Different Soil: What Happens When Your Conditions Meet Someone Else's

By Brooke Levy

We've talked about the pot (see The Space Constraint: How We Learn to Contain Ourselves). We've talked about what happens when you finally move into a bigger one (see Working Through Transplant Shock: How We Learn to Grow in New Conditions). But there's a part of this we haven't gotten to yet, and it's the part where most people start to feel really lost.

What happens when your conditions meet someone else's?

You've started understanding your own conditions. Maybe you know your pot was small. Maybe you've started noticing your patterns, your nervous system's defaults, the shape you take when things get close. But then you start dating someone, or you're already in a relationship, and suddenly everything you thought you'd sorted out is up in the air again. You're reactive in ways you didn't expect. You're not sure if what you're feeling is about them or about you. The things that bother you might be legitimate, or they might be old signals firing in a new context.

Two plants can both be healthy and still have completely incompatible conditions. That doesn't mean something went wrong. It means they needed different things.

Whose Roots Are These?

One of the most disorienting things about being in a relationship is figuring out what's yours and what belongs to the other person. Not in a property sense, but in an emotional one. Your reaction to their tone. Your anxiety when they don't text back. The way their silence reminds you of something you can't quite name. The tightness in your chest when they pull away, or the impulse to withdraw the moment they move closer.

Murray Bowen, the psychiatrist who developed family systems theory, called this differentiation of self. It's the ability to maintain your own emotional identity while staying connected to someone else (Bowen, 1978). To feel without being consumed by what you feel. To stay close without losing track of where you end and the other person begins. It sounds simple. In practice, it might be the hardest relational skill there is.

Differentiation isn't about distance. It's not about walling yourself off or becoming so independent you don't need anyone. It's the ability to stay present with someone who matters to you, especially when things get tense or emotionally charged, without either merging with their experience or shutting down to protect yourself from it.

For people who grew up in smaller pots, this is especially hard. If your system learned early that closeness required making yourself smaller, or that someone else's emotional state was always your responsibility, then the line between your feelings and theirs was never clearly drawn to begin with. Research consistently links lower levels of differentiation to lower relationship satisfaction and higher relational distress, particularly in couples where one or both partners have difficulty separating their own emotional experience from their partner's (Lampis et al., 2019).

If the boundary between your feelings and someone else's was never clearly drawn, every relationship becomes an exercise in trying to figure out what you're actually responding to.

What This Looks Like in Dating

Dating is where this gets activated. Early-stage relationships engage the attachment system in a way that few other experiences do. You're assessing safety, scanning for signals, trying to figure out if this person is someone you can trust, all while your nervous system is running its own background check based on decades-old data. What feels like chemistry or intuition is often your system toggling between attraction and self-protection, reacting to cues that have more to do with your history than with the person in front of you (Shorey, 2026).

This is where attachment styles don't just coexist. They collide.

If you lean anxious, distance feels like a verdict. A slow reply isn't just a slow reply. It's your system telling you the truth about how much you matter, how much you're wanted, even when that interpretation has almost nothing to do with the person on the other end. Your system learned early that connection was unpredictable (Ainsworth et al., 1978), so you monitor for threat constantly, reaching for closeness to settle something that started unsettled long before this person showed up. The tricky part is that the intensity of your response can feel like proof that this relationship matters more than it actually does yet. What's really happening is your nervous system is reacting to an old pattern, not necessarily to the person in front of you.

If you lean avoidant, closeness is the thing that registers as pressure. Someone wanting more from you emotionally doesn't feel like intimacy. It feels like a demand, one your system has been trained to manage by pulling back. Not because you don't care, but because care, when it was offered in your early environment, often came with strings attached or required you to give up something essential about yourself.

When these two styles meet, the result is often what researchers have called the pursue/withdraw cycle. One partner moves closer, the other pulls back. The pursuit intensifies the withdrawal, and the withdrawal intensifies the pursuit. Both people are reacting. Neither person is necessarily responding to what's actually happening between them right now. They're responding to what their system expects to happen, based on what it learned a long time ago (Seiter, 2024).

