with their parents through their relationship with their own children.

For Example

A mother who was abandoned by her own mother might promise to never abandon her children, so she’s going to do the exact opposite as a way to try to heal the abandonment wound. She instead is intensely emotionally involved with her child and becomes overbearing as an overcompensation for the emotional void she experienced in her own parental attachment.

But this is done as an emotional reaction to her past, not as a conscious reflection and mature intention to approach her attachment with her children. She’s not tuning into her actual child’s needs, who might need something different than what she’s giving. She’s giving the child version of herself — from the past — what she believes she would have wanted from her own mother.

She is unconsciously trying to heal her wound, not actually attend to what her children actually need from her and relating to her child’s authentic self. It becomes about her own emotions, versus what her child uniquely needs from her, which might actually be more space and autonomy.

So she ends up being suffocating for the child. And, ironically, she also ends up being neglectful, despite her intention to not be. She ends up being neglectful because she’s not actually attuning and attending to the child’s needs.

As a result, she repeats the very thing she was working so hard to avoid — being neglectful. She also unconsciously manifests her own abandonment. Because, in feeling suffocated, the child pulls away and emotionally distances from her to try to protect himself from her engulfment.

This leaves her feeling empty, rejected, and unloved. And it leaves both of them from being authentically connected to each other. Maybe she puts a million and one pictures up on Facebook and creating a shrine for her children. But the children actually prefer privacy and try to set boundaries around social media use.

What the child wishes is that the mother would understand their need for privacy and respect their boundaries. But the mother reacts and feels rejected because she’s just giving her love. But she’s doing what she thinks she would have wanted from her own mother. She’s not attuning to her own child’s needs. She’s serving her own emotional needs unconsciously and unintentionally, but it has an effect on the child.

Final Thoughts

As a result of projection, a child’s sense of self and development might be impaired, which cal lead to all sort of emotional, psychological, and relational problems in adult life:

• The child might feel constantly responsible for their parent’s upset.

• The child might feel like they’re always doing something wrong.

• The child might feel constantly anxious to fulfill their parent’s expectations.

• The child might take on anxiety from their parents.

• The child might end up with an unclear sense of self and poor self-image.

• Parent and child never experience true intimacy and authentic connection.

In short, projection stops a child from feeling free to explore who they uniquely are. They have no breathing room to learn to “hear” themselves and experiment with who they want to become:

• What they think, feel, believe, and understand about the world.

• What they love to do, what they’re good at, what they don’t like to do, what they’re not good at.

• Who they want to have romantic and platonic relationships with.

• What their biggest hopes and dreams are.

• How they want to live their day-to-day lives.

Instead, the parent’s projections drive what self they should become. Then, they will go on to do the same with their children, unless they become aware and choose to explore and embrace their more authentic longings and ideals.

This is all a result of parents seeing children as an extension of themselves. This impairs children from growing into themselves and into their own separate individual in the world, also known as the process of self-differentiation.

Self-differentiation does not mean that children disconnect from the parents and become isolated, which is often a misinterpretation of this approach. Quite the opposite actually. Authentic connection deepens the more children are freed from the parent’s projections and are seen and embraced for who they authentically are becoming in life.

Self-Differentiation in Relationships: Processing the End of a Relationship

When a relationship ends, we lose a part of our identity that we’ve been building with another person. It’s an experience of psychological death. This can be extremely painful and can launch us into an emotional and existential crisis that leaves us disoriented and unsure of how to cope and move forward.

And, I’m here to tell you honestly that moving forward is not an easy process, but it’s completely possible. What’s more, on the other side of this process might actually be a life you love even more than before.

When you give death to an old version of your life, you are afforded the opportunity to create a new one. One that lets go of the baggage of the past. One in which you are wiser and stronger. One in which you might actually find is more meaningful and fulfilling.

But to get to the other side, you must go through it and experience it fully. You must process the experience, learn from it, and apply the lessons to the new life you are creating. Here are 3 steps to begin processing doing so…

1. Embrace Emotional Complexity

It’s normal to feel many opposing things at the same time: grief and relief, desperation and hope, hate and love. Paradoxical emotions, motives, and meanings can all co-exist:

• We can feel intensely sad about the fact that it’s over and yet be absolutely certain that the right thing to do is move on.

• We can love the person we are leaving with every ounce of our being, we can think they’re amazing, and yet still know that they’re not a good match for us.

A big part of maturity is the having the capacity for mental and emotional complexity. It’s about embracing paradox. It’s about holding the tension between seemingly opposing poles with giving in to one side.

This is where I often see people go wrong. They either give into the sadness and go back to what is no longer a viable relationship. Or they completely cut off and don’t allow themselves to fully process the situation and learn from it.

The more we allow ourselves to experience the complexity and totality of any given situation, the more skillfully we can navigate challenging situations, and the more wisdom we can draw from our lived experiences.

2. Acknowledge How You’ve Grown

Listen, I know it can be a lot to ask to acknowledge the good in the midst of the rage and resentment we can sometimes feel toward the other person. But, the more we practice awareness of what we take with us from our relationships into our future lives, the better off we will be for it.

Any relationship — no matter how good or bad it was — offers us the opportunity to learn and grow if we allow ourselves to reflect and extract the lessons from the experience. When a relationship ends, we can ask ourselves:

• What do I take from that relationship with me into my future life and relationships?

