How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 101

1. Differentiation of Self
The first concept is Differentiation of Self, or the ability to separate feelings and thoughts.
Undifferentiated people can not separate feelings and thoughts; when asked to think, they are flooded with
feelings, and have difficulty thinking logically and basing their responses on that. Further, they have
difficulty separating their own from other's feelings; they look to family to define how they think about
issues, feel about people, and interpret their experiences.
Differentiation is the process of freeing yourself from your family's processes to define yourself. This
means being able to have different opinions and values than your family members, but being able to stay
emotionally connected to them. It means being able to calmly reflect on a conflicted interaction afterward,
realizing your own role in it, and then choosing a different response for the future.
Families and other social groups tremendously affect how people think, feel, and act, but individuals vary in
their susceptibility to a "group think" and groups vary in the amount of pressure they exert for conformity.
These differences between individuals and between groups reflect differences in people's levels of
differentiation of self. F