**Differentiation 101: How To Stay In Love Without Losing Yourself — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/differentiation-101-stay-in-love-without-losing-yourself/

Heidi Priebe explains differentiation: maintaining your sense of self within close relationships, and how autonomy and connection can coexist. Covers five signs of undifferentiated relationships.

## Key Takeaways

- Differentiation means staying connected to others while maintaining your own sense of self.
- Undifferentiated patterns are rooted in the belief that autonomy and connection are mutually exclusive.
- Both anxious and avoidant patterns are two sides of the same undifferentiated coin.
- Healthy relationships allow differences in thoughts, feelings, and expression without treating them as threats.
- Growing differentiation involves recognizing self-abandonment and learning to hold boundaries without needing partners to change.

## What the video covers

- Differentiation is defined as the capacity to maintain your sense of self inside close relationships, staying connected without abandoning yourself or others.
- Anxiously attached and fearful-avoidant people often recognize themselves in undifferentiated patterns around boundaries and self-abandonment.
- Avoidant people may wrongly believe they are 'too differentiated,' when counterdependence is the other side of the same undifferentiated coin.
- The core underlying belief of undifferentiated people is that autonomy and intimacy cannot peacefully coexist, often rooted in childhood where connection came with punishment for asserting differences.
- 'Autonomy maxers' prioritize self-truth but seek partners who agree with them, looking for a yes man rather than an equal partner.
- 'Connection maxers' overdevelop accepting influence from others, adopting partners' worldviews and feeling incomplete without them.
- These two types often pair up, sharing the belief that closeness requires sameness.
- In differentiated relationships, psychological boundaries are respected: partners can hold different thoughts and feelings without needing to override each other.
- In undifferentiated relationships, boundaries blur, partners feel like extensions of each other, and differences feel threatening, often escalating into arguments about who is right.
- The video outlines strategies for increasing differentiation, including tolerating difference, investing in resourcing contexts, and recognizing when conflicts are really about needing control.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction to Differentiation
2. 03:00 Differentiation vs. Attachment Styles
3. 06:20 Autonomy Maxers and Connection Maxers
4. 10:00 Five Signs of an Undifferentiated Relationship
5. 20:00 Blurred Boundaries and Emotional Differences
6. 30:00 Strategies for Increasing Differentiation
7. 40:00 Choosing Your Battles and Investing in Resourcing Contexts
8. 48:20 Conclusion: Building Strong Relationship Foundations

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is differentiation according to Heidi Priebe?

Differentiation is defined as our capacity to maintain our sense of self inside close relationships. It means staying connected to others without abandoning major parts of ourselves, and staying connected to ourselves without abandoning others.

What is the difference between autonomy maxers and connection maxers?

Autonomy maxers prioritize staying true to themselves and seek partners who adopt their views, while connection maxers overdevelop accepting others' influence and adopt partners' worldviews to feel complete. Both share the undifferentiated belief that closeness requires sameness.

What is a sign of an undifferentiated relationship?

One sign is that psychological boundaries between partners start to disintegrate over time, with both people feeling safe only when they arrive at shared interpretations. Differences in emotional expression then become arguments about who is right rather than neutral variations.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. This winter on this channel, we've been talking about rupture, self-reovery, and repair. And today, we're going to zoom way in on the selfreovery part of things, which is to

00:16

Speaker A

say, we're going to be talking about the concept of differentiation. Now, differentiation is a term that we've already spoken about in passing at a couple of different points throughout this series. So, in particular, we've talked about how being undifferentiated

00:30

Speaker A

means having a very poor relationship to boundaries. So, it can cause us to sort of lose sight of where we end and others begin. But today, what we're going to be doing is really fleshing out what differentiation is, how it's different

00:45

Speaker A

from attachment styles, and how we can start working to increase our level of differentiation if we recognize that it's an area where we're struggling. So in very simple terms, differentiation is our capacity to maintain our sense of self inside of close relationships. So

01:04

Speaker A

what it means to be well differentiated is that we both know how to stay connected to other people without having to abandon major parts of ourselves in order to keep our relationships afloat.

01:15

Speaker A

But it also means that we know how to stay connected to ourselves without needing to abandon others and be totally free of any sort of commitments or relational responsibilities.

01:26

Speaker A

And so something I really often find is that when I start talking to anxiously attached people or in a lot of case fearful avoidance about the concept of differentiation, they tend to immediately recognize themselves in it, right? and they'll go like, "Oh yeah, I

01:40

Speaker A

really struggle with boundaries and I'm always kind of abandoning what I actually want or need inside of my relationships." But then when I talk to those who are more on the avoidant side of the spectrum, they tend to think the

01:51

Speaker A

problem is that they are too differentiated, not realizing that being counterdependent or being deeply uncomfortable with relying on others is just the other side of that same undifferiated coin.

