Category: Relationships

Self-awareness is great, but without changes in behaviour it doesn’t do much for a relationship. On my facebook page I recently asked “How have you changed your behaviour to improve your relationship?”

Here are three of the insightful real-life examples readers generously shared, with a few comments of my own:

“I let go of the notion that my partner must agree with me.”

“I have let go of the notion that my partner must agree with me on most issues. That has freed up a lot of energy that would otherwise have been wasted fighting over what are essentially meaningless points. I have found that my respect for her has grown, and I hope the reverse is also true.”

Finding ways to manage differences and “agree to disagree” in relationships really does free up a lot of energy, and the part about increased respect matches my observations: when couples are able to respect differences, the overall respect for each other grows.

“The sacred pause…”

“The biggest change I implemented in my behaviour is the ‘sacred pause’. This allowed me space to then look at his words/reactions with curiosity instead of reactivity.”

This is such a powerful change in behaviour, and I was curious about how it had affected interactions and outcomes in the relationship. Her answer below is a perfect example of growing out of emotional fusion and into emotional differentiation, a crucial developmental stage of relationships.

“It is still a new behaviour in a middle aged woman who spent her life in reactivity so I am not 100% with it yet, but when I am successful it means that I can either hear the actual words my husband says and/or notice that whatever energy or words that may have traditionally felt like an attack on my worthiness are either not about me at all or I can now respond thoughtfully to the interaction. My pattern was definitely to take any perceived slight or any negative energy and attack, even if the interaction had nothing to do with me. If there was negativity of any kind attached to my husband I did not feel safe and I attacked him verbally. It was very humbling for me the first few times I was successful at being able to separate myself from his energy.”

The third commenter had been working with the differences between self-regulation and co-regulation (such an important area of understanding and practice).

“I learned to shift into more self-regulation.”

“I found some awareness about myself in your article about self-regulation and co-regulation. I recognized that I used co-regulation as a tool to get out of my own discomfort and create enmeshment. I learned to shift into more self-regulation. I directly noticed a decline in the drama of our relationship.”

That got me wondering if they had experienced any loss in feelings of intimacy or closeness as a result of decreased drama (drama is often part of “the glue” in relationships, for better and for worse), so I asked.

“Some yes. When I became more solid in myself, the space between us became greater. The drama fed the tension, which fed the excitement. With less drama, the lack of a more solid connection showed. I did, and do, feel more intimate with my own self, a big win for me.”

Intimacy with one’s self is always a big win, and perhaps the best possible foundation for any relationship.

Changing behaviours in a relationship is always a matter of “catching yourself in the act” of unconscious, reflexive, habitual responses to stimuli and choosing something different in the moment. With practice and repetition new habits are formed.

How have you changed your behaviour to improve your relationship? Share your real-life examples in the comments.

All My Best,
Justice

Struggling to change harmful behaviors in your relationship? Check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples worldwide on the issues that make or break relationships. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

Interdependence in relationships – How do we get there from here?

It’s easy to be an advocate for the virtue of interdependence in relationships. You give some, you take some, you can count on each other… what’s not to love.

The word itself has a distinctly modern ring (it peaked in popularity around 1980 and is still going strong), implying a kind of balance that many of us today crave, and reflecting the non-hierarchical ideal so popular in these times.

Interdependence is indeed an apt descriptor for relationships that are resilient, balanced, and mutually enjoyable and supportive for the people in them, and interdependence is a worthy vision and a worthy goal. But how to get there? Do you just decide “From now on I’m going to have an interdependent relationship!”?

Likely not. If interdependence is to thrive in a relationship, first the stages of both dependence and independence will probably have to be sufficiently navigated.

Interdependence comes after dependence and independence

Interdependence in relationships isn’t really a choice, it’s a developmental milestone, a marker of maturity. You don’t just one day choose to be interdependent in relationship (though your choices in general will factor), you grow into being interdependent in relationship.

To grow into a state of relationship interdependence there are, for most of us, prerequisites. One of these prerequisites is experiencing a sufficient amount of dependence in relationships. The other prerequisite is experiencing sufficient independence in a relationship. Now, if you’re a born relationship genius, a Mozart of the interpersonal realm, maybe you can skip these steps, but the rest of us are more or less bound to a certain developmental path.

Interdependence isn’t some mid-ground between being dependent and being independent; it’s a whole different level, one that is potentially reached after accomplishing the tasks at the prior (lower) levels of dependence and independence.

Dependence and independence are both negative and positive

All of us begin our life journey completely dependent on our mother (or a sufficient surrogate). In this sense dependence comes naturally. At some point we grow toward independence; we begin to recognize ourselves as separate from mother. Depending on how we come to understand our experiences, dependence and independence have negative, positive or ambivalent connotations in our life, and we bring these into our intimate adult relationships.

It is in our adult relationships that we work through our issues (most of us have them) around dependence and independence. Hopefully we learn healthy modes of both: how to lean on our partner, have them lean on us, and also how to stand on our own two feet, and allow our partner to do the same. There are healthy and necessary aspects to both modes of being in relationship.

Independence, dependence, or both?

It’s not uncommon to have strong negative associations with dependence or independence or both. Both have a dark side and a light side. Dependency can include generosity, support, and understanding. It can also include manipulation, smothering, and powerlessness. Independence can include self confidence, emotional differentiation, and freedom. It can also include isolation, disconnection, and arrogance.

Put another way, most of us have a complicated relationship with either (or both) dependence or independence. We have to reconcile ourselves with both before we can proceed to the next level.

