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Psychological Differentiation: Self-constructed
For life is
at the start
a chaos in which one is lost.
– José Ortega Y Gasset
I would like to begin this article by defining psychological differentiation, a concept most identified with psychologist Murry Bowen. But I won’t because I believe that would be unhelpful at this point. Despite what AI would have us believe, the psychological state of differentiation is complex and multidetermined, and while each component of it is quite easily understood, the process of putting all the elements together is not so obvious. In fact, I think you would laugh if you could see all the notes, diagrams and models I worked through to get to any existential, feminist state of clarity with regard to psychological differentiation. It took me many days, many colored pens, and many pages of odd sketches before I could capture the dual processes and four orthogonal relationships that form the basis for this extremely potent facet of adulthood. Therefore, I’m going to ask for your patience here in terms of seeking a definition. Stick with me, and I’m confident that by the end of this article you will be able to toss off the word “differentiation” with ease – and depth – of understanding.
Instead of a definition, then, let’s start with the backstory to this synergistic and novel state.
The story of differentiation
Healthy little kids eagerly explore their physical world once they feel they have a secure base to which they can reliably return. As big kids, we are designed to do the same – step out to explore our psychological world knowing we can retreat to a homebase as needed. That process gets derailed for many of us as we move along our route to maturity, a derailment that is explored in the chapter on biases. The essence of that chapter is that we are supposed to park ourselves at the end of a cultural continuum that we have chosen (or that has been chosen for us) until we know all the ins and outs of that membership. Then, fully established as constituents of that subculture, we gain the confidence to look around to see what other options might be out there. But what derails an openness to exploring the world outside of our clan is hierarchy.
Hierarchy, most often the result of patriarchal, zero-sum misogyny, sets us at odds with any position different from ours. That oppositional stance leads at best to a lack of curiosity and at worst to violence. These unhelpful reactions to difference create within us concerns about how dangerous it might be out in the world and curtail our inclination to explore. We neutralize this setback with a willingness to see the world through the lens of orthogonality. The article on adversarial collaboration outlines the way to achieve expertise with interpersonal orthogonality – the vital two-dimensional, egalitarian view of difference that underlies the ability to be open to contrasting views.
Taken together, the bias formation/adversarial collaboration articles outline the developmental steps humans are designed to take – selecting biases we think we will like and then using orthogonal flexibility to move from chauvinism to two-dimensional exploration. Once we are capable of bipartisan data gathering, our life choices will be crafted through orthogonal reckoning. Again, orthogonal reckoning means making life decisions by gathering two-dimensional input to broaden our thinking process. The ability to use orthogonal reckoning is the first of dual processes that grants us the ability to differentiate.
initial biased state ⇢ adversarial collaboration ⇢ two-dimensional understanding ⇢ orthogonal reckoningI wouldn’t recommend reading any further if the opening of this article doesn’t make sense to you. I would urge you, instead, to read the articles linked in those paragraphs first. Hopefully they will help you understand how biases can be softened with adversarial collaboration to create a two-dimensional understanding of complex psychological truths.
Once we understand orthogonal reckoning, we can use that process to build a solid foundation for differentiation, a step that takes us into the four content areas underlying differentiation. It might help here to clarify the difference between process and content.
Process vs. content
Psychological process refers to the manner in which we move through the world. It is the “how.” How we decide what we decide and how we do what we do. The steps of orthogonal reckoning described above provide an example of a process. We select our legitimately derived biases, seek out new information with adversarial collaboration, expand our original position and then make our choices from that expanded place. Lots of “doing” words.
The psychological concept of content is the “what” with which we engage our process. In our example, the content would be the facts. To expand on that: Let’s say I am a member of Save the World’s Whales. I believe no one should ever kill whales. Those are the facts as I see them from my biased standpoint. The content of the adversarial collaboration process would be novel facts such as the importance of hunting whales to native populations and the way in which subsistence hunting differs from commercial hunting. Content in our example, then, is concrete information about the issue from another viewpoint. When we wrestle sincerely with competing information, we are in the process of updating the content of our beliefs.
