What is Differentiation?

There is one skill that comes up in my work with clients over and over again: Differentiation.

In simple terms, differentiation is our ability to stay connected to ourselves while allowing another person to be a separate person from us.

It sounds simple.

It is NOT. :)

Because many of us grew up receiving messages about who we were and what we were responsible for:

• You're too sensitive.
• You're selfish.
• You're responsible for keeping the peace.
• Look what you did to your mother.
• You shouldn't feel that way.
• You're responsible for how I'm feeling.

When messages like these are repeated over time, we can become hooked into roles and responsibilities that were never actually ours to carry.

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Part of differentiation is learning to unhook from what isn't ours.

This is the boundary work many of us are more familiar with.

Externally, that might mean:

• Communicating a need.
• Setting an emotional, physical, intellectual, or spiritual boundary.
• Sharing a different opinion.
• Saying no.
• Naming what is and isn't okay with us.

But there's also a tremendous amount of internal boundary work involved.

We may need to unhook from:

• Other people's expectations of us.
• Blame that doesn't belong to us.
• Old family narratives about who we're supposed to be.
• The belief that someone else's emotional experience is automatically ours to fix.

But differentiation also asks us to look at what WE put onto other people.

This is the other side of the work—and honestly, sometimes the harder one.

Because just as other people can project their expectations, emotions, and narratives onto us...we can do the exact same thing to them.

We feel hurt and immediately want to figure out who is to blame.

We feel like a boundary was violated … but realize we never actually communicated the boundary.

We feel disappointed that someone didn't behave the way we hoped they would, and decide they did something wrong.

Or an old wound gets activated and we begin responding to the person in front of us as though they're the person who originally hurt us.

Differentiation asks us to pause and ask:

• What is actually mine to own here?
• And what genuinely belongs to you?

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This is why responsible communication is such an important part of differentiation.

Unless someone has broken a clearly communicated agreement, crossed an established boundary, or is behaving in an overtly disrespectful or harmful way, there may not actually be a person who needs to be made "wrong."

Sometimes there are simply two different people having two different experiences.

This is where the roots of Nonviolent Communication have been incredibly influential in my work.

Can I communicate:

• What's true for me.
• What I'm feeling.
• What I need.
• What my boundaries are.

Without requiring you to become wrong in order for my experience to be valid?

And can I also respect that you have your own feelings, needs, boundaries, history, and way of seeing things?

That balance between SELF and OTHER is the heart of differentiation.

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And you can't imagine how difficult this is for most of us.

Differentiation asks us to do both: Stop carrying what was never ours to carry .. AND .. Take greater responsibility for what actually IS ours.

The more we can do that, the more empowered we become in our own experience—without taking away someone else's right to theirs.

We can advocate for ourselves while still allowing the people we love to feel seen, respected, and valued for who they actually are.

To me, that's some of the deepest work of relationships.

With warmth,
Silvy