I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
American psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry Murray Bowen proposed that the goal of personal development is self-differentiation, in which you set apart and detach yourself from the opinions and pressures you face from other people, especially your family members. Differentiation allows you to balance two core human needs: autonomy (individuality) and connection (togetherness).
In Bowen’s view, a well-differentiated person can stay connected to loved ones (a partner, family, friends) without losing themselves in emotional fusion or overreacting to conflict and stress.
I came across Bowen’s ideas in Peter Kramer’s book Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy–and the Nature of Advice. I am not thinking of leaving my current relationship, but I own the hardback as well as the Kindle version of this book, and I started re-reading it a couple days ago. I remembered that I had found Kramer’s ideas enlightening and unusual.
Kramer feels hesitant to offer advice, but partway through the book he does so, based on the idea that, within a relationship, a person can improve it by pursuing differentiation.1
Here are Kramer’s precepts for improving a relationship based on increasing your own self-differentiation, pulled from the book and paraphrased:
- Where you are is probably not far from where you ought to be (the principle of matched differentiation). You have chosen someone as a partner who is at roughly your same level of emotional and psychological development.
- Focus on differentiation, that is, how well you live as yourself despite pressures to live according to how people around you expect. And support your partner’s differentiation, that is, their ability to live as themselves not exactly as you, or other people, want them to live.
- Corollary: If you want anything to change in the relationship, the logical target is your own level of differentiation, not your partner’s.
- Differentiation occurs within relationships, not solo. Your best opportunity at change–at development, that is, not becoming different but becoming better–lies in staying in your current relationship not jumping to another one. “It is the complexity, the impossibility, the dullness or painfulness of the current imperfect relationship that provides the context for change.
- Change enough. Small marginal changes aren’t going to improve the relationship. Seek marked and persistent change. Work on change with tenacity. E.g., work to enjoy what you disdain in your partner. Or moderate your tendency to give compulsively.
- Change yourself first. You’re not going to improve your relationship by insisting that the other change. You are your best target of change. Your partner is not.
- Expect discomfort. What you will do to change will not feel natural or comfortable. You may need to exaggerate the change far beyond what you think is reasonable or necessary. Still, choose it freely, without any compulsion.
- Expect a response. Though it may not be the response you expect. Your partner may change in unpleasant ways or may leave you. Or they may change in ways you like.
- Be self-centered. Invest in your own development, with the aim of differentiation. Seek to maximize your own gain. Just like pursuing self-interest in a capitalist economy was said by Adam Smith to promote payoffs for everyone, so it does in a relationship.
I find these interesting principles to ponder, not so much for the book I’m writing right now, which focuses on finding a partner and the initial establishment of a relationship, but for the second book I’m planning, that will focus on building or renovating a relationship.
- However, before getting to this Bowen-inspired advice, he first questions whether differentiation is the proper target for self-improvement. He discusses the idea that perhaps connection and affiliation and mutuality are as or more important than differentiation. ↩︎