Another example often used to clarity the difference between content and process is arguing. The process of arguing is the way you engage with someone when you disagree. You can discuss calmly, raise your voice, shake your fist, cite copious references or cry. There are healthy disagreement processes (adversarial collaboration) and unhealthy ones (stonewalling or lying.) The content is what you are disagreeing about – chores, parenting, money, politics.

Process is the how and content is the what. We are now going to use the process of orthogonal reckoning to explore the four content areas that support differentiation.

Four content areas

There are four content areas that we need to understand if we want to maintain a differentiated stance as we move through our days. We can consider these content areas existential pillars that support our ability to reach full adulthood. They are: ego strength, emotional basecamp, will to power and mastery. Once these four psychological constructs (the content) are in place we will be able to maintain a differentiated approach to the decisions we make in our minute-to-minute lives (a mature choosing process). You’ve probably spotted the existential truth in that previous sentence. Because the decisions we make in our minute-to-minute lives create our lives, if we cannot routinely be differentiated adults, the randomness of each little decision will hamper our forward progress toward the life we were designed to live. We will wander through our days rather than stride out.

Here, then, is a good place for me to make my usual plug for the need to attend to the existential concerns underlying each of the orthogonal relationships that create the four pillars.

Existential truths are important to understand because without a clear understanding of them we tend to avoid thinking about them. If we don’t think about them, we will float on the surface of our lives. We humans are already very vulnerable to the whims of Fate and to pressure from many layers of interpersonal influence, so it makes no sense to increase our vulnerability with unanchored lives. Each of these four components of differentiation anchors us in a distinct way to what’s best in humans, giving us just a little more access to and confidence in the decision-making process. It is also true that these four stellar aspects of being human need constant maintenance. There’s no doubt that it will take some effort to understand, implement and maintain each of the four content areas. But facing difficult tasks is far more satisfying than drifting along not knowing what to do with our life. Being lost is worse than being challenged. It turns out that people are not overwhelmed when exposed to existential truths. Rather, they are reassured that what they sensed was true, is true – that life is difficult for humans which is why they often struggle. When we can add some existentially powerful strategies to that reassuring truth, we ease some of the angst that percolates under the surface of every life. Sound good? Read on!

As you probably suspected, each of the four content areas represents an orthogonal relationship between two opposing character strengths. Now that we have our handy dandy process of orthogonal reckoning, we can use that to identify and integrate the underlying components of each existential pillar.

1. Ego strength

Ego strength is a function of the belief that our sense of self is a good size, a good shape, based on sound data and is well protected. We believe that we are in the right place at the right time with the right stuff to “do our own thing.”

Most of us know intuitively when our life feels like it’s a good size. Our days are filled with challenges and rewards that suit our age, experience, training, aspirations, etc. We feel satisfaction when we fill in the blank in this sentence: I am ________. We may want more in our future, but, currently, we are fulfilling many of our ambitions, and the world seems happy to allow us this degree of contentment.

Often less clear is whether or not our life is the right shape. Many cultures encourage us to be a nice, big shape, but only if we are doing what we have been told to do. But being the right shape means living a life that you alone designed, one that fits your unique talents, hopes and hungers. Few cultures do a good job of supporting people as they navigate the twisted and narrow path of self-exploration. The entirety of Section III explores the problems inherent in trying to design a life for yourself that you would be happy to live all over again.

It can be difficult to determine if our belief in ourselves is based on accurate data or not. Fate and its fickleness can reward all of us in the wrong way for the wrong reasons, leaving us confused about our sense of self. I think it’s best to take the feedback from our world and filter it through our prevailing biochemical state. (Ha, ha, ha. Another Iversen-left-turn-at-Albuquerque.) What I mean is this: when we are doing the things that we are truly designed to do and doing them well, our biochemical state tends to be stable and positive. Our mood is optimistic, energized and patient. This lovely state of affairs will exist as we move through our days and also at 2 a.m. when we are alone with our raw thoughts. So, if you’re basically sleeping well and feeling good about things, chances are that your ego is based on sound data. But, again, a read through Section III will help you reinforce your confidence.

