Moving on from your family dynamics is a lifelong task and the result of family of origin work. The concept of differentiation is central to the ability to live your own life and form healthy adult relationships. In this article I provide a couple of definitions and identify ways you can develop  differentiation.

Differentiation is the active, ongoing process of defining self, revealing self, clarifying boundaries, and managing the anxiety that comes from risking either greater intimacy or potential separation.

Murray Bowen defined differentiation as the degree of resilience to the interpersonal contagion of anxiety.

It is important to distinguish between individuality, which these definitions may sound like, and differentiation. Individuality is how we develop as a person and connected to self esteem; what is it that makes us who we are?  Differentiation occurs in relation to others, how are we different from them? Differentiation is not about being separate from our family but about being able to tolerate who they are while maintaining our sense of self. People make the mistake of believing that they have left their family dynamics behind by being many miles away and having little to do with them.

I have worked with many clients who are struggling with wanting to change their relationship with a parent/s. Often they are feeling angry, hurt and disappointed when the same dynamics in the family continue. The need to change family members is based on wanting to get something they have never received: recognition, attention, comfort, support. The other side of this can involve trying to change themselves to get needs met. Both of these positions keep the person stuck in the family dynamics.

Some examples of low differentiation:

Jane is living with her parents and her father continually disregards her requests to respect her space and things. She gets angry and withdraws treating him as if he doesn’t exist. Her attempts to speak to him about her feelings end in yelling matches.

Josh lived his life taking care of himself and being independent and rational. He grew up with an alcoholic father. His father has been sober for the last 6 years and their relationship is ‘fine now’.  However, they have not discussed what it was like for him growing up and their interactions are superficial.

Peter’s mother constantly calls him asking for advice, wanting to talk when she is upset or lonely. Whenever Peter tries to limit the interactions she gets angry and manipulates with guilt. This ends up with Peter being there for his mother and resenting her.

Changing your interactions with your family can be complex. How do you maintain contact but not get drawn into the dynamics? This is a question many of my clients ask. It is easy to see why many people distance themselves to give the illusion that they have overcome their family dysfunction. However, in adult relationships these same dynamics show up and the way you deal with communication and conflict reflect your degree of differentiation.

Ways to improve differentiation

Dealing with anxiety
Anxiety causes us to acquiesce, shut down, cut off, withhold important feelings and desires, attack others and defend ourselves. Anxiety arises because risking self expression identifies difference. We feel anxious because being different and allowing others to know us, threatens our security in the relationship. We need to learn to regulate the swell of anxiety that arises as we risk being seen for who we are.  Grounding, relaxation and learning to be present are all important skills in helping to regulate your nervous system.

Boundaries
Undifferentiated boundary systems in families occur when family members don’t express differences and acquiesce to pressure to conform. Or they will fight to hold onto their identity with self righteousness and protection. Developing healthy boundaries increases differentiation and real connectedness. Even when your family members continue with unhealthy boundaries you can remain strong and clear in their presence by improving your boundaries.

Self awareness
Becoming self-aware increases your choices in relation to your family. As you become aware of how you get drawn into the dysfunction and lack of differentiation you can make different choices.  As we become aware of our reactions we can become observing of these dynamics instead of reactive.

Mourning losses
In order to move beyond wanting your family to change requires mourning the loss of your needs not being met. Keeping stuck in anger and hurt prevents you from mourning.  We have to acknowledge these tragedies in our life to let them go. Often clients have difficulty letting go of anger because it feels like they are letting their family ‘off the hook’.  It is important to realize that your family members are either going to take responsibility or not, and there is nothing that you can do about it. By mourning that your family is not the way you needed them to be, you are acknowledging what happened and allowing yourself to heal.

So many times people come into therapy wanting to know what happens, how does it work? What are we doing in therapy?  I think one of the important things we are doing is encouraging people to have a more intimate relationship with themselves. Without that relationship it is very difficult to make decisions, to create the life we want, to share ourselves and to love others. This relationship involves our whole body. We experience life by what flows through our body. It is not just an intellectual knowing, thinking about I am this or that, but it is taking in the whole of who we are. It is when we experience this flow of emotions, and sensation easily and without being overwhelmed that we feel alive with the richness and complexity of our life.