Another example often used to clarify the difference between content and process is arguing. The process of arguing is the way you engage with someone when you disagree. You can discuss calmly, raise your voice, shake your fist, cite copious references or cry. There are healthy disagreement processes (adversarial collaboration) and unhealthy ones (stonewalling or lying). The content is what you are disagreeing about – chores, parenting, money, politics.
Process is the how and content is the what. We are now going to use the process of orthogonal reckoning to explore the four content areas that support differentiation.
Four content areas
There are four content areas that we need to understand if we want to maintain a differentiated stance as we move through our days. We can consider these content areas existential pillars that support our ability to reach full adulthood. They are: ego strength, emotional basecamp, will to power and mastery. Once these four psychological constructs are in place we will be able to maintain a differentiated approach to the decisions we make (a mature choosing process). You’ve probably spotted the existential truth in that previous sentence. Because the decisions we make minute-to-minute create our lives, if we cannot routinely be differentiated adults, the randomness of each little decision will hamper progress toward the life we were designed to live. We will wander through our days rather than stride toward a future memory we have chosen to pursue.
Here, then, is a good place for me to make my usual plug for attending to the existential concerns underlying each of the orthogonal relationships that create the four pillars.
Existential truths are important to understand because without a clear understanding of them we tend to avoid thinking about them. If we don’t think about them, we will float on the surface of our lives. We humans are already very vulnerable to the whims of Fate and the pressure of many layers of interpersonal influence, so it makes no sense to increase our vulnerability by living unanchored lives. Each of these four components of differentiation anchors us in a distinct way to what’s best in humans, giving us more confidence in our decision-making process. It is also true that these four stellar aspects of being human need constant maintenance. There’s no doubt that it will take some effort to understand, implement, and maintain these four content areas. But facing difficult tasks is far more satisfying than drifting along not knowing what to do with our life. Being lost is worse than being challenged. It turns out that people are not overwhelmed when exposed to existential truths. Rather, they are reassured that what they sensed was true, is true – that life is difficult for humans which is why they often struggle. When we can add some existentially powerful strategies to that reassuring truth, we ease the angst that percolates under the surface of every life. Sound good? Read on!
As you probably suspected, each of the four content areas represents an orthogonal relationship between two opposing character strengths. Now that we have our handy dandy process of orthogonal reckoning, we can use that to identify and integrate the underlying components of each existential pillar.
1. Ego strength
Ego strength is a function of the belief that our sense of self is a good size, a good shape, based on sound data and is well protected. We believe that we are in the right place at the right time with the right stuff to “do our own thing.”
Most of us know intuitively when our life feels like it’s a good size. Our days are filled with challenges and rewards that suit our age, experience, training, aspirations, etc. We feel satisfaction when we fill in the blank of this sentence: I am ________. We may want more in our future, but, currently, we are fulfilling many of our ambitions, and the world seems happy to allow us this degree of contentment.
Often less clear is whether or not our life is the right shape. Many cultures encourage us to be a nice, big shape, but only if we are doing what we have been told to do. But being the right shape means living a life that you alone designed, one that fits your unique talents, hopes and hungers. Few cultures do a good job of supporting people as they navigate the twisted and narrow path of self-exploration. The entirety of Section III explores the problems inherent in trying to design a life for yourself that you would be happy to live all over again.
It can be difficult to determine if our belief in ourselves is based on accurate data or not. Fate and its fickleness can reward all of us in the wrong way for the wrong reasons, leaving us confused about our sense of self. I think it’s best to take the feedback from our world and filter it through our prevailing biochemical state. (Ha, ha, ha. Another Iversen-left-turn-at-Albuquerque.) What I mean is this: when we are doing the things that we are truly designed to do and doing them well, our biochemical state tends to be stable and positive. Our mood is optimistic, energized and patient. This lovely neurological state of affairs will exist as we move through our days and also at 2 a.m. when we are alone with our raw thoughts. So, if you’re basically sleeping well and feeling good about things, chances are that your ego is based on sound data. But, again, a read through Section III will help you reinforce your confidence.
