(Fearless) No actually by definition differentiation is MORE caring and feeling than enmeshment!! That's because we are not USING the other person for our sense of identity, etc. instead we are caring and feeling for a person because...
...of who they are and not for whatever it is we want them to do for us.
...detachment is part of fusing and enmeshment and NOT part of differentiation. if you are differentiated, you don't have to detach.
Exactly.
(Cobra) If we are talking theory, then I don’t buy this, because theoretically it should be possible to completely know a person. All you need to do is ask, and all the other needs to do is answer. I see no reason why it should theoretically be unhealthy. As a practical matter, well, that’s another thing.
Quote:
The dawning of loneliness is a very strange time in a relationship. Sometimes it is a sign that something is clearly wrong, and that action must be taken to set things back on course. But this is not always the case. It is one of the age-old truths about love that, while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, at the same time it washes us up on the shores of the loved one's otherness. ...
Most psychological experts counsel a certain level of resignation in the face of this disappointment. Some desires, like the one for total intimacy, can never be met, the experts remind us. Freud was notorious in his promulgation of the "reality principle," in which insistent demands for pleasure have to give way to the truth of limitation and restriction. he saw the task of therapy as helping people move from a place of neurotic misery to one of common unhappiness, and, for him, that was movement enough. One psychoanalyst who has contemplated the contradictory nature of love, however, has come up with a more hopeful formulation. "Love," wrote Otto Kernberg, who has devoted the better part of his long career to the study of intimate human relations, "is the revelation of the other person's freedom."
--Mark Epstein, M.D. in Open to Desire
From another place in the same book:
"I have no trouble understanding the idea of non-attachment in meditation," the questioner said, "but when it comes to my marriage and family, I don't get it. Why is non-attachment even a positive thing to aspire to?" Attachment, even desire, seemed to teh questioner like something to be supported in the interpersonal realm, no something to be overcome.
Stephen motioned to his wife, Martine, who was just coming into the room. "My wife says it is like holding a coin," he said, and he held out one arm with his palm up and his fist closed. "We can hold it like this," and he emphasized the closed nature of his fist, "or we can hold it like this," and he opened his hand to show the coin sitting in the center of his palm. "The closed fist is like clinging," he said. "But with my hand open, I still hold the coin."
Stop WaitingFeel EverythingLove AchinglyGive ImpeccablyLet Go