People who come to see me do not necessarily come in saying that they want a more intimate relationship with themselves. More often it is a result of some crisis where their life is not working in some way and they are in pain, and they want some way of stopping the pain. Understandable, who wants to feel pain? What is ironic is that the more we can experience and therefore build that relationship to ourselves we discover that we can withstand and  recover from anything that life throws at us whether that is rejection, betrayal, loss, humiliation etc. We learn that we have the strength and resilience within us. However if we remain constricted and try to defend against pain we will remain powerless and fearful of life, given that life is painful at times.  So our relationship with ourselves is really crucial to embracing life and becoming more alive. Constriction or expansion, that is the difference between developing a more intimate relationship with ourselves or not.

How is the relationship with the therapist important in this process? Whatever the ‘issue’ is that we are wanting to deal with whether that is depression, anxiety etc, as we begin to examine the dynamics within ourself about this what we find is that our deepest hurts and emotional pain has come from those relationships with significant others, and their  failure to recognize who we are. In other words our feelings, desires, perspective etc  was not important to those around us and we have had to adapt ourselves to deal with this. This adaptation has developed into ‘symptoms’ such as depression, anxiety, relationship difficulties, low self esteem.  So it stands to reason that the relationship with the therapist is going to be important in transforming the emotional pain we carry.

One of the biggest differences in therapy vs other relationships is that the therapist’s focus and attention is on the client. My personal struggles are taken care of elsewhere and do not intrude on or distract me from being present to my clients. This is the basic contract. What this does is give the message that your experience matters and I am going to take that seriously. When this is mirrored back a space is created where the person can relax into their experience and take themselves seriously. In this way the person is encouraged to develop their relationship with themselves and transform the adaptation they have made that keeps them afraid of life. When we think of how the struggles people have are a result of not being taken seriously, we can begin to see how really profound this process is.

Now that doesn’t mean it is easy for people, for a lot of people have great difficulty focusing on their experience and for good reason. The experiences that have caused this constriction are painful and contain fear, as we said before, so as they begin to focus on their internal, physical, emotional self – these experiences are going to get stirred up. So another aspect of the relationship with the therapist that is important in encouraging a relationship to self, is creating safety to experience this in a way that is manageable.  If we are overwhelmed we will just constrict further, and that is not going to be helpful.

We need safety to develop this relationship to ourselves. A way to think about safety is through the experience of an infant as they begin to crawl and walk. This is how we begin our exploration into self by exploring the world and how it feels to us. What is the mother doing ? – well (hopefully) she is paying attention to make sure the child doesn’t go too far and hurt themselves. And she is also not intruding on the child’s experience to prevent the child exploring, because of her own fear. So the creation of safety in therapy is similar by creating a space where you are not going too fast that you become overwhelmed, and not going too slow that nothing happens. Both of which reinforce a fear of life and living. Overprotective mothers do a lot of damage. They prevent the child from developing this experience to themselves, and give the message that the child’s desires are not ok and that the world is a very dangerous place.

One of the most important skills a therapist has in this process is the ability to be really tuned in to what is needed at any given time – and this is more than empathy or listening. It is about sensing into, and being with the other that facilitates a two way communication where the client feels the therapist’s presence and experiences their attention to what is needed.  As the therapist is attuned to her clients then adjustments are made to create this container. Perhaps there is a need for more space around an experience, or a little push to move out of too much comfort and protection.  If there is a sense of being overwhelmed then it is important to take a moment slow it down and put our feet on the ground so we can feel supported before proceeding.  So as this is communicated and processed the person can relax one step at a time into their experience at that moment. Through this they gain confidence to experience life, and deal with what comes their way. We don’t have to restrict our experience in order to survive. 

We are hard wired to feel safe by our connection to others. Relationships are crucial to our ability to feel safe and recover from trauma. When our ability to form relationships and trust others has been compromised, it is difficult to create an experience of feeling safe in the world. The relationship with the therapist is a unique and profound experience that can transform our emotional pain.
 

Throughout my training into working with the body and trauma, I have been challenged to look at some of the ways I had been trained in the past. The most obvious is to do with emotions and emotional release. In the early days I was trained in Gestalt and back then pounding pillows and 'big' emotional releases were a sign of having broken through defences and resolved past unfinished business. So letting out your rage towards the parents you imaged on the pillow (with all the abuse and hatred you could muster), was seen as a 'breakthrough' and 'letting go' of this pain.  I haven't worked with anyone in this way for many years but the notion that we have to have a 'big' cathartic release to be doing our work is still a popular idea.

