An Old Psychological Theory to Simplify Your Relationships
The Separation of Tasks — by Alfred Adler.
We like to think of ourselves as totally independent. We like to believe we are free-willed — “I did it my way” — “I can do it on my own” kind of people.
While taking radical responsibility for our own lives is incredibly important, we sometimes forget just how interconnected and interdependent we are. We forget that we have a deeply-rooted need to belong to a community.
Alfred Adler, one of the great psychodynamic thinkers of the last century (next to Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung) called this need for belonging and contributing to a community Social Interest.
According to him, all behavior has two goals: You want to be self-reliant and you want to live in harmony with society. Which means your task is both to believe in yourself and others. Adler, furthermore, stated that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems.
Therefore, he came up with a concept that can help us to simplify and improve our interpersonal relationships, called “The Separation of Tasks.”
And this is quite needed as we humans like to sabotage our interpersonal relationships in too many ways.