A well-protected ego is one that needn’t fear devastation if thwarted by other people or shipwrecked by Fate. Protecting our ego is akin to using semi-exposed rocks to cross a creek. There are things that can keep us dry (confidence, coordination, practice and so on,) but we are all one well-disguised, tippy stone away from ending up in the drink. Section IV outlines the many skills that can up our resilience in order to buffer us from the ill-effects of both Fate and other folks.
Each component of ego strength is created and maintained at the boundary between us and the world. We need to be able to balance the size, shape, accuracy, and safety of ourselves against the pressures and distortions coming at us from the outside world. As always, when we seek to embody a psychological attribute such as ego strength, we want to be able to stand on two legs. The two legs that support ego strength are narcissism and empathy. Let me be quick to remind you that narcissism isn’t a negative characteristic and empathy isn’t always a positive one. Both narcissism and empathy can be problematic if not counterbalanced. When conjoined within a person, however, these two human characteristics show up in healthy and constructive ways at that boundary between ourselves and our world.
Our narcissism pushes us from within to seek out the biggest and richest environment for growing a solid sense of self. It constantly sends out tendrils of wanting to see if more of what seems tasty to us can be had. If the answer is “yes,” we work to expand our lives into this new space. Healthy narcissism reflects our ability to build a strong internal identity by integrating into our consideration what it means to us to be the human being we wish to be. This narcissistic dreaming is at its strongest when free from shame, nay-sayers, the needs of others, Fate and so on. That is why our ego needs that sacred space created by narcissism bound to empathy. We all need to take narcissistic dreaming seriously enough to protect it because these dreams are the tiny seeds that can grow into a lush and vibrant existence.
Empathy prevents our ego from running amok at the expense of others. It monitors the shape and size of our ego, protecting us from disaster or hostility. We avoid getting out over our skis by not trying to master something we are not designed to learn or by not invading the ego territory of another. In other words, we push our boundaries out only until we bump into something. What alerts us to a boundary problem is discomforting information coming from the rest of the world. If we are trying for too much at this time, for something that isn’t right for us or for something that intrudes on someone else, we will hear about it.
Empathy allows us to hear and acknowledge what is going on at the boundary. It enables us to turn our perspective around and look at things from the other side of the boundary. But receiving pushback doesn’t mean we need to instantly acquiesce. Reminiscent of the skills underlying a healthy defense system, ego strength allows us to individually determine the ratio of influence between outside input and the intentional self. It moves us beyond simply controlling how much information gets through from the world (a healthy defense system) and into using the inner processing centers in our minds to sort through the information (orthogonal reckoning). We use narcissism and empathy together to synergize the incoming data. We can do this because our respect for our narcissism helps us recognize the validity of another person’s narcissism, meaning that our empathic sense can start from a place of respect for the existential position of the other person. Our empathic skills allow us to trust that our growing narcissism will behave itself at a boundary. Because we know we will be careful when we bump into something, we can therefore throw a lot of energy into filling out our sense of self.
Ego strength is the mechanism that establishes our sacred space in the existential world. When partnered with an empathic braking system, our narcissism creates a psychological oasis in the chaos of the social world within which we design our lives. The resulting narcissistic dream reflects a unique and nascent hunger that starts us on a forward journey. What is germinated by this first pillar, in other words, sets the stage for what is to come.
2. Emotional basecamp
If humans are at their best when they move out to explore their world knowing they have a safe haven to return to, then we all ought to learn how to create that safe haven for ourselves. Humans have two forms of refuge – within a community and within our heads. We create the first through our attachment behaviors and the second through our sense of autonomy. What creates an emotional basecamp for each of us is the balance between attachment fostered by empathy, and autonomy fostered by narcissism. When our relationship with ourselves and our relationships with others are robust and stable, we can reliably find refuge within and without.
As straightforward as that last paragraph may seem, it will be surprisingly difficult to achieve because the patriarchy splits narcissism/autonomy apart from empathy/attachment, elevating narcissism/autonomy and sending them into the domain of men; and diminishing empathy/attachment and sending them into the domain of women.
