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I’ve been considering the idea that relationships tend to fall into three patterns:
Hierarchical. One person’s needs and wants take precedence over the other’s.
Transactional. Each gives something to get something.
Mutual. Two people coming together as whole people, seeing and responding to one another as whole people—to connect and discover one another.
In a mutual relationship, each person becomes something else and something more by virtue of that coming together. This is a relationship continually co-created by two, each shaping and being shaped by the other—an experience of “we,” not just two “I’s.”
This is where genuine intimacy happens. This is what philosopher Martin Buber referred to as an “I-Thou” relationship (versus an “I-It” relationship).
Many people have never experienced this kind of mutual relationship and cannot conceive of it, any more than a fish could conceive of “not water.” It is simply outside their experience.
When such people are dissatisfied with the subordinate role in a hierarchical relationship and seek a more satisfying one, they do not envision a mutual relationship. Instead, they envision another hierarchical relationship with the roles reversed.
When they are dissatisfied with a transactional relationship and seek a more satisfying one, they do not envision a mutual relationship. Instead, they envision another transactional relationship with better terms.
One distinguishing feature of psychodynamic psychotherapy is that it develops the capacity for more mutual relationships—specifically by exploring what occurs in the psychotherapy relationship itself.
Because of the work done in the therapy relationship, mutuality and intimacy become more possible in other relationships.
This is one reason most psychodynamic therapists are deeply unimpressed by pop-psychology notions of self-love, self-healing, self-care, etc. It’s all self, self, self.
But our experience of self is formed in relationship, and requires relationship to change.
We become most fully ourselves in mutual relationships where we are truly seen.
This is entirely different from the “self-care” and “self-love” promoted by therapy influencers.
