When someone is suffering psychologically, or when someone’s behaviour angers us, wears us out or makes things difficult for us, we almost automatically look for the cause inside the individual.
“He has trust issues.”
“She’s dependent.”
“He’s excessively jealous.”
“She has anxiety.”
Our language, like much of our culture, has taught us to treat psychological difficulty as an individual phenomenon — as something that lives inside a person regardless of where they are, who they are relating to, and the conditions that form around them.
The perspective of relational psychotherapy offers a different reading.
It does not deny personal history or individual responsibility. But it adds a crucial dimension: many of the experiences we consider internal and individual emerge within relationship.
We are never entirely alone.
We always exist within a field of relationships.
Our experience is shaped not only by what we carry inside us, but also by what is created between us and others.
So the question is not only: “what is happening inside you?”
It is also: “what is happening between you?”
Imagine a woman who becomes intensely anxious in a relationship, to the point of panicking that every absence means the end of it. She constantly asks for reassurance. She worries when her partner withdraws. She checks, she insists, she is afraid.
It is easy to say that she is excessive, dependent or dramatic.
And she probably does carry experiences that make her more vulnerable to abandonment and rejection.
But that is not the whole picture.
If her partner is consistently emotionally distant, avoids commitment, struggles to express himself or continually creates uncertainty, then her anxiety is not born exclusively inside her.
It is triggered, amplified and takes its particular shape within the relationship.
Her behaviour may be an attempt by the relational system itself to restore the contact that is being withdrawn. Not as the pathology of one individual, but as an expression of a difficulty in the relationship.
In the same way, a person considered cold or emotionally unavailable may, in a different relationship, show tenderness, availability and closeness.
What has changed?
The relational field within which each person’s experience emerges. Gestalt field theory holds that a person cannot be understood in isolation from their environment and their relationships. Experience emerges at the meeting point between organism and environment, not exclusively inside the individual. From this perspective, even individual symptoms and traits acquire relational meaning; they are not only individual difficulties but express the way contact is formed within a particular field of relationships.
This does not mean that other people are responsible for what we feel.
But it does mean that our feelings are never created in a relational vacuum.
Fear, anxiety and depressive symptoms do not appear independently of the context in which we live and relate. They acquire form, intensity and meaning within particular experiences of relationship.
Trust and safety, likewise, are not only internal states. They are experiences that emerge in relationship, when there is another person available to co-create them. We cannot feel safe in an environment experienced as threatening, just as we cannot feel it in a relationship where the other side does not offer steady and secure ground.
In psychotherapy we often speak about emotional co-regulation: our nervous system is continually affected by the presence, the stance, the gaze, the tone of voice and the emotional availability of the significant people in our lives. As children, before we learned to calm ourselves and feel safe on our own, we learned to do it through someone else. And this is a function in relationships that never fully recedes; often we go on finding it hard to regulate our feelings depending on the quality of the relationship we are living in.
For these reasons we need to be careful when we label a person with psychological terms.
Words like “jealous”, “insecure”, “dependent”, “avoidant”, “toxic”, “dramatic” may describe only a behaviour — what we see — but not necessarily what is happening.
Sometimes they describe a moment in a person’s life, or a role they are called upon to take within a particular relationship, rather than the person themselves.
Psychotherapy is not interested only in discovering what someone has.
It is interested in understanding what happens when this person meets another within a relationship.
And often in seeing that what looks like “one individual’s symptom” is in reality a way of existing within a relationship.
Because the symptom does not belong exclusively to one person. It belongs to the encounter, to the relationships that shaped us, to the relationships we are living today, and often to the wider systems we belong to and are affected by.
Perhaps this is why change does not always begin when we try to fix ourselves.
Sometimes it begins when we start to see more clearly what is happening between us and others, and to choose consciously to stand differently within what keeps repeating and being activated in a particular way.