A well-protected ego is one that needn’t fear devastation if thwarted by other people or shipwrecked by Fate. Protecting our ego is akin to using semi-exposed rocks to cross a creek. There are things that can keep us dry (confidence, coordination, practice and so on,) but we are all one well-disguised, tippy stone away from ending up in the drink. Section IV outlines the many skills that can up our resilience in order to buffer us from the ill-effects of both Fate and other folks.

Each component of ego strength is created and maintained at the boundary between us and the world. We need to be able to balance the size, shape, accuracy and safety of ourselves against the pressures and distortions coming at us from the outside world. As always when we seek to embody a psychological attribute such as ego strength, we want to be able to stand on two legs. The two legs that support ego strength are narcissism and empathy. Let me be quick to remind you that narcissism isn’t a negative characteristic and empathy isn’t always a positive one. Both narcissism and empathy can be problematic if not counterbalanced. When conjoined within a person, however, these two human characteristics show up in healthy and constructive ways at that boundary between ourselves and our world.

Our narcissism pushes us from within to seek out the biggest and richest environment for growing a solid sense of self. It constantly sends out tendrils of wanting to see if more of what seems tasty to us can be had. If the answer is “yes,” we work to expand our lives into this new space. Healthy narcissism reflects our ability to build a strong internal identity by integrating into our consideration what it means to us to be the human being we wish to be. This narcissistic dreaming is at its strongest when free from shame, nay sayers, the needs of others, Fate and so on. That is why our ego needs that sacred space created by narcissism bound to empathy. We all need to take narcissistic dreaming seriously enough to protect it because these dreams are the tiny seeds that can grow into a lush and vibrant existence.

Empathy prevents us from trying to make our ego too big too soon, a poorly chosen shape or to allow it to expand at the expense of others. This is what keeps us safe – by not setting ourselves up for disaster or precipitating hostility. We protect ourselves by not getting out over our skis, by not trying to master something we are not designed to learn or by not invading the ego territory of another. In other words, we push our boundaries out only until we bump into something. What alerts us to a boundary problem is discomforting information coming from the rest of the world. If we are trying for too much at this time, for something that isn’t right for us or for something that intrudes on someone else, we will hear about it.

Empathy allows us to hear and acknowledge what is going on at the boundary. It enables us to turn our perspective around and look at things from the other side of the boundary. But receiving pushback doesn’t mean we need to instantly acquiesce. Reminiscent of the skills underlying a healthy defense system, ego strength allows us to individually determine the ratio of influence between outside input and the intentional self. It moves us beyond simply controlling how much information gets through from the world (a healthy defense system) and into using the inner processing centers in our minds to sort through the information (orthogonal reckoning). We use narcissism and empathy together to synergize the incoming data. We can do this because our respect for our narcissism helps us recognize the validity of another person’s narcissism, meaning that our empathic sense can start from a place of respect for the existential position of the other person. Our empathic skills allow us to trust that our growing narcissism will behave itself at a boundary. Because we know we will be careful when we bump into something, we can therefore throw a lot of energy into filling out our sense of self.

Ego strength is the mechanism that establishes our sacred space in the existential world. When done with an empathic braking system, the narcissistic demarcation of our boundaries can create for us an oasis in the chaos of humanity within which we can work out our design process. The existential component, narcissistic dreaming (what we wish to be), reflects our unique, nascent hunger that initiates a throughline connecting the four pillars underlying differentiation. What is germinated by this first pillar, in other words, sets the stage for what is to come.

2. Emotional basecamp

If humans are at their best when they can move out to explore their world knowing they have a safe haven to return to, then we all ought to learn how to create that safe haven for ourselves. What creates an emotional basecamp for each of us is the balance between attachment fostered by empathy, and autonomy fostered by narcissism. Humans have two forms of refuge – within a community and within our heads. We create the first through our attachment behaviors and the second through our sense of autonomy.

As straightforward as that last paragraph may seem, it will be surprisingly difficult to achieve because the patriarchy splits narcissism/autonomy apart from empathy/attachment, elevating narcissism/autonomy and sending them into the domain of men; and diminishing empathy/attachment and sending them into the domain of women.

We arrive now at what is the most pernicious hierarchical split plaguing humankind: the specific hierarchy of difference that pits how men regard the world of commitment to relationship against how women regard it. Privileging narcissistically supported autonomy over empathically supported attachment creates the greatest distance between the sexes, causes the most substantial dissatisfaction between men and women, and perpetuates the loneliness/depletion gender divide. It also sets the world of work against the world of love.