• In what ways did that relationship help me grow and mature?

• What did I learn about what I need most in future relationships?

• What did I learn about what I don’t want or won’t tolerate?

• What was my role in the relationship not working out and how can I approach my future relationships differently given that awareness?

To be clear, this exercise is intended to help acknowledge both what worked and didn’t — and the growth and evolution you take with you as a result.

As humans, our nervous systems are wired to connect with the nervous systems of others, and any time we enter into an attachment with another human being, we inevitably affect each other. We wire new connections and make new memories.

No matter what, our relationships remain a part of our psyches and body memories as metabolized experiences. We have a choice whether we want to reflect on those experiences and draw wisdom from them, or leave them lurking in our subconscious.

Each person we connect with can potentially draw out a new side of us that we’ve never explored before or that had gone to sleep. They can potentially show us a new way of being in the world or a new perspective on life.

Each relationship offers us the opportunity to get to know ourselves more deeply. To learn what we need and want. To learn what to avoid and let go of. To get a little bit better at relating and at loving.

3. Tend to ‘The Void’

When a relationship ends, it sometimes can launch us into a full-blown identity crisis. At the very least, it can leave us a little lost and confused for a while. This is because, as social creatures, we evolved for our identities to be wrapped in our relationships with others, for better or for worse.

When a relationship ends, a piece of our sense of self is lost and we will need to grieve:

• Past memories, present routines, and future plans.

• The sides of ourselves that came alive in the presence of the other.

• The time, energy, and resources we invested.

Whether we were the one broken up with or the one doing the breaking up, there’s a void is left behind to fill. And we will need to tend to that void by moving forward into the future while still grieving what we’re leaving behind.

Moving forward looks like taking the opportunity to recreate ourselves, to build up our sense of self, and to fill that void with novel and meaningful things.

Perhaps for you that means:

• Reinvesting in old relationships that were getting less attention.

• Going out to meet new people and making new friends.

• Pursuing hobbies, work, and creative projects more deeply.

• Doing some extended travel or moving to a new city.

• Going to therapy and processing your patterns and grief.

• Taking care of your physical health and body.

Whatever it might look like for you, know that you can move forward while still holding onto the past. You can still grieve what was while working on what will be. In fact, that’s a critical part of the grieving process: transitioning a new life.

And creating will be a big part of it, because in the transition, we lose what we once created. To fill that void, we must create new things in our life to fill it. While it’s sad to lose the past, it’s also an opportunity to grow and expand ourselves in ways we might have not imagined.

My two biggest and most painful breakups in life have helped birth new and better versions of me. They helped take my life in new creative directions I never thought possible.

Sometimes the things in life that help catapult us into growth are things we wish would have not happened, but they are an opportunity for expansion nonetheless.

Final Thoughts

Breaking up is never easy. Loss and grief are never easy. Starting over is never easy. But change is a fact of life. We’re always losing old parts of ourselves and creating new ones. It can be tempting to want to block out everything that happened or to try to hang on tightly to what is getting away from us.

But the best way to move forward is to process the experience and use it as a catalyst to birth a new version of ourselves. To create a new lifestyle that’s deeper, richer, more engaging, and more meaningful than ever before. After all, discomfort is the often admission price to a meaningful life.

Understanding Multigenerational Patterns in Bowen Family Systems Theory

Generational patterns are emotional, behavioral, mental, and relational patterns that get passed down from generation to generation, often in a repetitive or cyclical way. 

Some of these patterns are passed down through conscious teaching, but more often they are passed down unconsciously and automatically, normally through interaction, modeling, and imitation. These patterns all interact to shape who we become in our lives and how we approach our adult commitments and relationships.

As humans, we are a social species and we evolved to learn from others. Knowledge about how to live, interact with the world, and adapt to life’s demands is transmitted from generation to generation. This transmission happens largely outside of awareness and often without being questioned. 

Two Types of Generational Patterns

Repetitive or Recurring Patterns

The first type of generational pattern is the passing down of knowledge about living in the social world. This can be beliefs about relationships, beliefs about the self, emotional reactions, coping mechanisms, relational behaviors, values, principles, and so on. Many times these patterns are referred to as culture and cultural evolution.

Oftentimes, these are passed from generation to generation without ever being questioned by any given generation. We just do things because that’s the way our family and culture do it and that’s how they’ve always been done. However, some knowledge about living that was adaptive under specific contexts becomes maladaptive in another context.

For example, a father who immigrated to the United States at a young age to try to make a better life for himself learned that he could become successful by presenting a certain image to the world and always performing.

He then raises his children with these values:

• “Dress to impress.”

• “First impressions are everything.”

• “Appearance is the most important thing.”

• “The world is a stage.”

• “Fake it until you make it.”

The children go on to repeat these belief patterns, however, it leaves them feeling empty and disconnected from their authentic selves. Additionally, they grew up in a generation where authenticity began to matter more, or at least be more accepted.

It was acceptable for them to have colorful hair and wear casual clothing in the workplace. It was welcomed for them to share their vulnerabilities and admit when they didn’t have all the answers as a leader. So the learned behaviors that were once adaptive for the father’s generation became maladaptive for his children’s generation.

