Relational psychotherapy believes that emotional well-being depends on having satisfying, mutual relationships—relationships that reinforce adaptive beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world. It sees emotional distress resulting in part from relationships, both past and present, where we felt pressure to demean ourselves or play restricted roles in order to stay connected with the important people in our lives. Suffering grows from relationships that taught us lessons that diminished us.
Relieving emotional distress in relational psychotherapy comes about in at least three interrelated ways. First, the therapist continually offers his support, care and commitment to the client. The experience of being heard and understood strengthens and transforms the client’s sense of self, which in turn enhances his or her confidence and well-being. Maintaining this supportive relationship and getting it back on track when there are momentary disruptions is crucial to the therapeutic process.
Second, client and therapist work together within this supportive relationship to make sense of the client’s life. This entails understanding the ways the client has come to organize experience and interpret life events. It means articulating the beliefs and life lessons the client has gleaned from different relationships. One way client and therapist will gain this understanding is by paying close attention to interactions in the client-therapist relationship.
Third, as client and therapist form a relationship with each other, they will begin to notice that, at times, this relationship will contain some of the old relational patterns that no longer serve the client. Other times, new, more useful relational possibilities will emerge. These new kinds of connection help the client to experientially disprove diminishing beliefs and learn to create a larger repertoire of ways to connect with others, ways that leave the person feeling stronger, more confident and more alive.
Because relationship is so important to a relational therapist, he takes seriously the interpersonal impact of power differentials and social issues such as race, class, culture, gender and sexual difference, and works with these issues as they are present in the client’s life and in the therapeutic relationship. In this way, relational therapy moves beyond one-on-one relationships to see the client holistically in all the different social and historical contexts within which he or she lives.
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