02:06

Speaker A

So the core underlying belief that all undifferiated people share is the belief that autonomy and intimacy cannot peacefully coexist because usually people who grew up undifferentiated witnessed in their early environments that connection tended to come with inshment. So people's individual sense

02:27

Speaker A

of self getting lost and asserting differences led to being left alone. So some people make the decision really early on that if autonomy and connection are at odds, they will choose autonomy.

02:41

Speaker A

And then over the course of their lives, these people who I call autonomy maxers within the spectrum of being undifferiated stay really focused on being true to themselves, but they never really develop the capacity to trust relationships or to be very heavily

02:57

Speaker A

influenced by the people that they get close to. And so the only way that these people really learn how to stay close in relationships is to find people who are willing to adopt their preferences and beliefs and viewpoints and who don't

03:11

Speaker A

really challenge them in any significant ways. So they kind of subconsciously go out into the world looking for a yes man more so than a true equal partner when it comes to romantic relationships. even though they might genuinely harbor deep

03:27

Speaker A

fantasies of meeting someone who they just happen to click with perfectly without having to change or examine themselves in any major way. And then on the other side of the undifferiated spectrum we have what I call the connection maxers. So these are people

03:42

Speaker A

who go okay if autonomy and connection are at odds which obviously they are choose connection. So rather than focusing on developing a strong selfidentity as they grow up where they might get clear on things like what their feelings and beliefs and desires

03:57

Speaker A

are, they overdevelop the part of themselves that accepts influence from others. And as a result, they often end up going into relationships in their adult lives feeling very eager to adopt the worldviews or lifestyles or preferences of their partners because

04:14

Speaker A

they're going out into the world kind of subconsciously searching for the other half that they think will finally complete them. Not realizing that the reason they feel incomplete is in large part because they have cut themselves off from exploring their own individual

04:30

Speaker A

interests and desires and passions, fearing that that would lead to them getting abandoned or left alone. And guess who very frequently ends up in relationships with each other? These two types of people who tend to look very different on the surface, but again

04:45

Speaker A

share that same core underlying belief about relationships and how they function. which is that closeness requires sameness. And so most relationships necessarily involve one person who gets to kind of keep their authenticity online and another person who abandons

05:03

Speaker A

theirs for the sake of maintaining connection. And of course, this is in contrast to more differentiated people who believe that autonomy and connection are not only not at odds with each other, but that they in fact complement each other

05:17

Speaker A

very well. And we'll talk a lot more about what that looks like in the latter half of this video. But for now, we're going to go into five key signs that your relationship might be undifferentiated.

05:31

Speaker A

So the first sign of an undifferiated relationship, one that lacks an appropriate relationship to boundaries, is that as time goes on, psychological boundaries between the two people start to disintegrate.

05:46

Speaker A

So a psychological boundary in the simplest sense can be thought of as the natural understanding that your inner world and my inner world are separate.

05:56

Speaker A

So you have your own thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, reactions to things, and I have mine. In a differentiated relationship, we might spend a decent amount of time sort of peering into each other's inner worlds going, "Oh, you think that? That's cool.

06:11

Speaker A

I think this." Or, "You think that? I disagree. Let's figure out how to work around that inside of our relationship.

06:20

Speaker A

But neither person feels the need to control or override the other person's experience in order for the relationship to feel safe.

06:30

Speaker A

In an undifferiated relationship, it's not that people stop having their own individual thoughts and feelings, but both people start to only feel safe if they're arriving at a shared interpretation of the thoughts and feelings that are getting brought in. So

06:46

Speaker A

meaning making, the interpretations and psychological weight that we put on things starts to become centralized in these relationships. And as time goes on, it starts feeling distressing to both people if they're arriving at different interpretations of things. For

07:02

Speaker A

example, let's say one person in a romantic relationship is very emotionally expressive and the other isn't. In a differentiated relationship, that difference can just exist. So, one person might express things very openly and the other might process things more

07:17

Speaker A

internally, but neither of those orientations are treated as inherently wrong. They just figure out how they're going to work around that, assuming they are both electively choosing to be with each other for a good reason. But in an

07:30

Speaker A

undifferiated relationship, the boundaries between people start to blur. So on both sides, your partner might start to feel like more an extension of you than as a totally separate person.

07:42

Speaker A

And once that happens, any major differences that come up between partners stop feeling neutral and they start feeling uncomfortable or maybe even a bit threatening to both people's sense of identity. So in these types of connection, that disparity in emotional

07:59

Speaker A

experiences is more likely to turn into an argument about what the right level of emotional expression is. So, partner A might keep insisting that partner B is irrational and needs to reel in their emotions and learn to self-regulate. And

08:15

Speaker A

partner B might argue back that partner A is repressed and needs to go to therapy and learn to be more vulnerable.

08:22

Speaker A

But both of them are really trying to get to the same place in the end, which is to arrive at an agreement about what the correct way to be is, rather than accepting that different people just have different inclinations

08:35

Speaker A

and different preferences. And so over time in these dynamics, usually there's one partner who starts getting deferred to a little more often as a sort of de facto authority on what is considered to be true or real or the right way to be.