Cyclical Patterns

The second is a cyclical process that stems from unresolved emotional attachments playing out throughout the generations. Whatever unresolved attachments a particular generation has will be projected onto the next generation, which will lead to the next generation reacting to the projections. So the patterns end up repeating in a cyclical way from generation to generation.

This pattern is a result of an reactive process that people are unaware they are participating in and perpetuating. It will continue until one particular generation becomes aware and decides to interrupt the pattern and do something different. 

So for example, a mother who was abandoned by her parents might unconsciously work this out in her own parenting by promising to “never do what her mother did to her.” 

She will reactively polarize to the other end of the spectrum and potentially end up being overinvolved with her children. In turn, this might impair their development, or they might feel so suffocated by her that in order to cope they break off contact and stay at a distance in their adult lives. 

As a result, she ends up reenacting her abandonment wound through her children, and they will likely go on to repeat some version of this with their own children unless they become aware of this process and choose to work through it.

Patterns Can Be Adaptive or Maladaptive

Adaptive Patterns

Adaptive patterns are ones that help an individual “get along in their environment with greatest success and least conflict with others.” They make sense for the current context the individual is living in and helps them survive and thrive in their environment.

Maladaptive Patterns

Maladaptive patterns are ones that cause more harm than good in the individual’s life, relationships, and his or her environment. Sometimes, patterns that were once adaptive for previous generations are no longer adaptive in the current one. Because they get passed down automatically and unconsciously, they end up becoming harmful instead of helpful for this generation.

How to Apply This In Your Own Life

1. Awareness

Are you aware of your emotional and relational patterns? If so, are they all adaptive for you and the people around you? If you take the time to map out your generational family system — about 3 generations should be good — you might find recurring patterns across the generations.

This is a powerful way to start recognizing the forces that shape who you become in your adult life. They have been in the evolutionary making for a long time and operate largely outside of our awareness.

2. Questioning

Sometimes what gets passed down to us is incredibly adaptive for the context of our specific generation and the environment we live in. But, sometimes they’re maladaptive and need to be reflected on, questioned, and better understood.

Which patterns did you learn in your family system that are no longer serving you in your adult life? Which patterns are stopping you from creating the type of life you want to live, whether that’s in your relationships, in your profession, or in your general lifestyle? Which patterns might even be causing you harm?

This is the stage to reflect and question and figure out what steps you might want to work on changing.

3. Evolving

In this stage, you put what you’ve learned into action. This is all about slowyl adopting new beliefs, behaviors, and coping mechanisms so that you can live more of the life you want. You might also find motivation in breaking a cycle so that you can help set up future generations to do something differently than every other generation that has come before you.

Whatever doing something different might look like for you, this is the stage where you work do actually do it differently. This part of the journey is normally the hardest. Changing ingrained patterns that took decades to form takes hard work. Progress is gradual and cumulative normally over years and decades. But know that change is possible if you really want it.

Learning to See the Unconscious Emotional Process in Relationship Conflicts

As a couple’s therapist, I’ve been trained to prioritize my focus on how a couple interacts with each other during conflict over what their conflict is actually about.

In therapy speak, we call this focusing on the process of a conversation over the content of the conversation. The content is what people are talking about, whereas the process is how they are talking about it with each other.

Seems simple enough, but it’s incredibly hard in practice to not get lost in a couple’s content — and even harder to do so in my own relationship disagreements.

A couple’s process tells you a lot more about the strength and health of their relationship than whatever mundane content they’re fighting over. The process is where people get stuck in their relationships and what most relationships eventually fail over.

For example…

Let’s say a couple comes in to talk to me about their perpetual disagreements over their finances. We’ll bring the issue up in session and I’ll let them air out their grievances for a bit. As they do, I observe how they’re interacting with each other in the process of talking things out:

• Who gets defensive? Who shuts down? Who escalates?

• Who is more dismissive? Who more often defers to the other?

• When one person does or says X, how does the other react?

I also explore what it would be like to be a fly on the wall when the conflict comes up at home:

• Who normally brings the topic up first and how do they do so?

• How does the conversation normally play out?

• How does the conflict normally come to an end?

• Do they tend to pull anyone into the middle of the conflict?

• Do they distract themselves with work, hobbies, or friends?

• Do they avoid addressing the topic altogether to keep the peace?

The How Reveals the Emotional Process

You see, couples are normally in recurring conflicts with each other about different things throughout the course of their relationship: finances, raising children, sex, relationships with in-laws, and so on. 

How they approach conflict over one topic is likely similar to how they approach all of them, and this is why they get stuck. They repeat the same patterns of interaction over and over with each other.

At the surface it might look like these conflicts are about different things. Underneath the surface, however, there’s a common emotional process that drives their interactions with each other across all of those topics. 

The emotional process is - quite literally - the subconscious emotional communication that’s happening between the two of them. It reveals each person’s unmet emotional needs, emotional sensitivities, and deepest emotional wishes.

In every criticism, there is a veiled wish. In every bout of anger, there is a hidden cry of pain. In every conflict, there is a set of unresolved emotional issues that express themselves in the physical world.

Money, sex, children, in-laws — we channel our deepest emotional needs through the external world. Our inner life manifests in our outer life.

For example…

I’ve worked with male clients who live an entire emotional life through their interest in sports. I have a strong suspicion that this is because it’s safer and more socially acceptable to do so.