Built upon the solid rock of intrinsic but slight sex differences between men and women, the ranking of the commitment dichotomy has roots that cling to a masculinist narrative that no longer serves humankind. The toxicity for both men and women rests not in the difference between narcissistically supported autonomy and empathically supported attachment, but in the hierarchy. The detoxification, therefore, rests in eliminating the hierarchy not the use of either strategy.

When the dominant culture exalts men’s ways of being and disparages women’s ways with respect to committing to partnering equally in relationships, everyone suffers. We need to sensitize men to the need to sincerely value committing to putting work into relationships. We need to alert women to the need to bravely up their commitment to autonomous actions.

That brings us to the heart of feminist thought – concern with who is underwriting the cost of interpersonal relationships.

Here, then, is a good place for me to make my usual plug for the need to attend to the feminist concerns underlying this crucial pillar. Women have for far too long built and maintained the emotional basecamps for their menfolk. This should no longer be acceptable. In order to strengthen my case for what humans need to do about this dilemma, I’m going to exaggerate the gender divide between men and women, and I’m going to attach different solutions to each gender. Of course I believe that people of all stripes need to learn all these interpersonal skills.

Commitment to attachment: There can be no argument that humans need humans. It follows that social relationships are nonnegotiable in the pursuit of human flourishing. While everyone might nod in agreement about how people need people, there is little agreement about how one goes about creating intimacy. Men approach relationships from the narcissistic, autonomous end of the continuum while women approach from the empathic, attachment side.

So, what happens when you situate the masculine culture of narcissistically-driven autonomy next to the feminine culture of empathically-driven caring? Autonomy can always trump caring. Whoever is less invested in a relationship always dominates simply because, with less emotional connection, they have less investment to lose. And often with greater financial flexibility, they can much more easily shut down emotionally and/or walk away. Men, due to their inherent and developed sense of autonomy, can put very little into creating community while benefitting the most from it. As a result, autonomous men can control caring women, even when they don’t mean to. What we end up with here is bullying.

It is important to note that there are two kinds of bullies: intentional – mean people who enjoy pushing their weight around; and inadvertent – bullies who will sloppily take advantage of others by ignoring their privileged status. There is no point in addressing the former because intentional bullies willingly use violence to reinforce their position, meaning they are impervious to appeals to change. Cruel thuggery can only be curtailed by an overwhelming opponent such as a faster gunslinger (Wild Bill Hickok), a functioning legal system (RICO) or a mass uprising of concerned citizens (the Civil Rights Movement). The bulling behavior we are addressing here is the inadvertent type.

We have to assume that most men do not want to be bullies. It is, however, very difficult to let go of an advantage that you’ve become accustomed to, that all your peers are indulging in and that no one is fussing too much about. It is also true that the form that inadvertent bullying takes is generally the absence of sound attachment behaviors, and omissions are tricky to spot. Men fail to recognize that there are important behaviors they are neglecting to do.

Men can’t give away their physical power or their perhaps greater comfort with autonomy. But they can choose to be in integrity with respect to commitment to commitment by proactively learning the skills needed to fully participate in the creation of community. Right?

Very specifically, we are calling upon men to learn to the point of mastery the three most basic interpersonal skills: careful listening, expressed empathy and effective stipulation. The importance of these skills cannot be overstated. Unless and until men master them, they can only continue to be interpersonal bullies. The concept of weaponized incompetence is germane here. Men need to understand that they tend to be very bad at all three of these skills and that only by learning to do them very well will they help end the logrolling relationship between men and women. A man high in integrity will – right at this moment – go to read the articles in Section V that cover these three skills.

Commitment to autonomy: There are two steps women need to take to do their part in abolishing the hierarchy of narcissism/autonomy over empathy/attachment. First, they need to completely eliminate any shame over their intense commitment to commitment. And second, they need to power up their autonomy-based behaviors in order to hold the patriarchy accountable for its hierarchical thinking and subsequent bullying (aka misogyny).

I hope I don’t need to explain to anyone how shamed women are for their attachment to attachment. Everywhere you turn someone is ridiculing women for caring. It makes me crabby just trying to think of examples, so I’m going to trust you to think up your own. Suffice it to say here, women are made to feel less than because they care more.