08:50

Speaker A

This is more often than not that autonomy maxer who feels more comfortable with asserting their independent opinions and thoughts. But this does not mean that the autonomy maxer is more differentiated than their partner. As a quick rule of thumb, David

09:06

Speaker A

Snersh, who wrote the book Passionate Marriage, where he talks a lot about differentiation, says that we generally tend to partner up with people who are at approximately the same level of differentiation than us, even if they exist on the other side of that scale.

09:20

Speaker A

So in these dynamics where one partner is taking on more of the role of the authority figure, what's happening is that both people are getting regulated by that connection in different ways.

09:31

Speaker A

One person might be regulating through routinely checking in with their partner and feeling like okay, they're affirming that I'm okay, I'm good, I'm lovable, whatever it is. The autonomy maxer is starting to regulate through being checked in with and having their sense

09:47

Speaker A

of competence and authority and correctness continuously reaffirmed. And I want to make clear here that what we're talking about is a consensual dynamic. Right? So this is very different than something like a relationship that functions around coercive control where one person is

10:04

Speaker A

intentionally trying to cut off the other person's access to supports that exist outside of the relationship or to any way of seeing things other than theirs. What we're talking about in this context are relationships where one person just genuinely does not want to

10:19

Speaker A

take the lead in most areas and the other person genuinely does. And both people are actually likely in these cases to push back against any situation that takes them out of that role. So if the autonomy maxer starts referring more

10:34

Speaker A

to the connection maxer's perceptions, that might actually make the connection maxer really uncomfortable. And they might have this feeling of kind of like, "Get back up on your pedestal, please, where I like you." And I just want to

10:46

Speaker A

make that clear because again we can have other types of dynamics where this is not mutual or consensual. But in this case we're talking about two people who are at least initially quite comfortable and happy with the roles that they've

10:58

Speaker A

chosen. And in fact when these two types of people meet each other it might often feel like they really are each other's missing piece or soulmate or whatever it is because their ideas of what it means to be in relationship are so

11:12

Speaker A

complimentary. Which brings us to sign number two of an undifferiated relationship, which is that when one person feels uncomfortable with or disregulated by something that the other person is doing, their first instinct is to try to change the other person's

11:27

Speaker A

behavior rather than getting curious about their own reaction to it. And this actually makes a lot of sense when we remember that that erosion of psychological boundaries is happening, right? where we're starting to see our partners as extensions of ourselves

11:42

Speaker A

because behavioral change is actually a really great strategy for self regulation. So if I start going to bed really late every night, but I keep having to wake up early for work, I might notice, wow, that's making me feel awful. And the

11:58

Speaker A

first thing I'm probably going to think to do is start going to bed earlier. So making a behavioral change.

12:05

Speaker A

The problem is that in undifferiated relationships, we start applying that same logic. If I'm uncomfortable with something, someone's behavior needs to change to other people. So, if our partner is doing something that we don't like, our first instinct becomes trying

12:23

Speaker A

to change them. For example, let's say we're dating someone who tends to sleep in later than we do. And that bothers us because when we were growing up, our parents always shamed us for being lazy if we were in bed late. So, we developed

12:38

Speaker A

this whole idea that getting up early is the right thing to do. And so, instead of noticing something about seeing my partner happily asleep at 10:00 a.m.

12:47

Speaker A

feels triggering or kind of unfair to me in some deep way, the only thought that makes it into our awareness might be they need to be more disciplined. And then we might start an argument with them or start making little comments

13:00

Speaker A

about their sleeping habits or start applying pressure on them to wake up earlier in various ways. So, oh, I just happen to book us a brunch reservation at 8 a.m. tomorrow, whatever our preferred way of dealing with conflict

13:12

Speaker A

happens to be, right? But the point is that we're taking the approach of trying to regulate ourselves and the discomfort that comes up in us when we're watching our partners behave in a way that we wouldn't by managing the other person's

13:26

Speaker A

behavior rather than getting present with our own discomfort and figuring out why we are getting so triggered by something that this other person is doing and how we want to be in relationship to our own reaction.

13:41

Speaker A

And to be clear, differentiation is not about putting up with absolutely anything that happens in a relationship, including things that are unsafe or abusive for us. But there is a big difference between things that are genuinely unsafe and things that just

13:56

Speaker A

feel uncomfortable because they're not how we would do them. And I just want to keep bringing that up because it's a really important thing to be able to parse apart and stay aware of. The third sign of an undifferiated relationship is

14:08

Speaker A

that conflict becomes disregulating for both people on a kind of core level. So when conflict comes up in a healthy and differentiated connection, it's not that it's painfree, right? Very often both people need to take some space from each

14:23

Speaker A

other. They might miss each other. They might feel like the co-regulation that they generally get out of the relationship is disrupted. And that can absolutely be really painful.