In the world of sports, they can experience pride, excitement, and joy. But it’s also more acceptable for them to experience disappointment, fear, and even grief. I’ve seen grown men cry over their team losing a world championship, yet I know they would never feel safe to cry over their marriage.

All human beings - including men - have emotional needs and wishes that show up in everyday, mundane topics. If each member in a couple can learn to zoom out, they can understand the larger process and the deeper emotions driving the fight over the mundane topic.

As a result, when done well, conflict can actually lead you to a deeper connection between your partner. 

Most Conflicts Are Unsolvable, Which Isn’t a Bad Thing

Famous couples therapist and relationship researcher John Gottman found that 69% of conflict in relationships is over what he calls unsolvable problems.

These are conflicts that will happen over and over throughout the life of a relationship. They stem from “fundamental differences in personalities or fundamental differences in lifestyle needs.”

Ideally, we partner with people who have shared values, but who are different enough from us that they complement areas of our personality that we lack.

For example, in my relationship, I’m the laid back one. I take life really slowly and like to think things through thoroughly before ever acting on them. But I’m so laid back and thoughtful that I can become lethargic and prone to inertia.

I’m lucky enough to have partnered with someone on the opposite end of this spectrum. He gets things done in the blink of an eye. This balance between us has fared out well for us for the most part. He inspires me to move, I inspire him to slow down.

But it’s also one of the biggest drivers of perpetual disagreement the two of us have. His action bias leads him to have a hard time sitting and being present with me — something I need deeply in a relationship. And my tendency to ask a million questions and analyze every thought and feeling often leaves him feeling anxious and groundless.

But this is exactly how it should go. This is what happens in a long-term relationship. Couples who have had enough fights over the decades — or enough failed relationships — come to understand that every relationship will have some version of this.

And this is because no two people are 100% alike, have exactly the same needs and strengths, and move through life the same way. And if you spend long enough with each other, and intertwine your lives enough with each other, you’ll eventually hit the limitations of your differences.

That is to be expected. There’s nothing to be solved in unsolvable conflicts. The only thing to do is to improve the process by which you approach and navigate those conflicts.

Differences in views on money can be a good thing. One person is a big saver, the other more of a carefree spender. Together, they bring each other to balance. But together, they can also drive each other nuts trying to bring the other to their side completely. They might eventually even decide that they’re not right for each other because of this.

Couples who last understand that differences can be a good thing. Differences can help each person grow and evolve. And the work of a successful relationship is to mature in the process of navigating those differences. It’s not about compromise, it’s about co-creating something greater than each of you could have done individually, through drawing on each other’s strengths.

A couple can succeed at their relationship while still having a million things they disagree on and see differently. They can have perpetual conflicts over them throughout the course of their entire relationship, yet still feel fulfilled in their partnership. As long as their process - or how they navigate these conflicts - is done with maturity, emotional savvy, empathy, and light-heartedness.

A Lesson From Stable Couples

The difference between stable couples is not that they don’t have conflict — AKA differences — it’s that they navigate them more smoothly. They simply don’t react or catastrophize their differences. They don’t see it as a sign of relationship failure. They see those differences as a normal part of being human trying to coexist closely with another human.

So, where a volatile couple looks like they’re fighting endlessly, a stable couple looks like they’re having a normal daily conversation over coffee. From the outside, it looks like stable couples don’t ever fight or have conflict. But they navigate differences and perpetual disagreements just as every couple does — they just take the emotional reactivity out of it and see it as a part of normal daily conversation.

They also see each other’s emotional process and can attend to it without getting caught up in the content and thinking the relationship is doomed. A volatile couple would be having the same conversation over differences but be highly emotionally reactive over it — in part because they are not attending to their own and each other’s emotional process — and it would look and feel like an endless fight.

Final Thoughts

In my office, I open space for people to talk about literally anything with me — sports, celebrities, work, social media, gaming, you name it. But in those conversations, I’m always exploring: What are the deeper emotions this person is playing out through this thing they’re talking about?

My ultimate goal when a couple comes in is to help them learn to see process and catch themselves when they’re at home, outside of the classroom of my therapy office.

So if you can learn to use my secret weapon as a couples therapist of seeing the emotional process during conflict, your relationships will benefit greatly from it.

Understanding Enmeshment in Relationship Systems

What Is Enmeshment?

All human beings are driven by the balance between two fundamental life forces: individuality and togetherness. We all have the desire to be an autonomous individual in our own right and the drive to belong and connect with others.

Healthy and mature relationships balance these two drives well. In enmeshed relationships, however, togetherness is favored over individuality. There is too much closeness, which often impacts the healthy and development of the individuals in the relationship. 

In enmeshment, there’s often a lack of psychological and emotional boundaries between people. They find their sense of self in each other versus in themselves. This results in an unclear distinction of self — too much “we” and not enough sense of “I” to counterbalance it.

Signs of Enmeshment

You’ll know you experience enmeshment in your relationships if:

• You experience insecure attachment or lose your sense of self in any of your close relationships.

• You struggle identifying who you are outside of those relationships and/or feel uncomfortable doing things alone and making decisions for yourself without the input or support of others..

• You struggle with setting boundaries and/or with understanding and respecting the boundaries others set with you.

• You fear the rejection and disapproval of others, so you tend to censor yourself or bend the truth to appear a certain way to others.

• You find yourself taking responsibility for the psychological and emotional problems of others, or expect others to take responsibility for yours.

