Right Relationship
“ ‘Knowledge is not knowledge until it is given’ said Dr Mauritus. ‘Like Love’ thought Jacob.”
— David Mitchell in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
While there are many wiser men who have said this better than I, it bears repeating that we exist only through relationship.
You are your relationships to your family, friends, partner, community, nature, and spirituality.
Beyond these relationships, you are nothing more than latent possibility. An unbeing.
You are not kind unless you act kindly to another person. You are not brave if you never feel fear and endure despite it.
Someone might say that they are a “quiet” person, but what they really mean is that most of their relationships with the people and environments in their life render them quiet or that they are quieter than others.
Yet, put this person with a close friend and they might suddenly be loud, talkative, and jovial.
We are not static, isolated entities with fixed properties that react in predictable ways to external, fungible stimuli.
These “properties” or characteristics are abstracted categories of our relationships to others. These categories imply a fixity that is not part of reality.
So how should we think about improving our lives or improving ourselves?
Self-improvement is the focus of massive amounts of self-help books, podcasts, and get-rich-quick content. Such is the ambient anxiety lurking in the minds of young men and women who want more out of their life and are struggling to find their place in this world.
I argue that we ought to focus on the relationship between “ourselves” and the outer world rather than focusing on specific external methodology.
This focus should be on achieving Right Relationship with the people in our lives, our career, nature, and spirituality. Most importantly, the key to Right Relationship lies within the kind of attention we give to the various people and forces in our lives.
In this article, I will focus solely on relationship with other people and the kind of attention brought to these relationships by the Humanist psychologist Carl Rogers.
Client Centered Therapy and Our Personal Relationships
Carl Rogers is one of the most influential psychologists to have lived. Typically labelled as a “Humanist” psychologist, Dr. Rogers pioneered a client-centered therapy technique that ran counter to the dominant Freudian therapy technique of the time and would later go on to become the dominant method of therapy that modern psychologists still use today.
At the time Freudian therapy would have the psychologist diagnose the patient and then prescribe them medication or a protocol of behavior.
Dr. Rogers went against this by developing a set of earnest observations from his own clinical experience that focused on certain almost axiomatic principles that he found true within all of his relationships with patients.
Briefly, the most important of these for our discussion now are as follows:
- People are naturally oriented towards growth and healing. Given an environment where the patient is unjudged, feels safe, and can freely guide the dialog, the patient will inevitably move towards a more holistic relationship to the world and people in their life (ie growth).
- The relationship of therapist to client is inextricable and critical to the movement towards growth for the patient. It is of the best interest of the patient that the therapist is their honest and authentic selves during therapy. If the therapist feels disgust, for example, then it does not help the patient to conceal this disgust as the body language of the therapist will betray disgust while his/her words might say otherwise. This would begin to cause distrust into the patient.
- “Can I meet this other individual as a person who is in the process of becoming?…. If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified, already shaped by his past, then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis. If I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potentialities.” — Dr. Carl Rogers
Further, it is important to note that healing only occurs through relationship. This follows as a natural consequence of us only existing within our relationships such that healing, growth, and improving our lives would primarily consist of bringing a higher fidelity of attention to these relationships.
The therapist and patient is one such example where one party takes care to create an environment devoid of judgement and condemnation. The therapist is taking particular care about the kind of attention and relationship that he or she bears upon the patient such that the patient’s potentialities are able to be brought forth.
Dr. Rogers further postulates that we could bring the attitude of a therapist to the other personal relationships in our lives.
While Dr. Roger’s ideas about therapy were met with hostility from the institutions of the time, his ideas were eventually accepted and client-centered therapy remains the primary mode of therapy today.
Dr. Roger’s key insight was his belief in the self-corrective nature of the human psyche and the locus of relationship and attention when it comes to therapy and growth.
Right Relationship is Unblocked Relationship
So what is right relationship?
In the truest sense, Right Relationship is relationship in itself. Or, at least, relationship given its proper attention and due in a manner that is not blocked by us acting or speaking inauthentically as well as fidelity to the becoming of the other person.
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Yet, often we block ourselves from relationship in many ways that insipidly limit our life and our potentialities.
Let us examine one particularly pernicious way that we block ourselves from relationship.