14:34

Speaker A

But the dysregulation that happens exists in the relational space. So what that means is that I'm reaching out for someone and they're not there and that present moment experience of connection is going unmet.

14:48

Speaker A

And that might feel really sad or lonely. My body is going to have responses to that if that's what's happening. But our inner world and how we make sense of things is not being threatened in those cases.

15:02

Speaker A

And that is quite different than how this plays out in undifferiated relationships because in undifferentiated relationships both people are getting a lot of self-regulation out of the fantasy of sameness. So again this fantasy of sameness regulates both people in slightly different ways. For

15:23

Speaker A

the partner who values autonomy above all else, the fantasy of sameness means getting to hold the belief that they can have intimacy. and lasting connection that never really requires them to be vulnerable, to be influencable, or to be

15:38

Speaker A

out of control in any major way. All of which are things that they have learned to associate with losing themselves, which is the one thing they are never willing to compromise on.

15:51

Speaker A

And for the partner who values connection above all else, that fantasy of sameness means believing that they will not ever again have to be left alone with any major decisions in life.

16:03

Speaker A

That they won't have to face the consequences of any choices they make on their own. And that there can be this kind of merging with another person that saves them from the loneliness of what it's like to do life on their own. which

16:17

Speaker A

in differentiated relationships we learn we can never really disconnect from entirely. These fantasies about what love could be are intensely regulating for those of us who grew up without access to love that taught us either how to connect without losing ourselves or

16:34

Speaker A

how to grow into our authenticity without being abandoned. But they are fantasies because mature differentiated love requires both a willingness to be influenced and changed as well as the capacity to stand on our own as separate people from our partners. And so when

16:53

Speaker A

we're undifferentiated and we start to perceive of ways in which we're at odds with our partners during conflict, those fantasies get threatened and both people can become quite destabilized by that quite quickly. So in those cases, there's going to be a really high

17:08

Speaker A

incentive for the very differences that in a differentiated relationship would need to get acknowledged in order to lead to healthy repair to get squashed or to go underground.

17:21

Speaker A

So, this might mean sweeping a lot of things under the rug or in a lot of cases, one partner folding and pretending to agree with something that they don't actually agree with just to get the relationship to return to

17:33

Speaker A

baseline so that fantasy can come back online. which might even mean accepting that they are in some way flawed or wrong in the way that they are processing things which is why they were holding that separate opinion or perspective that led

17:49

Speaker A

to conflict in the first place right so saying things like you know what you're right I was just thinking that way because I have attachment issues and I'm actually being too clingy or whatever it is that we might not

18:02

Speaker A

actually agree with all the way through but that it feels better to convince ourselves of then accept that we just have different responses than our partner and maybe always will even if we let's say become securely attached.

18:14

Speaker A

Right? So distorting our own self-concept to convince ourselves that if we were just more self-actualized or more healed, we'd think the same as our partner can actually feel less threatening than just acknowledging that we're different in these ways that might

18:29

Speaker A

eventually require us to put some boundaries in place. boundaries are incompatible with that fantasy of sameness. And then we might have the autonomy maxer going, well, if my partner were just healed enough or smart enough or regulated enough, of

18:45

Speaker A

course they would act exactly like me, which is again using that fantasy of sameness to self-regulate. There is a right way to be and a wrong way to be.

18:55

Speaker A

And I don't know how to bridge the divide between different ways of being. So, I subconsciously have to get really busy trying to convince myself and my partner that if we're not thinking the same, it must be that there's some way

19:07

Speaker A

in which they're just not getting my way of understanding this. And so a lot of self-abandonment that feels good in the moment for us but then bad in the long term is born out of these moments of panic where we would rather abandon or

19:22

Speaker A

distort what's true for us or someone else in order to get back into that shared fantasy of two people can be on the same page about everything. There go love can exist. Then stand up for what we really think is true and risk losing

19:36

Speaker A

that imagined perfect connection. Fourth sign that you might be in an undifferiated relationship is that sexual desire and polarity start to erode over time. It is our differences, not our similarities, that keep attraction strong inside of relationships.

19:55

Speaker A

And so in undifferiated dynamics where the sameness is highlighted and differences are swept under the rug as a rule, one of the first things that tends to die a natural death is sexual chemistry. So this is not to say that

20:09

Speaker A

sex stops happening altogether, but very often it starts to be driven by kind of secondary things like anxiety or release. So one partner might start initiating sex less from a place of I feel an embodied pull towards you and

20:24

Speaker A

more from a place of I want to be reassured that I'm still wanted. Right?

