A Model Of Growth And Healing In Life And Therapy

According to RCT, therapeutic goals should focus on expanding one’s ability to create, participate, and sustain growth-fostering relationships over the life span. Based on their earliest work, psychological well-being and emotional maturity involve an increasing capacity to be authentic and fully present in relationships along with a growing capacity to be responsive to others who are struggling to represent their experiences in the relationship.As such, the therapeutic process is about developing relational competence or, more simply stated, therapy is about getting better at relationships.
RCT posits that the process of becoming relationally competent involves the ability to become increasingly able to fully represent oneself both honestly and authentically in relationships. It also involves feeling “effective” in relationships by being able to impact the other (Miller & Stiver, 1997). Ideally, there is a mutually empathic responsiveness, characteristic of the reciprocal responsiveness between mothers and their infants. In adulthood, this translates to each person feeling as if they have been heard and that their experiences matter. This experience, which is referred to as mutual empathy in growthfostering relationships, leads to a sense of connection, which is experienced as what has been referred to as the “five good things.”
These five good things are (a) a greater sense of zest, energy, or vitality; (b) an increased sense of effectiveness or agency in relationships; © a feeling that we clearly understand ourselves, others, and our relationships with others; (d) an experience in which each person in the relationship shares a sense of feeling valued and worthy; and (e) a feeling that one’s relational capacities have grown and, as such, there is a desire to expand one’s relational networks with others (Miller & Stiver, 1997). RCT also posits that experiences of connections are very powerful and impact one’s ability for creativity and productivity, for example, and energize individuals even when they are not necessarily with another person.
In reality, relationships are characterized by periods of connection and disconnection.
In fact, RCT emphasizes that disconnections are inevitable in even the healthiest relationships. Disconnections can result from a myriad of circumstances that include everything from simple misunderstandings to abuses and violations and can be periodic or chronic, the worst of which begin in early childhood when individuals feel most vulnerable and helpless. Disconnections are also experienced in relationships as the opposite of the five good things. In a disconnection people feel (a) depleted of energy; (b) helpless; (c) confused and unclear; (d) unworthy and bad; and (e) forced to turn away from relationships (Miller & Stiver, 1997). Much as connections fuel the ability to be fully present in one’s own life, disconnections can feel nearly debilitating and make handling the responsibilities in one’s life feel burdensome. At worst, disconnection will drive people toward isolating themselves, an emotional state referred to as “condemned isolation” in which people are vulnerable to self-destructiveness and self-blame. Disconnection is more common among women than men because women carry more responsibility for the well-being of their relationships.
In the face of a disconnection, it takes a certain type of courage and vulnerability for individuals to authentically express their hurt, disappointment, or needs, especially if they
are the less powerful (subordinate) one in the relationship. This capacity is directly affected by sex role socialization, making it more difficult for men to express their hurt, for example, which is often masked by anger, and to also respond to others when traditional models have encouraged unresponsiveness as a means of asserting one’s strength and autonomy. On the other hand, women are often “over responsible,” which makes them vulnerable to being emotionally exploited in relationships. When people are responded to empathically, then a sense of connection can be restored, and both parties grow and experience a sense of relational competence/confidence (the feeling that “Hey, I’m pretty good at this!”) and transformation. If, on the other hand, individuals are responded to in a way that is injurious or somehow denies their experience, they will begin to leave aspects of themselves out of the relationship in order to play by the relational rules. In RCT, this is referred to as the central relational paradox, which plays itself out when, in the face of yearning for connection, individuals leave authentic parts of their experiences out of the relationship in order to somehow “keep” or “fit” into the relationship and to avoid repeated injurious consequences (Miller & Stiver, 1997).
The efforts made to play by relational rules in order to maintain the relationship and to avoid injurious consequences are thought of as a process by which one exercises strategies of disconnection. Individuals exercise strategies of disconnection leaving parts of themselves out of relationships in order to avoid potential pain or, at worse, a complete relational rupture. What is left is only an illusion of a connection. RCT posits that people develop certain patterns of disconnection that are developmental in nature. In other words, many strategies of disconnection are guided by a person’s relational images or expectations of how others will respond to him or her based on his or her familial experiences and personal experiences in the larger culture (Miller & Stiver, 1997). If developmentally one has had to repeatedly exercise strategies of disconnection to avoid being abused or to avoid random acts of racism, for example, then these strategies of disconnection become strategies for survival. In this context, one’s yearning for connection is experienced as a heightened and frightening experience and, in order to restore a sense of safety, one ultimately and paradoxically turns away from relationships and possibilities to heal and into isolation, a dynamic in response to past relational violations captured in the characteristics of borderline personality disorder, for example. It is important to remember that the degree of safety one feels to express one’s authentic feelings is directly related to how much power or mutuality one experiences or expects, and often these expectations come from family experiences or from one’s sense of being marginalized from the larger culture. As such, individuals feel varying degrees of freedom to express themselves and have varying expectations they will be heard, both of which are directly related to the degree of privilege or marginalization one experiences. Feelings of privilege and marginalization are the result of the stratification that occurs around “difference” in our culture and include the degree to which one might experience ableism, ageism, classism, heterosexism, racism, or sexism, for example.
RCT has been influenced by feminist scholars including Peggy McIntosh, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. For therapists who train in this model, creating connection and mutual empathy requires a degree of thoughtful responsiveness to clients, a stance that is not advocated by most approaches to therapy. The notion of mutual empathy and connection as healing forces in relationships have been incorporated into the fields of counseling, education, medicine, nursing, social work, theology, and psychotherapy as a model for psychological growth and well-being of individuals of all walks of life.