Women can’t achieve physical equality with men, so they need tremendous courage to hold onto their entitlement around commitment to commitment in the face of men’s strength and autonomy. It is helpful if women realize that, where there is an inadvertent bully, there is a hierarchy based on a bluff. The bluff here is that the world of community would exist without women’s attachment skills. I think we can all agree that this is not true. The bitter irony here is that women care more about and for relationships, know more about them and pour more emotional energy into them but are less secure and resourced by them. Mother’s Day notwithstanding, the patriarchy isn’t going to suddenly stop with the minimizing, ridiculing and all around ignoring the value of the contributions women make to establish the communities that provide the emotional base camp for so many. Women have to simply decide to no longer accept the shame. Every time they are exposed to one of those annoying examples of male disregard for emotional connections, women need to up their narcissism in order to reject the indictment.

Nowhere is this disregard more tragic than in this truth: neither men nor women are aware of the fact that it is women who generate and donate the majority of the energy that powers the interpersonal world. I’m talking actual energy here. This naïveté is beyond tragic. Once women become aware of this incredible power they have (as outlined in the introduction to Section V), they can engage their narcissistic verve (their pride in themselves) to start enhancing their autonomy. Specifically, women need to bolster their ability and willingness to speak out and influence the behavior of others even when that may negatively affect a relationship.

The three needed relational skills are those that keep an attachment in check by setting limits on the outside world. Without the capacity to establish boundaries, a woman remains vulnerable to intrusions that can range from irritating psychological violations to horrific physical abuse and, yes, still-too-common-to-believe, death. But equally crucial, without the capacity to set firm boundaries, a woman will simply not have sufficient room to enact her signature strengths – to exert her will to power in order to invent herself.

You will see that these skills are all precluded by the act of pulling focus away from supporting others and focusing, instead, on supporting herself. We are back to the trope of putting your oxygen mask on before you care for others. To expand on that trope, while men need to learn to be curious about why others are suffocating, women need to be curious about why they, themselves, cannot breathe.

1. Speak up. For most women, the first step toward autonomy requires that they find their voice. It can be difficult for high attachment women to speak out when men are in the room. They are not wrong to fear dismissal, ridicule or retribution if they speak out, but women need to learn to hold the floor when they believe their words are valuable. This doesn’t have to involve a soapbox move. It can take the form of pulling someone aside to explain privately your position, writing an opinion in a letter to the editor, or organizing other women to join in expressing feminist concerns. But the more women learn to speak up in the room where it happens, the better. In the spirit of Take Back the Night, women need to habituate to Take Back the Room. Much of feminist literature describes the process of learning to speak up. We need a compendium of such inspiring writing for every woman to keep by her bedside for nightly review.

Women can learn a lot about speaking up with clarity and brevity from watching how men do it. The coherence with which men speak is impressive. Their posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, choice of vocabulary and so on all align to communicate their confidence in what they are saying. And their expectation of being believed. It makes sense to accelerate the learning curve for grasping how to do what men do by spending some time in imitation of men’s ways of speaking up. The most effective and charismatic women, however, move on quickly to customize their way of speaking to better fit the preferred empathic stance of women. An empathic speaker is aware of to whom she is speaking. She will alter her message accordingly thereby avoiding the pitfalls of mansplaining. What she will not do is assume that the listener(s) are mute, naïve or passive. With frequent verbal and nonverbal check-ins, a skilled speaker will include the listeners in filling in details and taking the material to new and vivid frontiers.

But speak up she must. No longer can a woman tolerate the suppression of her thinking by the silencing of her voice. She must commit to responding – again and again – to efforts by the dominant culture to hush her up.

2. Demonstrate independent thinking. When women speak up, they need to do a gut check to determine how authentically they are speaking. In other words, they need to practice disclosing the female perspective without being an apologist for it. This is healthy female narcissism – a willingness to be an authority on themselves and their feminine point of view. This self-affirmation presents a robust proclamation of woman as woman, an unapologetic love of the feminine from an ontological sense rather than a cultural one. This is an essence that every woman will recognize existing for her in the heart of her being – where she lives generously creating her community with careful listening, empathy and stipulation. Once women learn to trust in their existential faith that the way women see things is as valuable as is the way men see things, they will move more quickly into the ontological act of demanding adversarial collaboration everywhere sex differences exist.