We arrive now at what is the most pernicious hierarchical split plaguing humankind: the specific hierarchy of difference that pits how men regard the world of commitment to relationship against how women regard it. Privileging narcissistically supported autonomy over empathically supported attachment creates the greatest distance between the sexes, causes the most substantial dissatisfaction between men and women, and perpetuates the loneliness/depletion gender divide. It also sets the world of work against the world of love.
Built upon the solid rock of intrinsic but slight sex differences between men and women, the ranking of the commitment dichotomy clings to a masculinist narrative that no longer serves humankind. The toxicity for both men and women rests not in the difference between narcissistically supported autonomy and empathically supported attachment, but in the hierarchy. The detoxification, therefore, rests in eliminating the hierarchy.
When the dominant culture exalts men’s ways of being and disparages women’s ways with respect to committing to partnering equally in relationships, everyone suffers. We need to sensitize men to the need to put work into relationships. We need to alert women to the need to bravely up their commitment to autonomous actions.
That brings us to the heart of feminist thought – concern with who is underwriting the cost of interpersonal relationships.
Here, then, is a good place for me to make my usual plug for the need to attend to the feminist concerns underlying this crucial pillar.
Women have for far too long built and maintained the emotional basecamps for their menfolk. This should no longer be acceptable. To strengthen my case for what humans need to do about this dilemma, I’m going to exaggerate the gender divide between men and women, and I’m going to attach different solutions to each gender. Of course I believe that people of all stripes need to learn these interpersonal skills.
Commitment to attachment: There can be no argument that humans need humans. It follows that social relationships are nonnegotiable in the pursuit of human flourishing. While everyone might nod in agreement about how people need people, there is little agreement about how one goes about creating intimacy. Men approach relationships from the narcissistic, autonomous end of the continuum while women approach from the empathic, attachment side.
So, what happens when you situate the masculine culture of narcissistically-driven autonomy next to the feminine culture of empathically-driven caring? Autonomy can always trump caring. Whoever is less invested in a relationship always dominates simply because, with less emotional connection, they have less to lose. And often with greater financial flexibility, they can much more easily shut down emotionally and/or walk away. Men, due to their inherent and developed sense of autonomy, can put very little into creating community while benefiting the most from it. As a result, autonomous men can control caring women, even when they don’t mean to. What we end up with here is bullying.
It is important to note that there are two kinds of bullies: intentional – mean people who enjoy pushing their weight around; and inadvertent – bullies who will sloppily take advantage of others by ignoring their privileged status. There is no point in addressing the former because intentional bullies willingly use violence to reinforce their position, meaning they are impervious to appeals to change. Cruel thuggery can only be curtailed by an overwhelming opponent such as a faster gunslinger (Wild Bill Hickok), a functioning legal system (RICO) or a mass uprising of concerned citizens (the Civil Rights Movement). The bullying behavior we are addressing here is the inadvertent type.
We have to assume that most men do not want to be bullies. It is, however, very difficult to let go of an advantage that you’ve become accustomed to, that all your peers are indulging in and that no one is fussing much about. It is also true that the form that inadvertent bullying takes is generally the absence of sound attachment behaviors, and omissions are tricky to spot. Men fail to recognize that there are important behaviors they are neglecting to do.
Men can’t give away their physical power or their greater comfort with autonomy. But they can choose to be in integrity with respect to commitment to commitment by proactively learning the skills needed to fully participate in the creation of community. Right?
Very specifically, we are calling upon men to learn to the point of mastery the three most basic interpersonal skills: careful listening, expressed empathy and effective stipulation. As described in the article on adversarial collaboration, the importance of these skills cannot be overstated. Unless and until men master them, they can only continue to be interpersonal bullies. The concept of weaponized incompetence is germane here. Men need to understand that they tend to be very bad at all three of these skills and that only by learning to do them very well will they help end the logrolling relationship between men and women. A man high in integrity will – right at this moment – go to read the articles in Section V that cover these three skills.
Commitment to autonomy: There are two steps women need to take to do their part in abolishing the hierarchy of narcissism/autonomy over empathy/attachment.
First, they need to completely eliminate any shame over their intense commitment to commitment. I hope I don’t need to explain to anyone how shamed women are for their attachment to attachment. Everywhere you turn someone is ridiculing women for caring. It makes me crabby just trying to think of examples, so I’m going to trust you to think up your own. Suffice it to say here, women are made to feel less than because they care more.