Some of the positive qualities we can learn through dependence include –

• Trust
• Receiving
• Generosity
• Intimacy
• Co-regulation

Some of the positive qualities we can learn through independence include –

• Personal responsibility
• Boundaries
• Accountability
• Appreciation for solitude
• Self-regulation

The level of interdependence we can achieve in our relationship hinges upon how well we have integrated the best of both dependence AND independence, and how we have reconciled ourselves with our negative experiences of both. If you want to move toward greater interdependence, take an inventory of your skills in the areas of dependence and independence. Identify the gaps, work on them, and you will be working toward interdependence.

To learn more about interdependence in relationships check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

Do you have something to say about this topic? Leave a comment below.

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples worldwide on the issues that make or break relationships. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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Differentiation is not distancing

Most couples therapy in North America today prioritizes attachment, partner soothing, other-validation, and empathizing techniques, and so people are sometimes surprised when I talk about the need for differentiation in relationships.

To the uninitiated, differentiation is often confused with distancing, but it actually makes the opposite possible: In order to remain in close proximity to others (especially our primary partner) when emotions are running high, we must have achieved a certain level of emotional differentiation. Differentiation is what allows us to remain close to others in emotionally turbulent times.

If we have not yet achieved a sufficient level of emotional differentiation one of two things will happen when we are faced with a partner’s emotional volatility –

We withdraw. Without sufficient differentiation our nervous system can not handle our partner’s strong emotional experience, and so our body sends us a visceral message: Retreat!

or

We become enmeshed. We lose hold of our own emotional equilibrium as an individual and we merge emotionally with our partner. We can no longer differentiate between their emotions and our own emotions. We become a single emotional unit.

Withdrawing, distancing, or avoidance is sometimes mistakenly associated with differentiation because these behaviors appear to be the opposite of enmeshment, but withdrawing (distancing, avoidance) is generally a symptom of too little emotional differentiation rather than too much.

Enmeshment and co-dependency: The dark side of empathy

Emotional enmeshment (commonly called co-dependency) is often conflated with empathy. Actually, co-dependency IS a form of empathy, it’s just not a very favourable form of empathy. Empathy, often touted as the cure-all in couples therapy, has a dark side too; without emotional boundaries (differentiation) empathy devolves into co-dependent feelings and behaviours.

Dependence, Independence, Interdependence

Another way to understand differentiation is in terms of dependence, independence, and interdependence in relationships.

Long term relationships move through a set of predictable stages: dependence gives way to independence, independence gives way to interdependence. These are developmental stages that we all must navigate in sequence. They mirror the developmental stages of infancy and adolescence. In early life we are enmeshed with the mother (dependency). Slowly we develop our independence, sometimes as a reflexive action or protest against our dependency (think teenage rebellion). Eventually, if we do our personal work, we arrive at interdependence.

Flexibility is the key to interdependence in relationships: The people involved are strongly rooted in their own emotional autonomy AND they are able to meet each other empathetically. They can show up for each other emotionally without being blown away or drawn into the other’s emotional storm.

Differentiation and desire

In relationships characterized by interdependence and high levels of emotional differentiation the need for either enmeshment or distance has been effectively resolved, and the way is now paved for desire to flourish. The issue of desire is an interesting sidebar to the idea of differentiation –

Low levels of emotional differentiation are associated with neediness in relationships.

High levels of emotional differentiation are associated with desire in relationships.

Neediness preempts desire. There is generally not room for both. We don’t get to experience much real desire until we have sufficiently attended to our neediness. I’m not talking exclusively about sexual desire here (though that is definitely a part of the picture); I’m talking about knowing what you want as distinct from what you need. The difference is profound, and profoundly confusing for those who have little direct experience with emotional differentiation.

Need Vs. Want

Something I see again and again with client couples is that people who lean heavily toward the enmeshed end of the spectrum think mostly in terms of getting needs met, and do not know how to respond when asked for specifics about what they want or desire.

I recently suggested on my facebook page that “Sometimes our most difficult relationship issues boil down to a personal ability to say yes and no and to feel solid in either. This simple-sounding thing causes lifetimes of distress.” What I am speaking to here is the presence or absence of emotional differentiation.

Without sufficient differentiation we are not connected to what we truly want, to our genuine desires. In our enmeshment with our partner, we are always playing a guessing game, trying to manipulate outcomes to get our needs met, and so we are never able to stand solidly in what we are a YES to and what we are a NO to. A solid yes and a solid no are rooted in knowing what we WANT, and that want gets obscured when we are scrambling to get what we believe we need.

About the image at the top of the page

The image at the top of the page in some ways exemplifies what we are talking about here. In order to strengthen the connection between the ideas in the image and the ideas in this article we might add a developmental lens, ie – in the first quadrant (upper left) we could say that yes, our boundary is breached, but it’s also quite likely that we haven’t yet developed the differentiation boundary. Differentiation is of course a boundary, a very important and particular kind of boundary.

The next image is captioned “Rediscover Boundaries”, but it’s quite possible that differentiation boundaries have not yet been developed, so for our purposes we could also say this is about developing or discovering boundaries for the first time.

In the final image (lower right quadrant) we see a visual example of differentiation in action.

[Note – I do not know who created this image and so unfortunately I can not provide attribution.]

To learn more about differentiation and enmeshment in relationships, read my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples.

Do you have something to say about this topic? Leave a comment below.

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counseling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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