20:29

Speaker A

That's that anxiety driver. Or you might just have one or both people wanting relief from sexual frustration. And so they might keep on routinely having sex, but it starts lacking any real intimacy or excitement or novelty. All of that stuff that might

20:44

Speaker A

have been so interesting in the beginning before those internal boundaries disappeared. So when I was researching the concept of differentiation, most of the resources I found around it actually by a landslide were aimed at helping couples revive dead bedrooms. And so what I took from

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Speaker A

that is that this just seems to be one of the most explicit symptoms of a lack of differentiation that tends to make it into people's conscious awareness. So that lack of psychological boundaries, that need for shared meaning making, the

21:16

Speaker A

inability to resolve conflict, those things might all strike both people as perfectly normal and in fact the healthy way to do relationships. But the lack of sexual connection often starts jumping out as something that feels wrong or distressing for one or both people. And

21:34

Speaker A

that's a really good thing, right? Because when there's an underlying disease, our symptoms can start pointing us in the right direction. And so differentiation is a term that you hear coming up pretty often in the world of couples therapy, particularly sex

21:46

Speaker A

therapy. So Esther PL who wrote the book Mating in Captivity is someone who talks a lot about this concept as does David Snar who wrote the book Passionate Marriage. Too much emphasis on sameness is a natural pillar of attraction. It

22:01

Speaker A

takes all of the tension out of the dynamic. And to get that back, we often have to start being intentional about where we're placing our focus.

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Speaker A

So, we're going to talk a lot about how to do that in the latter half of this video, but for now, we're going to go on to sign number five that you might be in an undifferiated relationship, which is

22:22

Speaker A

one or both people's growth ends up stalling because individuation destabilizes the relationship dynamic instead of strengthening it.

22:32

Speaker A

So individuation or the process of exploring who we are as separate people inside of our close relationships is a very vital part of what keeps long-term relationships healthy. So when both people are engaged in that ongoing process of discovering new parts of

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Speaker A

themselves and new ways in which they're different from each other, it's like there's always new energy coming into the relationship, right? and new tensions developing which again keeps curiosity and attraction online. But if each person's felt sense of stability is

23:05

Speaker A

dependent upon sameness and the reinforcement of mutual meaning making, neither party is going to be able to grow in any meaningful ways without either a heavily consulting the other person or b waiting for them to catch up and kind of get on board and grow in the

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Speaker A

exact same way. So the longer relationships go on for in an undifferiated way, the more you start to see one or more often both parties stagnating and ceasing to grow in any meaningful ways.

23:37

Speaker A

And so the very same mechanism that may have made the relationship feel so good and so cozy at the beginning can start to feel like a trap.

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Speaker A

But there is a way out. So, for the remainder of this video, we're going to turn our attention towards how to become more differentiated, if any of what we just talked about is something that you recognize yourself in.

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Speaker A

Now, first off, there's this part that pretty much nobody ever likes to hear about when it comes to differentiation, which is that going from an undifferiated relationship to a differentiated one is probably not going to feel very good. It is probably going

24:18

Speaker A

to feel predominantly uncomfortable and even kind of existentially scary. And the reason for that is because undifferentiated relationships prioritize soothing, whereas differentiation is all about how we cope with not being soothed and with learning how to stabilize on our own. Then we

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Speaker A

bring that whole version of ourselves back into our connections and we give our partners the opportunity to be in relationship with that version of us.

24:48

Speaker A

But this also means allowing our partners to stabilize on their own without our input or our influence on how they're processing things and then also welcoming that version of our partners back into connection with us after they've gone off and made meaning

25:02

Speaker A

of their own experiences as their own separate person. So that fantasy of sameness has to start dying a natural death and it often feels really uncomfortable in the process. But it also tends to be the thing that grows us

25:18

Speaker A

in leaps and bounds. So without further ado, we're going to transition into five strategies for increasing differentiation no matter where your relationship is starting out. The first strategy that we're going to talk about today is re-establishing a sense of

25:34

Speaker A

privacy. In undifferiated relationships, privacy and secrecy often get confused. So, we're just going to really quickly clarify that difference. Secrecy is when you have already processed something that would significantly affect your partner and you intentionally withhold it for your own benefit. And most people

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Speaker A

agree that that is almost never a great thing in relationships. But privacy is something different.

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Speaker A

Privacy is simply the right that each of us have to our own internal experiences.

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Speaker A

So to process our thoughts and our feelings and reactions to things and make sense of them internally before bringing them into a relationship.

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Speaker A

So having a very clear and separate eye that is distinguishable from the Wii. Now, in undifferiated relationships, privacy is often seen as a threat because it quite literally is the number one threat to sameness. Right? If each person processes things on their own,

26:37

Speaker A

what if they come to different conclusions? The assumption is that the relationship couldn't survive that. But in differentiated relationships, not only is privacy okay, it is considered one of the main power tools that keeps things healthy and erotically alive.

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Speaker A

So what does that actually look like in practice? In undifferiated relationships, when we feel upset or activated or confused by the relationship, whatever it is that's going on, our first instinct is usually to bring all of that directly to our

27:11

Speaker A

partners with the full emotional charge online. And we do that because it feels so true to our systems that the only way to get regulated again is to convince our partner that our way of seeing things is the right way and to get them

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on board with it. The problem is that if they have that same belief that they need to get us on board with their right way of seeing things before they're going to be able to feel regulated again, the conversation is going to

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escalate into a giant disregulation fest very fast. And in this case, both people might be claiming and actually truly believing that they're there to resolve a conflict when really what they're both there to do is to get their opinion to

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Speaker A

champion the other persons so that they can get back into that shared sense of meaning in order to feel regulated again. But it's the desire for regulation that is steering the ship, not the desire for genuine resolution.