And second, they need to power up their autonomy-based behaviors in order to hold the patriarchy accountable for its hierarchical thinking and subsequent bullying (aka misogyny). It is helpful if women realize that, where there is an inadvertent bully, there is a hierarchy based on a bluff. The bluff here is that the world of community would exist without women’s attachment skills. I think we can all agree that this is not true. The bitter irony here is that women care more about and for relationships, know more about them and pour more emotional energy into them but are less secure and resourced by them. Mother’s Day notwithstanding, the patriarchy isn’t going to suddenly stop minimizing, ridiculing and all around ignoring the contributions women make in the establishment of the emotional base camp for so many. Women have to simply decide to no longer accept the shame. Every time they are exposed to male disregard for emotional connections, women need to up their narcissism in order to reject the indictment.
Nowhere is this disregard more tragic than in this truth: neither men nor women are aware that it is women who generate and donate the majority of the energy that powers the interpersonal world. I’m talking actual energy here. This naïveté is beyond tragic. Once women become aware of this incredible power they have (as outlined in the introduction to Section V), they can engage their narcissistic verve (pride in themselves) to enhance their autonomy. Specifically, women need to bolster their ability and willingness to speak out and influence the behavior of others even when that may negatively affect a relationship.
This trifecta of relational skills keep an attachment in check by setting limits on the outside world. Without the capacity to establish boundaries, a woman remains vulnerable to intrusions that can range from irritating psychological violations to horrific physical abuse and, yes, still-too-common-to-believe, death. But equally crucial, without the capacity to set firm boundaries, a woman will simply not have sufficient room to enact her signature strengths – to exert her will to power in order to invent herself.
You will see that these skills are all precluded by the act of pulling focus away from supporting others and focusing, instead, on supporting herself. We are back to the trope of putting your oxygen mask on before you care for others. To expand on that trope, while men need to learn to be curious about why others are suffocating, women need to be curious about why they, themselves, cannot breathe.
Socialized into willing self-sacrifice, women find autonomy frightening because it stretches the tethers that link them to others. They fear, rightly, that some of these tethers will be severed when they engage in autonomous behaviors. Can women handle endangering some of their relationships by limiting their donations? In no way are we asking women to forego their spectacular skills in the domain of human relations, but we are asking them to have the courage to tolerate the loss of some relationships along the way as they engage in speaking up and speaking out.
Women need to believe that they are capable of fully participating in the design of the world. They have every right to be in every room where it happens. But men will not spontaneously allow this to happen. Women need to speak up – constantly – to alert men to boundary violations that punish women for speaking up or shame women for seeking power.
To break the stranglehold on commitment that the patriarchal hierarchy enjoys, two things have to happen. The group on top has to acknowledge – from a place of high integrity and regret – that they have long been the recipients of unearned largesse. The group on the bottom has to demand – with courage and resolve – that they are now willing to demand equality wherever and whenever they encounter hierarchy. When men find they are indeed capable of loving love, and women cherish self-sufficiency, then humans will find themselves enjoying what Cixous refers to as “a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies.”
To continue with our throughline from the section on ego strength concerning the little seedling created by narcissistic dreaming, let’s look at how having an emotional basecamp moves us along toward differentiation. The safety we feel when we trust the support of both ourselves (autonomy) and our community (attachment) allows us to venture out to explore possible places to plant those hopeful seedlings. We search for fertile ground; we spend time alone tilling the soil and then return home to rest.
3. Will to power
Will to power is the delicious existential concept that defines how we humans create unique unifying projects that vivify our lives by using the orthogonal relationship that conjoins willpower and will.
If you remember from reading those articles, will power is the limited but renewable ability to start our motor when we decide to take our life somewhere. To put it in existential terms, will power means deciding to make a choice. It is this ability that allows us to overcome the initiation threshold which exists at the beginning of all endeavors.
Our will is our willingness to want something. That short sentence carries a ton of meaning. Will is the ability to look over the top of an initiation threshold to see what’s on the other side and then decide that what we see there is worth pursuing. Once willpower starts your engine, will is the existential GPS that tells you where to go once the motor is running.
