Individuation and differentiation is a big part of what comes up in my work with people. Finding our own edges, learning where we begin and end, and learning how to hold on to who we are in the face of other people’s feelings or demands of who they would like us to be.

Much of the work is about learning to hold our own shape, and learning that it is indeed safe to be exactly who we are.

Safe to be who we are, of course, not including asshole behaviour or things that tread on the autonomy and separateness of another. Barring those, we get to be who we are, own our inner experience and needs and wants and limits, and simultaneously not demand that someone else shift or adjust to make us feel relief. So. We can be who we are. And we can let other people be who they are. Then the work becomes figuring out how to pendulate between separateness and connection from that space of differentiation.

Lots of my work with folks over the last decade and a half has centered around growing the capacity to be safe within ourselves. Learning that aloneness or separateness is not necessarily dangerous. Learning how to feel like we’ve got ourselves, that we’re paying attention to our inner experience, and that we will show up and attune to our needs and be self-responsible adults. 

And.

There’s always an and. Again and again in the work of navigating sometimes the really early, often younger terror of aloneness – we also confront a deep and sometimes wordless need for connection. For togetherness. For withness.

And there is something I’ve been slowing into more and more as we dance around what it means to be separate and safe, as we work through the panic and angst that sometimes accompanies aloneness.

There is a paradox perhaps? I think that’s the right word. We do need to feel safe enough in our own skin. To know that we even have our own skin and not need to borrow another’s to feel safe enough in this life. Yes. Sometimes the anxiety of not having the attachment we needed can create ways of coping that don’t serve us well in friendship or partnership. So we want to support growing in this area.

And yet our hyper individualistic Western worldview that would rather us outsource community to apps, that prizes self sufficiency over interdependence, and has slowly dismantled needing each other in our day to day lives, this is such a far cry from how things are supposed to be. A far cry from how we thrive.

And so the deep longing for connection that shows up in the work, looked at only through a western hyper-individualistic lens might appear to simply be early attachment wounding. And sometimes it is, and those wounds need tending. But sometimes I wonder if this longing could also be an intuitive echo of what once was and could be again – a holding of our separateness within the context of interdependent communities.

Our bodies hold the memory of what we needed and did not receive, and I think they hold the wisdom of what is still needed now. There’s room for both. Connection doesn’t need to mean being swallowed up or lost in another, and aloneness isn’t the goal. Safe enoughness to be ourselves in both postures, perhaps is what we’re looking for. If separateness (or individuation or differentiation – choose your word) and connection were plotted on one of those quadrant graph things, I think our current culture would be high differentiation/low connection plot on that chart, when I think maybe what is more lofty (dare I say healthy) of a goal is to keep the differentiation, but work at getting the interconnectedness point bumped way up. Our separateness can be a gift to our connection, but separatness without connection leaves much to be desired.

Grateful to be invited to think bigger than the culture we’re immersed in, and to be reminded that togetherness is at the heart of what it means to be human.