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Speaker A

In differentiated relationships, the first move tends to be very different. So instead of going straight to the other person when we have those strong emotional charges online, our first move might be to step outside of the relational field altogether and process

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how we're feeling privately. So that might mean journaling about how we're feeling. It might mean talking to friends or family members who are good at holding space and letting us come to our own conclusions about things. It might mean sleeping on the problem,

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getting some exercise in, whatever it is. And however long it takes for us to reconnect to the sense of self we have that is separate from the shared kind of relationship identity that we have. And from that place, we can start sorting

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through whatever we feel about what's going on in the relationship. So we might look at things like where was I getting triggered versus what genuinely feels like something that needs to be worked through interpersonally.

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Speaker A

What does it seem like my partner wants? And is that the same as what I want? If our wants and needs are in contrast, what boundaries might I be able to come up with in order to make sure that I'm

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Speaker A

not going to lose myself too much by trying to also satisfy my partner's needs? All of that kind of stuff, right?

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Then we can go back into connection with that emotional charge having been absorbed and kind of grounded in our own private processing which means that our communication is going to be coming from a much more integrated place.

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Speaker A

So what we're doing in this case is inviting the other person to see us as a whole and coherent human being with our own perspectives and needs rather than trying to get the other person to regulate us back to a place of

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coherence. Being able to regulate first and connect second, at least having that as an option is the thing that helps us keep self-defin.

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Right? So, keeping our psychological boundaries intact by learning to step fluidly between our relational world and our private world when it matters to.

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And the more that we practice this skill, the better our discernment gets about when to use it. So, it's not that we need to process everything alone, but if we don't have that as a skill that we can reach for in moments where our needs

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and wants are at total odds with our partners, it's going to be pretty hard to resolve any conflicts in a way that feels genuinely satisfying to both people. Which leads us to the second strategy we're going to talk about for

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increasing differentiation, which is changing our relationship to boundaries. Specifically, we're going to talk about how to use boundaries to make our self-defin clearer rather than our inshment more comfortable.

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Basically, in undifferentiated relationships, boundaries usually function as an attempt to change someone else's behavior so that we can stay super close to them without having to feel uncomfortable about some way they're acting that we don't like. So, it's that undifferiated structure of

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needing the whole system to adapt to our needs and wants in order for us to feel like we are allowed to have them. In healthy secure differentiated relationships, boundaries actually function to help us determine the right distance we need to be at to someone in

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order to stay connected to them without losing our own wholeness or without having to change them in a way that erases some part of their wholeness. So, we can actually set the exact same boundary word for word and

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have it play out in two totally different ways based on whether the energy we're putting behind it comes from a differentiated or an undifferiated place. So, for example, let's say we're dealing with a partner who has a habit of lashing out with

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insults when they get dregulated. Okay? And we might tell them, I am not going to continue any conversations after the point where you insult me. great boundary to have, right? But if we're coming at the boundary from an

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undifferiated place, what we're probably going to do next immediately after setting it is start monitoring that person's behavior for signs that they are adhering to it. We might get angry and accusatory if they're breaking it or just overall keeping our psychic energy

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exactly where it is, which is focused on the other person and what it is that we want them to change. So that term psychic energy by the way it's this old Freudian and then yian term that essentially just refers to the fact that

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we all have a limited amount of mental and emotional energy. So when we are staying fixated on someone else's behavior including what they're not doing that we want them to do that's where our psychic energy keeps flowing directly towards them.

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When we set differentiated boundaries, we say no to what we don't want. But then our immediate next move is to withdraw whatever portion of our psychic energy was flowing towards that situation and redirect it towards something that is serving our wholeness.

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So in this situation, we might set the exact same boundary. I'm going to discontinue any interaction where I'm being insulted. But then our next move is going to be to intentionally shift our attention towards the relationships and the environments where we are

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already being treated with that respect. So we might start spending more time in those environments or prioritizing the relationships where we're spoken to kindly over the types of conversations with our partner or whoever else where they would end up insulting us in them.

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And overall, we're just going to start investing more of our time and our energy and our life force into the contexts that feel resourcing for us.

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So, our boundary is there not to try to get our partner to change, right? They can if they want to because they want to be prioritized by us again. And we don't prioritize people who speak to us in

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ways that are cruel. But that is up to them, right? We're not going to spend all of our time monitoring that situation because the real purpose of that boundary for us was about protecting our own wholeness by limiting the energy

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that we're giving to situations that drain us and that detract or take away from our life force. And so this is the concrete how portion of how we keep ourselves online inside of intimate connections. We stop organizing our

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lives around maintaining sameness at all costs. And we start organizing our lives around keeping our self-concept intact.

