A new model of development, based on listening to women’s experience (3,4) and on research on women’s lives (1) has arisen in response to the limitations of the more traditional theories. This relational-cultural theory of development and clinical practice (RCT) has been developed over the past 25 years at the Stone Center at Wellesley College (3,4,5). It is rooted in the groundbreaking work of Jean Baker Miller (2). Its core tenets postulate that women (all people) grow through and toward connection; mutual empowerment characterizes healthy relationships; mutual empathy is the process through which growth occurs. Growth-fostering relationships generate what Jean Baker Miller called “the five good things”: a sense of zest, increasing clarity, productivity/creativity, a sense of worth, and desire for more connection. Disconnections occur in all relationships when there is empathic failure, hurt, misunderstanding, and unresponsiveness; they are inevitable and ubiquitous. When acute disconnections are reworked, connections are strengthened. When a person is hurt (let’s say a person with less power, like a child or therapy patient) and is able to represent the experience to the more powerful person, who responds in a caring way, the injured person actually experiences a sense of “mattering” to the other person and of being effective in relationship. This is relational competence; it produces a sense of well-being, hope, and growing connection. If, however, the more powerful person who has participated in the hurt does not acknowledge the other’s pain and does not respond as if the other’s pain matters to him or her, the less powerful and hurt person is left feeling alone, scared, and vulnerable. In this case, the injured person will withdraw, disconnect, keep those aspects of herself out of relationship. She will use strategies of disconnection or survival to stay safe. In the process, however, she brings less and less of herself into relationship, thus limiting the potential for mutual growth. She will become less authentic, less fully representing her experience in that relationship. These places of disconnection become the source of what we call chronic disconnection. Jean Baker Miller (4) has used the term “condemned isolation” to characterize these places of painful disconnection; in condemned isolation, a person feels outside the human community, unable to move into relationships to reestablish connection, and often feels enormous shame and self-blame. The person feels she has caused the isolation and is, in some essential way, “bad” or unlovable. The path of human development is through movement to increasingly differentiated and growth-fostering connection; chronic disconnections are most destructive when they result from the unresponsiveness of or violations by important and powerful people in our lives.

Although acute disconnections can be reworked and thereby strengthen and transform connections, when disconnections are not repaired or responded to empathically they lead to significant pain. The original injury, not responded to in a caring way and repeated many times in the course of a child’s development, becomes the core of the protective disconnection. This injury can result from a traumatic violation of the child’s sense of safety (physical or sexual abuse, either acute or chronic), an ongoing context of humiliation or violation, or more chronic neglect and general unresponsiveness. All of these situations lead to chronic disconnection and the development of relational images unfavorable to the movement into new relationships. Thus, for a child who is treated abusively, an organizing and central relational
image might be: “Whenever I allow myself to be vulnerable, I am treated in a hurtful and frightening way. There is no empathy in those who are here to care for me.” Or another child might develop the relational expectation: “Whenever I represent my real experience of anger, I am attacked or abused.” In a less traumatic picture, the child might develop the following relational image that contributes to chronic disconnection: “I am responded to more positively when I suppress my real feelings and act cheerful for my parents.” These kinds of relational images take people out of connection. To the extent that the relational images are very central, generalized to new situations, and characterized by both pervasiveness and inflexibility, they will keep people locked into certain patterns of disconnection. While these images are importantly formed in early parent-child relationships, they are subject to change throughout the life span.

Since isolation is viewed as the primary source of suffering for human beings, those forces that take us out of connection become especially relevant. Shame arises when we feel unworthy of connection, when empathic responsiveness seems beyond our grasp (6). Shame interferes with moving into relationships where old, maladaptive relational images can be shifted. There is a sense of loss of empathic possibility or the belief that someone could respond empathically to us. Shame leads to isolation and often involves an experience of immobility; in shame, one is aware of wanting to feel connected but one feels unable to reach out or to move into the necessary vulnerability to participate in an authentic relationship with others. Shame is an intrinsically interpersonal affect. Experientially, it is about our whole sense of ourselves; our very being feels unworthy of connection.

Shame drives people into isolation and silence. While it arises spontaneously and is seen as one of the original affects in infants (7), shaming is also done to people to exercise social and political control. If those at the center (8) shame those at the margin or those who are outside the dominant value structure, very often they can disempower and silence them. The dominant group tells the nondominant group that its way of being is insufficient, not as “good” as the dominant group’s (you’re too needy, you value the wrong things, your sexuality is sick, your hair is too kinky). Shaming becomes a major psychological and political force in controlling people. Shaming, isolation, and silencing go hand in hand. They are often used by the powerful to disempower those with less power. As Karen Laing noted, “Isolation is the glue that holds oppression in place” (9).

The relational-cultural model is an evolving theory. Initially labeled “self-in-relation,” then “relational development,” it is currently referred to as ‘relational-cultural” theory, or RCT. This latest designation best captures the fact that this is a model that fully embraces the power of context and sociocultural forces in individual development. It furthermore attempts to include an analysis of the role of power imbalances. Rather than “the self,” connection and context are placed at the center of this new understanding of human beings. Proponents of the Stone Center model care about suffering incurred at the individual level, but we also care about the effects of disconnection at a societal level, the ways that power differentials, forces of stratification, privilege, and marginalization can disconnect and disempower individuals and groups of people. It is essential that we look at context and not assume that the person (or group) presenting with pain is the problem.

While many theories arising in the dominant culture would have us believe that psychological theory is value-neutral and scientifically “objective,” RCT emphasizes instead the importance of making the biases visible rather than invisible and looking at difference in terms of power differentials and stratifications imposed by the culture. Thus Jordan and Walker (10) write that listening to the voices of historically marginalized women will “challenge our assumption of a powerful mythic norm that would define ‘woman’ as a white, economically privileged, able-bodied, and heterosexual female. Unchallenged, this norm becomes a standard against which all women’s experience is interpreted and evaluated. Therefore, the extent to which any individual woman conforms to this norm becomes almost by default the measure by which she is deemed worthy of notice or fit for connection.”

Just as theories do not exist outside of culture, relationships do not exist outside of culture. To the extent that a culture devalues certain qualities and even disavows them, those people who tend to represent these qualities will be devalued. These discredited qualities will be used as a rationalization to demonstrate the basic inferiority of the people who express them; ultimately this inferiority will be invoked as a reason why “these people” should not be allowed access to power or political equality. Ignoring the range of cultural influences on people’s development ensues from a psychology that overemphasizes internal traits and individual difference. It makes what is intrinsically political and cultural appear to be a result of personal pathology. In this quest to explain all pathology as personal, mothers are blamed (11) and individuals are “healed” back into adhering to the dominant narratives. The power imbalances in patriarchal nuclear families are rarely examined nor are the effects on people of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classicism, and overemphasis on being able-bodied.