• You find it difficult to regulate and soothe your own emotions and often reach for others to help you do so.

• You find yourself often sacrificing your own wants and needs to meet the needs and demands of others.

• You get swept up in groupthink and group reactivity, catching the emotions of others, taking on their thinking, and joining in automatic behaviors.

• You seek validation, approval, and reassurance from others more often than providing these things for yourself.

• You find yourself unconsciously copying the choices, appearance, actions, or approach of others instead of charting your own way.

• You look to others for guidance and direction in life more often than trusting your own inner voice and wisdom.

How We Inherit Enmeshment

Enmeshment can be caused by a number of different experiences. Some of this is just part of being human because we evolved for a strong sense of togetherness as a social species. 

So, all humans experience enmeshment with their closest connections in one form or another. What really matter is the degree of that enmeshment and how much it’s affecting the individuals in the relationships.

Enmeshment is inherited from our evolution as a social species, but also gets passed down from previous generations of our family lineage, is learned in our nuclear family, and is also influenced by our culture and society.

1. Evolutionary Context

The togetherness force evolved in our human history for a reason. Social bonds were vital for our survival in our human history. Our ability to form strong emotional bonds with each other helped our ancestors band together, share their emotions with each other as a form of communication, and react automatically to their environment. 

2. Generational Transmission

Levels of enmeshment and maturity pass from generation to generation. The family you are born into has an entire legacy of enmeshment and maturity that they inherited from many generations before them. Hence, you are born into a family with a certain degree of enmeshment and a certain degree of maturity that was inherited from their own parents.

3. Nuclear Family

As babies, we are naturally born enmeshed. As we develop throughout childhood, we begin to mature and outgrow some of that enmeshment with the help of our families. However, our families can only take us as far as they have gone in their maturity.

For some of us, we can outgrow a good amount of enmeshment in our original families. Our parents were mature enough to help us leave home with a good degree of our own maturity. These are people who go on to have a healthy sense of self, and create secure attachments and balanced relationships with others.

For others, we left our families with a high degree of enmeshment and often go on to struggle with insecure attachment and imbalanced relationships in our adult relationships. 

4. Culture and Society

Enmeshment can also be influenced by the different social groups we belong to throughout the course of our lives —schooling, religious communities, cultural groups, friends, and so on. Enmeshment is perpetuated by any social group that promotes togetherness over individuality.

If we belong to a culture that perpetuates enmeshment, for example, it will be even harder to develop an individual sense of identity and choose yourself over the group when necessary. But it’s possible to do so, for those who want to go on the journey.

Consequences of Enmeshment

Although some people can live fairly functional lives in enmeshed relationship, for others, it can become problematic. This can look like:

• Having less energy for your own life and pursuits. You sacrifice energy and attention needed for your own pursuits.

• High levels of stress and overwhelm from taking on the problems and emotions of others.

• Having an unclear sense of individual purpose, personal meaning, and direction in life.

• Being more susceptible to life’s stressors or to emotional decision-making.

• Unstable or stagnant adult relationships and difficulty with attracting quality relationships.

• Perpetuating enmeshment to future generations. What you don’t heal in yourself will inevitably be passed onto your children.

How to Work Through Enmeshment

Because enmeshment is ultimately a state of imbalanced togetherness in our relationships, the way to start working through it is to bring more balance back by nurturing your individuality and sense of self. You can do this by beginning self-differentiation work on your own, or with a coach or therapist who specializes in Bowen Family Systems, enmeshment, and self-differentiation work.

How to Live More From Your Solid Self Than Your Pseudo Self

What Are the Pseudo Self and Solid Self?

A sense of self is our understanding of who we are in the world and determines how we approach our internal and external experience of life. We all have two versions of our sense of self - a pseudo self and a solid self (often referred to as the true self).

The Pseudo Self

The pseudo self is like the persona or mask that we wear for the world that’s based on the world’s standards, expectations, and demands for who we should or shouldn’t be. The pseudo self seeks external approval and behaves in a way that’s going to be received well by others.

The pseudo self is shaped by:

• Caregivers

• Family

• Social Circles

• Culture

• Religion

• Society

The Solid Self

The solid self, on the other hand, is that inner authentic core within us that’s based on the things that we truly think, feel, believe, and want for ourselves in our lives. It’s internally guided and internally validated.

The solid self is shaped by:

• Our Authentic Present-Moment Feelings

• Our Authentic Present-Moment Thoughts

• Our Self-Determined Principles and Values

• Our Unique Talents, Skills, and Creativity

• Our Unique Hopes and Dreams for Ourselves

• Our Unique Curiosities and Interests

Evolutionary Context

Having a pseudo self is a normal part of being human. We all have one and it develops in early childhood when we’re still dependent on our caregivers to meet our survival needs — normally our physical and emotional needs. We have to meet their expectations and conform to their standards because we depend on them to survive.

This is also true for society — we do depend on society to an extent to provide for our survival needs. At the end of the day, we are a social species and our interdependence with other members of our species is undeniable. Thus, we learn to morph and contort ourselves to meet the standards of others in exchange for some of our needs getting met.

Consequences

But as we grow up and become more capable of meeting our own needs, it becomes more important to live from our solid self, because living from our pseudo self can be incredibly emotionally taxing and impact our mental health and well-being.