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And that can often feel scary because the other person might not be willing to come and meet us where we're at. But it's also the only way that any relationship has a real chance of staying healthy long term. Because

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intimacy never has a chance of surviving dynamics where self-defin is getting lost. We just have to develop new strategies for bridging the divides that sameness used to squash. Which brings us to strategy number three, which is learn to ask for what you want instead of

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trying to convince the whole relational system to want the same thing. There is a very different way that we are exchanging energy in a relationship for lack of a more scientific way to put it.

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When we are acknowledging that we're different people but asking for what we want out of the other person. Then when we are trying to subtly get what we want by trying to convince the other person that they want it too, which is of

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course the differentiated versus undifferiated ways. So, I'm going to give an example of what this looks like by telling a story that a friend of mine has generously given me permission to tell. My friend was in a relationship

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with this guy that he really liked, who we will call Joe. And in the early stages of the relationship, my friend had covered basically all of their shared expenses, including letting Joe live with him for a while, rentree,

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because Joe was out of work, but my friend was pretty comfortably employed. And then about a year and a half into the relationship, Joe gets this offer for a really well-paying job across the country. So, the two of them talk it out

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and decide to do the whole longdistance thing. Joe takes the job and he moves across the country. And for the first couple of months, it was going smoothly and they were visiting back and forth pretty frequently. And then one week, my

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friend had this fairly significant maintenance issue crop up in his house. And it was one of those things where getting it fixed would have been super expensive, but he knew that Joe would know how to fix it himself because he

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was just a pretty handy person. So my friend immediately calls him up and goes, "Hey, I would really love it if you could come home next weekend and help me out with this issue that I'm having in my house." And Joe went,

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"Sure, as long as you pay for my plane ticket." And my friend hung up the phone feeling really annoyed. T had this idea that because he had given Joe so much financial help early on in their relationship and now Joe was the one who

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was earning more money than him, he should be happy to return the favor and pay for his flight to come back and help him out a bit. So he called Joe back that evening and they went on to have a

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long series of chronically escalating arguments about what the right way to deal with finances in a long-distance relationship was. And by the time my friend came to me to talk about the whole situation, he was just furious with his partner. So, he was in full-on

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rant mode about how his way of looking at things was right and Joe's was wrong.

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And he was totally preoccupied with trying to figure out how to get Joe to see his side of things. And so, we talked about this for quite a while. And eventually, I was like, "Okay, let's throw something out there. What if you

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just accepted that Joe disagrees with your reasoning and you ask him for what you want anyway?

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And so he decided to try that out. So he called up Joe the next day and went, "Hey, I really need to decision make on what I'm going to do about this issue with my house. It's getting imminent. So

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I would like for you to come home this weekend and help me fix it. And I would like for you to pay for your own plane ticket. Are you willing to do that for me?" and Joe went, "No." And my friend

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went, "Okay." And then he ended the conversation to go figure out how he was going to get a contractor in to help solve the issue. 3 hours later, Joe called back and he went, "I was thinking about it and I changed my mind. Can you

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pick me up at the airport on Friday?" So, even though this did end up working out the way that my friend wanted it to, what was interesting was that he told me after the fact that even if the exchange

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had ended with Joe saying no, he would have been okay with that because he had done his part in showing up for himself and asking directly for what he wanted.

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And it felt way better to do that and receive a straight up no than it would have to just keep trying to argue with his partner to get him to agree.

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clear differentiated lines had been drawn between them, right? And they ended up finding a way to connect across them. And this is the exact kind of dynamic that brings that aliveness back into connections that are losing their spark. When both people start to show

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their self-defin again, I want this. It's different than what you want. Are you willing to meet me in this or not?

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This type of framing puts both people back in the driver's seat of their own choices, which allows for a much cleaner exchange of energy. Fourth strategy for increasing differentiation inside of our relationships is getting curious about our own experience when our partners are

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changing or experimenting in ways that we don't like. Individuation. So that process of exploring how we're separate from our partners or our close connections is not something that automatically feels comfortable even in really healthy relationships.

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Right? So, let's say your partner starts to explore new political views that are different than yours, or they decide they want to go back to school and study something that you think is impractical, or there's a certain way that they act

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in social situations that you find just kind of cringy and embarrassing. In an undifferiated relationship, again, we might instinctively try to change them to avoid our own discomfort. But in a differentiated relationship, we get curious about our own discomfort first.

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So we might ask ourselves questions like, "What about this is personal to me? Why is it that I'm so bothered by my partner holding this political view or wanting to go back to school to be an artist or acting in kind of loud and

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unhibited ways sometimes at parties? Is it more of an ego thing that I'm worried about? Do I just not want to look bad by proxy? Or am I bumping up against a genuine value difference that we might need to consciously surface and talk

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about in our relationship? It's not that differentiated relationships always work out, right? Sometimes we do have genuine differences or constraints that we can't really work through. But when we learn to examine those immediate and kind of reflexive responses that we have to our partners,

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we end up gaining a lot of information about which things we can live with. So what we just need to set some of our own boundaries around and give them the space to explore without our interference versus which things are

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genuine deal breakers for us because they point at some deeper value difference or logistical constraint that actually would impact the relationship.

