The capacity to be an “I”

Differentiation means the capacity of a family member to define his or her own life's goals and values apart from surrounding togetherness pressures, to say “I” when others are demanding “you” and “we.” It includes the capacity to maintain a (relatively) nonanxious presence in the midst of anxious systems, to take maximum responsibility for one's own destiny and emotional being. It can be measured somewhat by the breath of one's repertoire of responses when confronted with crisis. The concept should not be confused with autonomy or narcissism, however. Differentiation means the capacity to be an “I” while remaining connected.

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

Get inside your box!

Do you know one of the "box people"? When they meet someone new, the “box people” immediately ask a question to identify which box the person belongs inside. "What do you do?" “Where are you from?” the “box people” want to stick a label on each person. Once they know the "box" (based on class, politics, religious affiliation, race, etc.), they can avoid the work of getting to know someone and treating them as an individual.

Meeting someone living outside the set of predetermined boxes is a challenge to the arrangement of tidy little containers. This affront will be met with increasing demands to "Get inside a box!” There’s a difference between asking honest questions to understand someone because you see them as an end in themselves, and asking questions as a result of treating people as means to an end.

Each of us has the same decision to make: Whether or not to treat others as unique individuals.

Stephen Goforth

Escaping from Group-Narcissism

You can’t force everyone to see the value in your group, just as you can’t force everyone to see the value in you as an individual. But you can control how you see yourself, and the narrative you tell yourself about your group and the world. The only way out from the group-narcissism trap is up, by transcending your group’s feelings of entitlement and connecting with fellow humans—even when it’s easier to believe that you’re special. 

Scott Barry Kaufman writing in The Atlantic