It can also make it so that we don’t relate authentically in our relationships, so our relationships aren’t as authentic and fulfilling as they could be. And, living from our pseudo self can stunt our growth and development through the course of our lives, so we never reach our fullest potential.

A healthy separate and authentic sense of self counteracts the pseudo self and sets the stage for our ability to:

• Trust ourselves.

• Make wise choices for our lives.

• Have healthy relationships.

• Cope with life’s stresses and challenges.

• Manage our psychological and emotional needs in adulthood.

Evolving Into Our Solid Self

Part of our personal evolution in our adult lives requires that we practice living more from our solid self, which takes hard work and intentional effort. It’s also not always going to be comfortable.

There are three main ways to practice living more from your solid self:

1. Learn how to be more emotionally autonomous. Depend on yourself to manage your emotionally difficulties and meeting your emotional needs instead of putting them in the hands of others.

2. Learn how to validate and approve of yourself so that you’re not living based on the definitions and judgments of others.

3. Define your own principles and values and practice living by them, even — and especially — when it gets hard to do so.

A Final Note

If you have been living a life that’s mostly from your pseudo self, this process might entail losing some relationships or dealing with reactions from people who are you used to you being a certain way and all of the sudden you’ve changed.

Learning to live more from our solid self is lifelong journey. It’s built from small, intentional, and consistent habits practiced over the long-term. It can get hard sometimes, but it’s a life-giving pursuit.

Living more from the solid self brings greater levels of mental health and well-being, more authentic and fulfilling relationships, and helps us reach our greatest potential in our unique lifetime.

Take your time and embrace the journey!

If you’d like to learn more about the development of the self throughout life, subscribe here for exclusive content I create just for my subscribers.

Self-Differentiation and Boundaries: What Are They and Why Are They Important?

What Are Boundaries?

Boundaries are invisible psychological and emotional lines that we draw with ourselves and others as we interact with the world. They determine what we will or won’t do, and what we will or won’t accept from others.

Boundaries are not intended to shut others out or to become rigid and distant from others in our lives. Rather, boundaries are intended to help us manage our energy wisely, protect our survival, and promote our well-being and evolution throughout the course of our lives.

Boundaries Help Us Manage Our Energy Wisely

Managing our energy with boundaries is actually an act of humility because we admit to ourselves and to others that we are limited human beings. We wake up each day with a limited amount of energy to offer to the world. We cannot be everything for everyone all of the time. And that is perfectly alright.

Using boundaries to manage our energy requires that we decide what’s important to us, what really matters in the grand scope of our lives, and what our priorities are. Then, we put in place boundaries to help us direct our energy toward the things that do matter and push aside or say ‘no’ to the things that don’t.

This is about embracing quality over quantity. It’s about going deeper in the few things we do choose to do, instead of spreading ourselves thin over many things. It’s about showing up as our best selves for the things that we choose to care about and choose to give our energy to.

Boundaries Help Protect Our Survival and Well-Being

When it comes to protecting our survival and well-being it’s about understand that as humans, we have limits and thresholds. Beyond those limits and thresholds, we can experience harm or potentially even destruction.

When we put boundaries in place, it’s about honoring those limits and thresholds. It’s about determining how far others can or can not go with us, or how far we will or won’t go with others. Beyond those limits and thresholds — or if people disregard a boundary we put in place — we ultimately choose to leave the interaction or the relationship because staying can cause us harm.

This is not about controlling the behavior of others because we can’t actually do that. This is really about having guidelines for how we will take responsibility for our own self-preservation. It’s about managing ourselves in interactions and relationships and pulling out of them if people cause us harm. We still should communicate our boundaries to people, but if they cross them, it’s on us to leave.

Boundaries Go Both Ways

We don’t just set boundaries with others, we also set them with ourselves. Boundaries with ourselves look like a) choosing which thoughts we will or won’t indulge, b) what kinds of behaviors we will or won’t engage in, c) how we will or won’t speak to ourselves and others, and d) what we plan to do with our emotions as they arise.

Boundaries go both ways: They are about managing our interactions with ourselves and our interactions with the external world.

Why Are Boundaries Important?

Individually, they promote our mental health well-being by protecting us from the anxiety of taking too much on and from becoming overwhelmed or burnt out.

Relationally, they ensure that we show up as our best selves in all of our interactions with others. They also set the standard for how others will interact with us and show up for us.

Collectively, they promote more peaceful and harmonious societies. Imagine if hundreds of people in your community — or millions of people in your society — were all working on having healthy boundaries and good emotion regulation skills. That would be a very different society than we live in today.

Boundaries matter. They matter individually. They matter relationally. They matter collectively.

A Final Note

As we work on ourselves and practice healthy boundaries with ourselves and others, we show up differently in the world. This eventually inspires others to change and to rise to the standard. By doing our own inner work, we slowly but surely shift the collective.

As cheesy as it sounds, we end up being the change that we wish to see in the world. As we change ourselves and then show up in the world as evolved beings, we inspire evolution in all of those around us as well.

If you enjoyed this piece, I share exclusive content on boundaries, mental health, well-being, and personal evolution in my monthly newsletter. Subscribe here.

7 Skills of Highly Self-Differentiated Individuals

Have you ever been around someone who seemed ‘wise beyond their years’? On the other side of that, do you ever notice how some of the ‘adults’ in our society are regularly having public temper tantrums more outrageous than 3-year-olds do?