It's important to note here that most women remain unaware that their heads are chock full of rich data. Because their attention to attachment has been so consistently, cruelly mocked, they fail to see what they have achieved through the years of paying close attention to the existential lives of others. Further, perhaps lacking the “legitimacy” of a sophisticated philosophical vocabulary or the “force” of adversarial confrontation so common in male speak, much of the wisdom of women appears as tentative or, worse, only applicable to the lives of women. This is a tremendous loss. Women, because of their deeper reservoir of knowledge of what it means to be a human being, can speak with authority on all topics that relate to designing the world of humanity.

Self-affirmation underlying confidence (which, again, they usually get reinforced only by their women friends, women writers and so on) needs to be and deserves to be reinforced through confirmation by the men in their lives. That requires women to handpick the men around them. Only men who can be trusted to stipulate will be men who matter.

3. Assert. If you think about it, an assertion is an invitation for the receiver of the assertive behavior to stipulate the person asserting. Assertion, as opposed to aggression, is a request to meet at a boundary to negotiate growth and change. As such, it cannot guarantee getting what you want, but assertion will provide moral clarity at the boundary. You may not get the behavior change you wish for, but, if you don’t, the other person will have gone on the record in terms of denying your – likely legitimate – request. Once you have asserted, in other words, the relationship has to change. Either the other person changes their behavior to accommodate your request (stipulating that their behavior needed to change), or they have to change their knowledge of themselves to include the understanding that they have denied your reasonable request. And if they just straight up reject you because they cannot tolerate this new information, there was actually no relationship there to begin with.

But at its most basic, an assertion is a request to be heard and respected. For a woman who has been raised in an environment that stole her sovereignty before she was an individuated person, making any kind of request can feel impossible. Years of being unstipulated and experiencing severe pushback when she does speak can cause her to doubt her entitlement and retreat. When this is true, a corroborating community will be an absolute necessity for her. Once again we arrive at the truth that, until and unless men start to learn the skill of stipulation, all corroborating communities available to women will be made up of women.

It is also true that women don’t enjoy being assertive the way men assert. It is more comfortable for most women to tackle this behavior within the context of attachment. To that end, she will put considerable effort into attending to her attachment to the other person as she frames her assertion. She will check in with the recipient to detect any damage done to the relationship and offer reparative steps as necessary. Many assume this attachment-based assertion is weak because it lacks the direct and demanding tone of male assertive behavior. But, is it?

Socialized into willing self-sacrifice, women find autonomy frightening because it stretches the tethers that link them to others. They fear, rightly, that some of these tethers will be severed when they engage in autonomous behaviors. Can women handle endangering some of their relationships by limiting their donations? In no way are we asking women to forego their spectacular skills in the domain of human relations, but we are asking them to have the courage to tolerate the loss of some relationships along the way as they engage in speaking up and speaking out.

Women need to believe that they are capable of fully participating in the design of the world. They have every right to be in the room where it happens. Every room. But men will not spontaneously allow this to happen. Women need to speak up – constantly – to alert men to boundary violations that punish women for speaking up or that shame women for seeking power.

To break the stranglehold on commitment that the patriarchal hierarchy enjoys, two things have to happen. The group on top has to acknowledge – from a place of high integrity and regret – that they have long been the recipients of unearned largesse. The group on the bottom has to acknowledge – with courage and resolve – that they are now willing to demand equality wherever and whenever they encounter hierarchy.

To continue with our throughline concerning the little seedling that was created by narcissistic dreaming in the section on ego strength, let’s look at how having an emotional basecamp moves us along toward differentiation. The safety we feel when we trust the support of both ourselves (autonomy) and our community (attachment) allows us to venture out to explore possible places to plant those hopeful seedlings. We search for fertile ground, we spend time alone tilling the soil and then return home to rest.

3. Will to power

Will to power is the delicious existential concept that defines how we humans create unique unifying projects that vivify our lives by using the orthogonal relationship that conjoins willpower and will.

If you remember from reading those articles, will power is the limited but renewable ability to start our motor when we decide to take our life somewhere. To put it in existential terms, will power means that we know how to decide to make a choice. It is this ability that allows us to overcome the initiation threshold which exists at the beginning of all our endeavors.