In my experience this cathartic release was attractive because I could feel something, which was better than the numbness and disconnection I felt most of the time. There was energy running through me and I felt more 'alive', untill the numbness returned. So what would happen was that I would feel a kind of relief that I could feel my emotions, and then shut off again. This going back and forth we now know through the research can be re-traumatizing. Responses to trauma often follow this pattern of being overwhemled and then cutting off.  It can be addictive though to feel the rush of emotions and energy surge.

This is not to say that strong emotions are a 'bad' thing and everyone is different in the amount of tolerance they have before it is overwhelming. Ideally we want to be able to be with our emotions as they flow through us, and keep us connected to ourselves and others. Being connected to our emotions is being human, and one of the dangers of cathartic methods of emotional release is that it can separate emotional experiencing and processing out of our everyday life. After all pounding pillows, and 'big' emotional distress is hard for most people to witness and is re-traumatizing.  So we can end up with a  tempory relief that comes with separating ourselves from others, or feeling out of control of our emotions.  Being overwhelmed reinforces the traumatic patterning in our bodies and does not transform.

So what is the alternative? When I look back on my experience it is not to say it was all a waste of time, I definately have made changes and my life has transformed. However, I do beleive that we are becoming much clearer about how the brain and nervous system works so that we can facilitate a more effective release of emotional pain. With what I know now I believe that I would have got to a confident and calmer way of life sooner. The good news is that you can!

In working Somatically we work with regulation to keep us grounded and in our window of tolerance. Regulation involves many ways in which each of us can stay present and feel safe as we experience and tease apart the emotional pain we are carrying. Some common ways are connection and support with your therapist/others, grounding, soothing and pleasant feelings, images etc.  Regulation is not about stopping the emotion but creating an internal and external support to be with the emotion.We need to honour our need for safety and going at our own pace with compassion and support. The story of the turtle and the hare says it all

I want to share an experience recently of some personal work I was doing that completed and let go of an early trauma. I want to share how powerful working from a mind-body approach can be. I have always been fairly inflexible especially around my hip area. As years have gone by my thigh muscles have become chronically tight. I would stretch them out and it was like an elastic band, they would stretch and then snap back in. This has caused me a lot of pain and discomfort for many years. I had the opportunity to do some work with someone who works from a somatic based psychotherapy approach to working with trauma. It was on a training I am doing in working this way. The legs and arms are important for our survival. Legs carry us and move us away from danger, and these movements are part of our ’survival instincts’. If we are not able to leave then that instinct becomes thwarted and tension will develop. This is one way that trauma will be held in the body.

Dealing with shame

Dealing with shame is a difficult and delicate process. Paradoxically in order to heal our shame we need to expose it. Everyone to some degree experiences shame. When the world fails to fulfill our every desire shame develops as a result of interpersonal disconnection. At these times we are exposed, cut off and separated by the responses to our innocent requests. These responses range from confusion and misunderstanding to anger, judgment and humiliation. This leaves us feeling that what we want is unwelcome and disgusting. We develop a connection to our desires and ultimately ourselves as shameful. As a result of our shame, and in an effort to prevent our self from experiencing the shame, we disown these aspects of ourselves.

Therapy is a process, which turns this around, and we learn that we are not shameful or vile. It is a catch 22 in that we don’t want anyone to really see into our deepest darkest secrets, and at the same time we just want to be ok as we are. The relationship with a therapist or getting close to anyone, can feel terrifying when we anticipate these aspects of our self being seen. Conversely, when we feel the loving acceptance of a therapist it can feel incredibly relieving, and supports us to be who we are.

It is when we feel vulnerable and that we need others that our shame is challenged the most.  A defensive “I can deal with it by myself” is another way to protect oneself from feeling our shame.  We may maintain this position to prevent the possibility of discovering what we fear to be true – that is that I am not ok!

It takes courage to enter into a process that explores inner experiences. It is understandable that if you could maintain control over experiencing difficult emotions such as shame, you would. However, this is likely to continue to create a split between what you present on the outside and what you feel on the inside leaving you with a feeling of disconnection from yourself and others.