When those two human existential characteristics are combined, they create the will to power that enables us to decide to choose what we now want to pursue most – to will one thing. Another sentence that reverberates with existential truth. It should be accompanied by trumpets. We need to be alerted to the richness of it in order to spend a little time thinking about it. Remember when I said earlier in this article that without a clear understanding of existential concepts, we tend to avoid thinking about them? Never is that more true than with the concept of will to power. It is my personal belief that will to power is the greatest gem hidden away in the esoteric and inaccessible oeuvre of the existentialists. In fact, willpower, will and will to power all represent existential concepts that are both hugely important and very poorly understood. Rather than giving these concepts short shrift by summarizing them, I refer you to the two articles covering them.
The metaphor I like in terms of our little seedling throughline is this: we germinate many seeds but decide to transplant only a few to our fertile, well-prepared garden. In a perfect landscape we will have a few towering trees, many shrubs and a ton of small, flowering plants nestled among them. Think large commitments, many hobbies and little sparkles of task magic.
4. Mastery
Mastery is enchantment. It creates within our brains a state of concentration and joy that bends time. Hours elapse unnoticed as we engage in skilled behaviors that completely absorb us. All humans are designed to pursue and enjoy mastery. It is achieved when conformity and audacity coexist within us in an orthogonally potent way. We pay our dues in the mastery game by spending the time to learn standards of practice from knowledgeable folks around us (conformity). We then step out audaciously to try our hand at innovation. When we are innovating, we exist in a state of flow. It doesn’t get better than this.
Humans are able to harvest this positive neurological biochemistry by mastering small skills (superb handwriting, effective parallel parking or a sparklingly clean kitchen), medium skills (preparing a full-course meal, a well-crafted assertion or maintaining a balanced family budget) and highly professional skills (designing a building, guiding a therapy session or wiring a house). A deep satisfaction exists within us when we can consistently generate a balanced selection of these three types of mastery. It’s important to understand that we need to be potent but not necessarily world class in order to enjoy the results of mastery. We just have to practice to excellence those skills that matter to us, using the gifts we have discovered within ourselves.
With ample mastery in our days, we are bolstered by extraordinarily stable mental energy. Absent mastery, we are increasingly vulnerable to escapist behaviors and unfettered comfort seeking.
You can tell by the brevity of this section that there is an entire article on this most existential of topics. If you haven’t read it…
To address the final piece in our throughline for this article, this peak human state reflects the self-discipline needed to learn, implement and refine the skills necessary to make your garden flourish. As anyone who adores gardening will tell you, gardening is an endless battle that requires pluck, resilience, experience and luck.
Differentiation: The Sexiest Place on Earth
In order to bring some personal control to the pandemonium of human existence, we each need to be able to sustain our project of becoming who we want to be despite encountering the vicissitudes of Fate as well as scores of people with their own agenda for us. If we understand that our lives are the most chaotic at the boundary between these persuasive others and ourselves, we can focus on standing on solid existential ground during interpersonal interactions. The word for that impressive comportment is, of course, differentiation.
Many people arrest unknowingly at the first developmental step humans take toward maturity – forming a binary idea about how the world works. They continue to use those beliefs to shape their day-to-day lives. But our second developmental step – psychological differentiation – can lead to a more robustly unique life. Differentiation reflects an earnest desire for collaboration, a cognitive ability to gather bipartisan data and the poise bolstered by ego strength and will to power as we hold true to the plans for our original project.
We have identified all the ingredients that troubled me through my days of using colored pens and much scratch paper – the dual processes and four content areas of differentiation.
The dual processes are:
• Adversarial collaboration
• Building and maintaining the four content areas
The four content areas are:
• Ego strength: empathy and narcissism
• Emotional basecamp: attachment and autonomy
• Will to power: willpower and will
• Mastery: conformity and innovation
When we can approach life from a differentiated stance, we will be reliable stewards of our souls. We can earnestly engage with others without abdicating our individual rights and responsibilities in terms of designing a life we would willingly live again.