Psychology in Seattle.

Hello and welcome to Psychology in Seattle.

I'm your host, Kirk Honda Licensed therapist.

I'm Mandy, Kirk's cousin.

And I'm Roberto Kachenia. I'm a campaign therapist. I'm Mandy Kirk's cousin. And I'm Roberto Kastignia. I'm a campaign manager for Republican

candidates. Hmm, all of them? One in particular. Please like us on Facebook, please subscribe to us on iTunes

iTunes and please email us at contact at psychology in

Seattle.com that's contact at psychology in Seattle.com we always always love hearing from our listeners. Today's

episode is about differentiation which is a concept developed by Murray Bowen

who is considered by some to be the grandfather of family therapy. He developed his theory in the, I'm guessing, 50s and 60s,

so it goes kind of far back. It's something that I talk about with my students and I thought I would share it here on the podcast.

Basically in a nutshell, differentiation refers to a number of things.

The first thing it refers to is your differentiation level between you and other people, so how much individuality you have and how much togetherness you have.

And Boeing considered it to be more healthy to be able to differentiate yourself from other people than to be merged or fused with other people.

Incidentally, I believe he came from an enmeshed family, a very fused family where there was a lot of interaction and a lot of emotional reactivity and everyone was in each other's business and everything and he actually he actually wrote an entire paper on how he used himself and his family in an

experiment to try to differentiate himself from his family. Someone died in the

family and he went home for a funeral and he did all these

experimentation to try to rework the relationships in his family and he believed that

he came out of that experience more differentiated and therefore more healthy so differentiation more he saw highly unhealthy individuals as having difficulty differentiating their own thoughts

and feelings from other people's thoughts and feelings.

So if someone was very angry or upset at something outside of them like their father is angry at their

co-worker. The child might have difficulty differentiating their father's

...