RELATIONAL CULTURAL THEORY

Relational Cultural Theory



Relational Cultural Theory

Introduction

Relational-cultural theory (RCT) offers the activity crucial for the endurance of the human genus namely, development, growth and expansion of others in a relational context often devalued, misunderstood, and pathologized within traditional model of development and mental health of human. As results, individual desire to set up and to take part in growth-fostering relationship over the life span is seen as “defective” or “dependent” in that they do not follow the accepted paths of separations and individuation indicatives of emotional maturity in Western psychology.

In reframing relationship as the background in which we experienced optimal psychological growth and emotional well-being during our lives, Relational Culture Theory articulate a mean that we can create and nourish mutual empathic growth-fostering relationship in therapy and in the life. It Creates the kind of relationship in which we could experience psychological development, heal, and mutual empathy that involve naming and de constructing interpersonal and socio-political difficulties that serve to keep us detached from each other, such as racism, heterosexism, sexism, ableism, ageism, and classism. Relational difficulty includes all sources of socio-economic classes in our culture whereby individual feels more or less significant, heard, visible, and able to encourage and seek impartiality for their individuals and collective interest.

Origins Of Relational-Cultural Theory

Relational-cultural theory visualized after it publicized in 1976 of Towards a New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller, MD, she was one of the traditional trained psychiatrists. As Miller began her clinical work with women, she began to recognize that what she had learnt about their lives did not fit into the traditional models of development she had been taught in medical school. This early observation encouraged the idea in her revolutionary book, including her points that our understanding of much of life had been skewed and was biased because the way we had come to understand “the nature of things” reflected only the stereotypical experiences and developmental patterns of privileged White men, which precluded our potential for understanding the other half of the human species—namely, women—and all the other experiences along the gender continuum including those of marginalized men and people of color.

A Model of Growth And Healing In Life And Therapy

In Accordance with RCT, therapeutic aims should focuses in expanding one's capability to make, participate, and sustain the growth-development relationship over the life time. Based on their initial work, psychological well-being and emotional maturity involved a rising capacity to be genuine and fully present in relationship along with an increasing capacity to be receptive to other who is stressed to represent their experience in the relationship. As such, the therapeutic processes are about development relational competence or, more simply stated, therapy is about receiving better relationships.

RCT posit that the processes of becoming relationally capable involve the capability to become gradually more able to fully represent oneself both authentically and honestly in relationship. It also involves feeling “effective” in relationships by being able to impact the other. Ideally, there is a mutually empathic responsiveness, characteristic of the reciprocal ...