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Right? So, I think that art is a silly degree that my friends wouldn't respect is an ego issue. I'm upset because we're not making a lot of money right now, and you going back to school for a degree

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that might not have a high return on investment is probably going to stall our plans for starting a family is a totally different issue.

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But when the first instinctive move that we make is to try to change our partner because we just get this feeling in our body that we don't like what they're doing or thinking of doing, that discernment gets lost about which

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situation we're dealing with. When we learn to privately process how we feel about what our partner is doing before we bring it up to them, we can usually go into those conversations being way more grounded about why the issue

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matters. not in general, but to us. So, keeping things personal rather than appealing to some imaginary authority is a really key sign of differentiation in a relationship. We're no longer trying to convince our partners that there is a

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one right way to do things. We're owning our experience as ours and we're letting them be at choice about how they want to respond to that. And fifth and final strategy that we're going to talk about today for increasing differentiation in

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our relationships is learning to grieve probably over and over and over again the comfort and safety that being undifferentiated brought us. Again, differentiating tends to feel existentially scary. And it feels scary not because we are weak or pathetic but

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because there is genuine risk involved. So prioritizing our wholeness above our connection with another person, which by the way doesn't mean devaluing or abandoning the other person's needs, right? It just means that we stop reflexively prioritizing their needs and

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wants above ours that might cause the other person to walk away from us if the thing that they liked about us was our willingness to always put them first. That is a real risk. Asking for what we want might lead

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to us getting a no and having to realize that someone doesn't want to show up for us in the ways that we might want them to. And if we're no longer giving ourselves the option to try to change

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the other person, that might mean that we have some very serious and sober decisions to make about our relationship to them. Differentiation requires us to risk loss whereas being undifferentiated is a very reliable loss avoidance strategy.

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Right? So there's a tradeoff here. We're not moving from a place of pain to a place of no pain. If we come from that side of the spectrum where we value connection over autonomy, we're trading in the pain of self-abandonment

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for the pain of increased relational uncertainty. And that is a real pain, especially if it ends up leading to true abandonment.

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Or if we air more on that side of being overly autonomous, we're trading in the pain of relational deadness for the pain and discomfort of no longer feeling in control in our relational dynamic.

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And that might feel really humiliating or otherwise unsafe for us if we're used to feeling like we're only as okay and worthy of respect as we are in control.

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But the good news is that if we persist with this overtime, differentiation tends to give us way more back than it takes from us, we regain self-rust and self-defing, which tends to make us both more secure internally and also more attractive to

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healthy people as we find our way towards becoming more comfortable in our own skin.

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And we regain humility when we recover from control seeking. So we develop the capacity to be known and cared for and changed by our relationships, which ends up giving us a much more meaningful experience of being alive than just optimizing for certainty ever

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could. So, we do have to grieve that fantasy that closeness could come without risk or that connection could be maintained without ever having to prioritize ourselves and stand on our own two feet. And that's a hard loss.

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But it's also the point where real adulthood in relationships begins. So, sort of like staying healthy long term requires us to do things that feel uncomfortable sometimes, like getting up at 6 a.m. to exercise or to eat broccoli

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instead of pizza most nights. Being able to maintain healthy and mature long-term connections also requires a tolerance for relational discomfort.

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So one day that might look like holding our ground on an issue that matters to us when our partner disagrees with us.

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Even though what we might really really want is to feel close and connected and like everything we think is the same. We have to be able to tolerate those instances of disconnection when it matters. In another instance, it might

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mean that we have to let the people who are close to us grow in ways that we would not choose for ourselves or for them. but honoring their autonomy and wholeness as a separate person in that process. Even if what we'd really prefer

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is for them to just listen to us and conform to the way that we would do things because we truly think that is best for us and them. But the point is expecting relationships to always feel cozy and frictionless is often the very

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thing that causes them to deteriorate over time. Just like always prioritizing comfort over challenge erodess our physical health over time.

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Right? Choosing the right kind of hard is what gives our relationships the depth and durability to actually last.

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And ultimately that is what differentiation is all about. developing really strong foundations for our relationships that don't require any major forms of self-abandonment or controlling of each other in order for both people to strike the right balance between feeling happy and free in their

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own lives and feeling committed and connected inside of their intimate partnership. All right, this has been a really long video, so I am going to leave it at that for today. But as always, any questions that you have coming up as you went

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through this video or any comments or curiosities or thoughts, please do leave those in the comment section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon.

Topics: differentiation boundaries attachment styles anxious attachment avoidant attachment relationships self-differentiation couples therapy autonomy intimacy

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