Our will is our willingness to want something. That short sentence carries a ton of meaning. Will is the ability to look over the top of an initiation threshold to see what’s on the other side and then decide that what we see there is worth pursuing. Once willpower starts your engine, will is the existential GPS that tells you where to go once the motor is running.

When those two human existential characteristics are combined, they create the will to power that enables us to decide to choose what we now want to pursue most – to will one thing. Another sentence that reverberates with existential truth. It should be accompanied by trumpets. We need to be alerted to the richness of it in order to spend a little time thinking about it. Remember when I said earlier in this article that without a clear understanding of existential concepts, we tend to avoid thinking about them? Never is that more true than with the concept of will to power. It is my personal belief that will to power is the greatest gem hidden away in the esoteric and inaccessible oeuvre of the existentialists. In fact, willpower, will and will to power all represent existential concepts that are both hugely important and very poorly understood. Rather than giving them short shrift by trying to capture the richness of the two articles about them, I refer you to those articles.

The metaphor I like in terms of our little seedling throughline is this: we germinate many seeds but decide to transplant only a few to our fertile, well-prepared garden. In a perfect landscape we will have a few towering trees, many shrubs and a ton of small, flowering plants nestled among them. Think large commitments, many hobbies and little sparkles of task magic.

4. Mastery

Mastery is enchantment. It creates within our brains a state of concentration and joy that bends time. Hours elapse unnoticed as we engage in skilled behaviors that completely absorb us. All humans are designed to pursue and enjoy mastery. It is achieved when conformity and audacity coexist within us in an orthogonally potent way. We pay our dues in the mastery game by spending the time to learn standards of practice from knowledgeable folks around us (conformity). We then step out audaciously to try our hand at innovation. When we are innovating, we exist in a state of flow. It doesn’t get better than this.

Humans are able to harvest the positive neurological biochemistry by mastering small skills (superb handwriting, effective parallel parking or a sparklingly clean kitchen), medium skills (preparing a full-course meal, a well-crafted assertion or maintaining a balanced family budget) and highly professional skills (designing a building, guiding a therapy session or wiring a house). A deep satisfaction exists within us when we can consistently generate a balanced selection of these three types of mastery. It’s important to understand that we need to be potent but not necessarily world class in order to enjoy the results of mastery. We just have to practice to excellence those skills that matter to us, using the gifts we have discovered within ourselves.

With ample mastery in our days, we are bolstered by extraordinarily stable mental energy. Absent mastery, we are increasingly vulnerable to escapist behaviors and unfettered comfort seeking.

You can tell I’m sure by the brevity of this section that there is an entire article on this most existential of topics. If you haven’t read it…

To address the final piece in our throughline for this article, this peak human state reflects the self-discipline needed to learn, implement and refine the skills necessary to make your garden flourish. As anyone who adores gardening will tell you, gardening is an endless battle that requires pluck, resilience, experience and luck.

Differentiation: The Sexiest Place on Earth

In order to bring some personal control to the pandemonium of human existence, we each need to be able to sustain our project of becoming who we want to be despite encountering the vicissitudes of Fate as well as scores of people who will have their own agenda for us. If we understand that our lives are the most chaotic at the boundary between these persuasive others and ourselves, we can focus on standing on solid existential ground when we find ourselves in interpersonal interactions. The word for that impressive comportment is, of course, differentiation.

Many people arrest unknowingly at the first developmental step humans take toward maturity – forming a binary idea about how the world works. They continue to use those beliefs to shape their day-to-day lives. But our second developmental step – psychological differentiation – can lead to a more robustly unique life. Differentiation reflects an earnest desire for collaboration, a cognitive ability to gather bipartisan data and the poise bolstered by ego strength and will to power as we hold true to the plans for our original project.

We have identified all the ingredients that troubled me through my days of using colored pens and much scratch paper – the dual processes and four content areas of differentiation.

The dual processes are:

• Adversarial collaboration

• Building and maintaining the four content areas

The four content areas are:

• Ego strength: empathy and narcissism

• Emotional basecamp: attachment and autonomy

• Will to power: willpower and will

• Mastery: conformity and innovation

When we can approach life from a differentiated stance, we will be reliable stewards of our souls. We can earnestly engage with others without abdicating our individual rights and responsibilities in terms of designing a life we would willingly live again.