You see, emotional maturity is not a given. It doesn’t just happen with age. It’s not innate to our species to be emotionally mature. It’s a lifelong pursuit that takes hard work and intentional practice.

But it’s life-giving. Emotionally mature people, in general, have greater levels of mental health and well-being, better relationships, and create more peaceful communities and societies.

Here’s what people who grow into emotional maturity practice doing regularly…

1. They are aware of their emotions, triggers, and reactivity.

Self-differentiated people work hard to observe and stay aware of their inner experience as they interact with their surroundings. They are able to slow down enough to notice their emotions as they arise in each moment. They are also able to notice when they are becoming emotionally reactive or reenacting a conditioned pattern from their past.

2. They practice consciously responding over automatically reacting.

Because they can slow down and become aware of their emotions, they can interrupt an emotional reaction or a conditioned pattern. They can introduce a space between the emotion and what they end up doing with it. They then use that space to temper the emotion and think about how to best respond to the situation at hand.

They introduce more choices for the next move, instead of unconsciously going with the default programming. Instead of the emotion blindly running the show, the emotion instead informs a consciously chosen response to the circumstance.

3. They practice taking responsibility for their own experience.

Emotionally mature people don’t blame others for their emotions, dump their emotions onto others, or pull others into their emotional dramas. They don’t constantly seek approval and direction from others. They see their emotional experience as their burden alone to bear.

They know how to self-regulate and self-validate. They know how to acknowledge and process their own emotions. They can think for themselves and have clearly defined principles and intentions for how they want to live their life. They understand that, while they can’t control what happens to them, they are always in control of how they choose to respond.

4. They practice having and respecting boundaries.

Boundaries help people preserve and use their energy wisely, so that they bring their best selves to the world as often as possible. Healthy boundaries also hold those around us to a quality standard of behavior. It ensures that we don’t remain in interactions or relationships that are harmful.

Emotionally mature people understand that healthy boundaries are a vital part of personal well-being and healthy relationships. Thus, they practice defining, setting, and reinforcing healthy boundaries with others and respecting the boundaries of others.

5. They practice living by principles over emotions.

Emotionally mature people understand that living by emotional reactions and automatic behaviors can lead to a lot of unnecessary chaos and suffering. Instead, they practice living by individual principles and values that they spent plenty of time thinking through and defining for themselves.

This doesn’t mean neglecting emotions altogether, but rather moving them out of the driver’s seat and into the passenger’s seat. Living a life guided by principles means living a life that is informed by emotions, but not driven by them. Our principles lead us instead, even when our emotions are pulling us in the other direction.

6. They practice balancing individuality and togetherness.

There are two seemingly opposing forces that shape all human relationships and are driven by our emotions. On one hand, we have the desire to be connected to others and to feel like we belong. On the other, we have the desire to be our own separate individual to belong to ourselves. This often manifests as the tradeoff between choosing self or choosing others.

People tend to polarize toward one side or the other, but emotionally mature people practice balancing the tension between both poles. With practice, they become skilled at knowing when to choose self and when to choose others, and this becomes a fluid dance for them over time. Thus, they have both a strong relationship with themselves while remaining in close connection with significant others in their lives.

7. They practice embracing the discomfort of growth.

Emotionally mature people are willing to endure the discomfort inherent to the process of challenging old ways of being and learning new ones. They lean into adversity and conflict. They listen to perspectives that challenge their worldview. They hold space for the opinions, beliefs, and life choices of others, even when they differ significantly from their own.

They practice being flexible and remain open to the unknown. They see life as an endless journey of learning and growing; of expanding one’s mind and letting go of what no longer serves them; of repeated cycles of psychological death and rebirth; of continuously evolving into new iterations of oneself.

If you enjoyed this piece, I share exclusive content on self-differentiation for subscribers. Subscribe to join in on the learnining!

Common Patterns in Enmeshed Family Systems and How to Counteract Each

In my work as a therapist, I find that many families relate through emotionally immature patterns, often unconsciously. Children suffer the consequences of these patterns and go on to repeat them in their own families as adults. That is unless they become aware and intentionally practice breaking the cycle.

With awareness and practice, each generation can become more mature. As parents practice more emotionally mature ways of relating, children go on to have a stronger sense of self, greater emotional well-being, and healthier relationships as adults.

Here are 4 things emotionally mature parents work on not doing…

Emotional Parentification

Parentification is when parents rely on children to fulfill their emotional voids and needs. This can sometimes manifest as placing children in roles that another parent or adult should be in. This pattern is often driven by a parent’s unmet emotional needs in their present lives or from their childhood.

Parents are not doing this intentionally, but the children become a target for the parent’s emotional hunger nonetheless. This puts a lot of demands on children and limits their ability to fully emotionally develop.

How This Manifests:

• Parents expect children to help soothe and regulate their difficult emotions.

• Parents seek constant attention, validation, approval, and displays of affection and love from children.

• Parents make children their confidant, surrogate spouse, hero, or little helper.

• Parents expect children to save them from their loneliness, especially in later stages of life as children go on to have adult lives and commitments.

• Parents expect children to be responsible for taking care of the emotional needs of other family members when the parent can’t or doesn’t want to.

To Practice Instead:

• They work on understanding and evolving their emotional voids so they don’t act out their emotional hunger on their children or other people.