Each person's attempt to feel safe is exactly the thing that makes the other person feel less safe.

The Soil You Bring with You

Here's what makes this genuinely hard: your reaction to another person can feel completely real and present and still be mostly about something old. That doesn't mean it's not valid. It means it needs sorting. And sorting requires the willingness to ask a question most of us would rather skip over: is this about what's happening, or about what this reminds me of?

Bowen's framework suggests that people with lower differentiation are more likely to experience emotional reactivity, responding to a partner's behavior as though it's a direct threat even when it may not be (Bowen, 1978). In fusion, your partner's mood becomes your mood. Their withdrawal becomes your crisis. Their anxiety becomes the thing you have to fix before you can feel okay.

Schnarch (1997) describes most people as entering relationships seeking what he calls other-validated intimacy, closeness that depends on your partner confirming that you're okay. When the relationship is the source of your sense of self, every shift in it becomes seismic. The alternative, self-validated intimacy, is the ability to hold onto your own sense of who you are even when your partner disagrees with you, or is upset with you, or can't give you what you want in a particular moment. That kind of intimacy doesn't require less vulnerability. It actually requires more. You just have to be able to stay grounded while you're being vulnerable, rather than outsourcing your stability to the other person.

Two plants growing near each other will always affect each other's conditions. One might take more light. One might need more water. None of that is a problem if you can tell which root system is which. It becomes a problem when you can't, when you start absorbing someone else's conditions as though they were your own, or when you mistake the shape you've taken around them for your actual shape.

What Tending to Your Own Soil Actually Looks Like

Start by getting curious about your reactions before you assign them to the relationship. When something your partner does triggers a strong response, pause. Not to suppress it. To locate it. Ask yourself: when have I felt this exact thing before? If the answer predates the person sitting across from you, that's important data. It doesn't mean the current situation isn't also real. It means there are two things happening at once, and they need to be held separately before they can be addressed honestly.

Notice when you're managing. If your instinct in a conflict is to immediately fix the other person's emotional state so that you can feel settled, that's fusion. Their discomfort isn't always yours to solve. Sitting with someone else's hard feeling without collapsing into it or running from it is its own form of intimacy. It might even be the most important form of it.

Pay attention to what you do with distance. Do you chase it or create it? Both are strategies, and neither one is inherently wrong, but both become reflexive when they're running on old software.

The question isn't whether you need closeness or space. It's whether you're choosing it or whether your nervous system is choosing it for you.

Name your pattern out loud, to yourself or to someone you trust. Not as a diagnosis. As recognition. I know I tend to pull away when things get real. I know I tend to over-function when someone I care about is upset. I know I read distance as rejection even when it might not be.

Naming the pattern is how you start to interrupt it. Not perfectly. Not every time. But enough to make space between the trigger and the response.

You don't have to have it figured out before you're in a relationship. But you do have to be willing to figure out what's yours while you're in one.

The goal isn't to show up in a relationship with no history, no patterns, no old soil clinging to your roots. That's not possible and it wouldn't be realistic. The goal is to know your own soil well enough to tend to it yourself, without expecting the person next to you to do it for you.

Intimacy isn't the absence of separateness. It's what becomes possible because of it.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.

Lampis, J., Cataudella, S., Agus, M., Busonera, A., & Skowron, E. A. (2019). Differentiation of self and dyadic adjustment in couple relationships: A dyadic analysis using the actor-partner interdependence model. Family Process, 58(3), 698–715. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12370

Schnarch, D. (1997). Passionate marriage: Keeping love and intimacy alive in committed relationships. W. W. Norton.

Seiter, T. (2024, May). Breaking the pursue/withdraw cycle: The power of response. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mindful-relationships/202405/breaking-the-pursuewithdraw-cycle-the-power-of-response

Shorey, H. (2026, March). The flip: When your new love turns into anxiety. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-freedom-to-change/202603/the-flip-when-your-new-love-turns-into-anxiety