What then are the implications for therapy if we truly understand and respect this oscillation between the self and the relational paradigm?
Relational healing is shifting from looking at individuals as relational beings to seeing being as relational. Given this, then when we sit with clients or a couple we sit with the profound understanding that in every moment our ‘self’ is being formed fluidly moment by moment - what potential for change!!
We now know so much more about how this is actually happening in our body-brains through things like mirror neurones and Limbic resonance and the Brain Bridge. It seems that it is not just our conceptual selves that are being formed minute by minute but our body states too. Which affects how we experience things… and then what stories we make up about the moment to make sense of it … and so what feelings we have about it … and then what actions we do…well, you get the story!
So thinking a little deeper into this oscillation between the concepts of the individual paradigm and the relational paradigm, the article I was reading goes on to say that for some people the self doesn’t exist as a separate entity that can be studied on its own. Now that I can agree with!
For me the self only comes into focus through the lens of the relationships it is embedded in. And likewise the relationship only comes into focus through the lens and co-creation of the individuals – back to two sides of the same coin!
I think Africa captures that exactly in a proverb saying:
‘I am, because we are.’ This is a fundamental philosophy of African Ubuntu.
I was reading an article on the relational paradigm and how it is developing conceptually all over the world when I came across this thought that we should acknowledge the fiction of the ‘self’ – that this concept of the individual is no longer relevant to therapy. I found myself agreeing and yet uncomfortable with the statement and it’s taken a few days to put my finger on what it is that makes me uncomfortable, and it is this:
The wording to me implies the abandonment of one concept, ie: the individual in the favour of the concept of the relational paradigm. I see it more as a spectrum oscillating between the individual and the relational – two sides of the same coin as it were. To abandon one of those indivisible sides in the favour of the other puts us surely right back at square one which is a concept, rather than concepts in relationship to each other…just as we can be seen as individual humans rather than humans experienced in relation to each other!