• They have emotionally fulfilling relationships with their spouse and other adults.

• They have several different sources from which they get their emotional needs met such as work, hobbies, friends, artistic practices, spiritual commitments, self-care routines, and personal development pursuits.

• They have a part of their identity that’s separate from the children and spend time away from the children with people and projects they care about.

• They practice self-validation, self-regulation, and self-love, and therefore liberate the children from having to help with those things.

• They have a healthy understanding of their own emotions and ability to manage their emotional connections with other family members on their own.

Parental Projection

Projection is the process in which parents work out their fears, insecurities, unresolved attachments, and unlived lives on their children. By anxiously worrying about the children, parents avoid turning toward the things inside them that need attention. I talk about this pattern in greater depth here.

As a result, children often feel trapped by their parent’s pressures. They don’t have room to be their own person, learn how to function well on their own, or live out their unique dreams and life choices.

How This Manifests:

• Parent unconsciously use their children to work out unresolved attachments with their own caregivers.

• Parents anxiously focus on what‘s wrong with their children and unconsciously avoid acknowledging their own insecurities and fears.

• Parents live vicariously through the adult children or expect the adult child to be the things they did not get to be.

• Parents put a lot of pressure on a child to get things right and react to their shortcomings. They fear the child’s failure, rejection, disappointment, or pain because they experience it as their own due to the lack of emotional and psychological differentiation between parent and child.

• Parents unconsciously expect children to live in their shadow or become the same as they were.

• Parents unconsciously compete with their children, or feel envious or resentful of their children’s successes.

• Parents believe their children owe them for the sacrifices they made as a parent to raise the child, demand loyalty and favors, and resent the child for what they didn’t get to live.

To Practice Instead:

• They acknowledge and work through their unresolved emotional attachments with their family of origin and other adults in their lives on their own, potentially with the help of a therapist or other means.

• They focus on processing the roots of their own fears and insecurities own their own, potentially with the help of a therapist, and free the children from this burden.

• They chase their dreams, keep doing their own inner work, keep learning, and keep developing new parts of themselves.

• They allow children space to be different, take risks, learn from mistakes and failure, have their own messy emotions, and trust children to be capable resilient, and grow from their experiences.

• They celebrate their children’s successes and happiness even when children have accomplished more than they ever have or will.

• They understand that children are not born to fulfill the parent’s dreams, expectations, and ideals, but rather to be their own person and live their own unique life.

Emotional Contagion

Misdirecting emotions can manifest in many forms, but the core root of the pattern is that parents struggle with acknowledging, regulating, and processing difficult emotions within themselves.

They end up putting them on the children through blaming, dumping, acting them out, getting defensive, or creating emotionally reactive drama.

How This Manifests:

• Parents emotionally dump or act out their emotions on their adult children.

• Parents blame others or play victim in emotionally charged conflicts.

• Parents emotionally reactive or highly dramatic over little (or even big) things.

• Parents defensive or turn it back the other way when adult children express dissatisfaction or hurt in the relationship.

To Practice Instead:

• As a parent, acknowledge, regulate, and process your own emotional issues instead of expecting your adult children to soothe you or fix your emotional and relational problems.

• Keep the focus on your own experience during a conflict or disagreement with an adult child and take responsibility for your part in the relationship dynamic.

• Understand that emotional reactivity is contagious and practice remaining calm and grounded in emotionally difficult times.

• Listen to your adult child’s feelings, needs, and wishes, which frees them to be authentic and honest in the relationship with you.

Boundary Negation

Enmeshment is a relationship with little to no boundaries and where people lose a sense of who they are as a separate person. Everyone gets pulled into everyone else’s drama and emotions spread like wildfire from one person to all members.

In enmeshed families, boundaries and individuality are experienced as threatening. Family members are expected to help save each other or at least make each other feel better.

How This Manifests:

• Parents pull children their children into their drama and conflicts with other family members.

• Parents get defensive or emotionally reactive when their children set or enforce a boundary.

• Parents feel threatened when their children express their individuality through independent beliefs, behaviors, social connections outside the family, and life choices.

• Parents overfunction for others and jump into save them when they are struggling with something.

To Practice Instead:

• Ask adult children regularly what their limits and preferences are and consider them in your interactions with them.

• Respect the boundaries adult children set with them without taking it personally.

• Enforce and model healthy boundaries with their adult children and other people.

• Encourage their adult children to think and make choices for themselves, even when it’s different than the parent’s beliefs or ideals.

• Encourage adult children to live their own lives, even if the parents miss them.

• They resolve their conflicts one-to-one with the other adults involved and model good conflict resolution skills for the children.

A Final Note

All parents will do some of these patterns to some degree or another throughout the course of parenting. All parents were likely on the receiving end of some of these patterns as well.

Patterns of relating pass from generation to generation. Some of them are perfectly adaptive. Some have room to be evolved. Most are unconscious and unintentional.

The practice of reflecting on these patterns is to help us a) develop greater awareness, b) interrupt the patterns that no longer serve our well-being, and c) continue evolving into more mature ways of relating.

One of the greatest gifts we can give future generations of our lineage and humanity as a whole is to continue our own personal evolution as parents.

Interested in a monthly Q+A with me on intergenerational family patterns, mature relationships, and holistic mental health? Submit your questions by subscribing to my newsletter.