In the book The Master and His Emissary, Dr. Iain McGilchrist so eloquently uses the literature of neuroscience and generous amounts of examples from other disciplines to illustrate how over reliant we have become on “left-brain”, piecemeal thinking.
Dr. McGilchrist’s thesis is too rich and nuanced to do any justice here, but we want to note that as the modern world increasingly glorifies reductionist thinking, our lives become more and more dominated by artificial abstractions that prove inadequate to judge and navigate the world and our lives.
Further, these abstractions blind us to what is and give an artificial “fixity” to the people and world around us.
The left-brain favors certainty and selectively prioritizes information that conforms with it’s abstract theory while ignoring the unique person in front of us.
This affects the attention and relationship we bear upon the person in subtle, yet hugely impactful ways.
For example, I might be walking down the street on my own as a young man and then I see a tall, muscular guy with nice clothes and a pretty girlfriend walking by. I might feel insecure and my mind might reflexively seek to validate myself by defensively judging this man, who I know nothing about.
I might assume that he is using her and he isn’t serious about the relationship. I might assume that he is self-absorbed and maybe not intelligent. I might think that his parents probably helped him so he could buy nice clothes without earning anything himself.
A common pattern of thinking underpins all of these thoughts. I am orienting myself in opposition towards someone that I feel envious of or insecure towards.
The kind of attention I am bringing about is judgemental and causes me to feel resentment. If the man chooses to stop and speak to me, then I will initially respond in a incredulous way as I have attributed so many negative stereotypes to him. I will be unable to clearly hear what he has to say unburdened by my own bias.
This is just an example and this type of thinking does not belong to any specific cohort, political party, or strait of society. We are all prone to this sort of thinking in our interpersonal relationships and general life.
Categorical and rigid thinking leads us to adopt defensiveness and a lack of vulnerability which precludes real, experiential relationship.
Indeed, this abstracted mode of thinking blocks true relationship from occurring at all.
Consequences of Lack of Relationship
If I deferentially categorize someone or a situation I encounter, then I do not see the uniqueness of what is in-front of me.
In this way, any creativity will be stifled. Any true recognition will be halted. Any organic or dynamic relationship won’t occur unless the other is somehow able to break-down my “wall” as it were.
We have become blind to each other and to the cultures within which we exist which have been replaced by imagined representations and generalized attributes.
We differ to our maps of reality that tend towards simplistic explanations and feel-good certainty than engaging with the human being and reality immediately in front of us.
We see and interact with our maps rather than the terrain. Abstracted reality, in this sense, replaces experiential (true) reality.
Right Relationship
Right Relationship and right attention might offer a mode of being that can help fix this self-inflicted blocking of relationship.
Right Relationship means giving attention to who or what is directly in front of you (ie being present here and now).
This means affirming the person who is front of you and suspending judgement on them at least during the interaction (although not necessarily agreeing with their viewpoints or decisions).
This means engaging creatively with the present moment and whoever is with you.
This means recognizing your mental leaps and “catching yourself” when you notice you are assuming beyond which is reasonable. This means not quickly deciding on someone’s character either way, but rather suspending judgement for some time with a sustained patience so that the true essence of an other can “reveal itself” or come into being.
This means holding in tension the opposites of life without needing to reflexively close or resolve them. This might be the the tension between being an individual and yet part of a community or the tension between needing to earn a living yet also needing self-expression and self-direction.
This means not holding your perspectives and world views so dear as to ignore and dismiss evidence contrary to them, but rather take on an attitude of constant unveiling and learning about people, events, institutions and things.
In this way, your relationships to ideas, people, and things become less static and more organic such that they can evolve and change over time. In this way, your world will come to life.
A people who has wronged might be redeemed.
A culture might find new avenues of expression and change it’s values.
A career or role that once was fulfilling and served growth might be found to be constraining.
Right Relationship is a step towards growth and the recognition that everything is relationship and constantly evolving and that our attention towards another critically gives shape and informs the relationship and must be done with the utmost care.
So, perhaps just for today, I hope that you take the time to listen to a loved one or stranger patiently and seek to understand them rather than contend with them or push them into acting in a way that you desire.
