Counseling and Psychotherapy. Группа авторов
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during trying and destabilizing times as the world grapples with a growing focus on injustices and indignities exacted against marginalized people; the perpetration of violence abroad and close to home; and economic, political, and public health crises. Relational-cultural theory (RCT) provides us with a progressive, feminist, multicultural, and social justice–focused counseling theory (Trepal & Duffey, 2016; Jordan, 2018). RCT offers counselors and clients a new way to see psychological distress and healing as relationally and contextually driven. This requires a careful examination of counselors’ worldviews, points of privilege, awareness of their social position, and how counselors share power in their work with clients.
Counselors continue to have much work to do in this regard. Hook et al. (2016) found that among 2,112 clients of color, 81% indicated that they experienced at least one microaggression from their counselor. Exploring the interrelated effects of counselors’ multicultural competency and cultural humility, Hook et al. found that a lack of counselor humility predicted microaggressions in client-counselor dyads for both racially and nonracially matched pairs. When clients experience these types of disconnections, their worlds and experiences may seem to matter less, and their voice and truth become marginalized and unheard. The implications of these results speak to the need for counselors to work from a theoretical framework that distinctly addresses how power, culture, and relationship flow in the counseling process while providing counselors and clients with a framework to understand and create mutually supportive, authentic, and growth-promoting relationships (Jordan, 2018). In this chapter, we share how RCT provides a conceptual roadmap and counseling philosophy that helps us examine the centrality of relationships, culture, social justice, and power.
BACKGROUND
The History of RCT
Since the mid-1970s, RCT scholars have critiqued the prevailing paradigms that guided the expectations for normal human development, optimal psychological functioning, and the primacy of a mutual client-counselor relationship (Jordan & Hartling, 2008). In 1977, Jean Baker Miller, Judith V. Jordan, Irene P. Stiver, and Janet L. Surrey began meeting regularly to support each other in their work, and their conversations grew into discussions about how traditional counseling and therapy approaches often failed or hurt women. As this collaboration evolved, these founding RCT scholars began contemplating new and meaningful ways to honor women’s experiences from developmental and counseling perspectives (Jordan & Hartling, 2008). By 1981, they established the Stone Center at Wellesley College and published an array of papers that continued to evolve the theoretical foundations and counseling applications of RCT (Jordan & Hartling, 2008). In 1995, the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute was established at Wellesley College and still exists today.
RCT scholars continue to expand RCT approaches in numerous counseling settings (Hartling & Lindner, 2016) and to promulgate these principles among international colleagues to address humiliation and promote dignity across the world. The Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network comprises a group of scholars and professionals who work to promote dignity worldwide and end systemic abuse across the globe (Hartling & Lindner, 2016). These efforts represent concerted efforts from RCT practitioners to address the roots of injustice, witness and honor humiliation that many feel, and cultivate dignity among all people. RCT is grounded in social justice, advocacy, and respect for people among cultures, and RCT practitioners long recognized and address power abuse, the weight of unearned privilege as a power-over dynamic, and the social and cultural factors of oppression.
Cultural and Social Justice Foundations
Power and Equality
Early in its development, RCT led at the forefront of counseling theories that intentionally centered culture, social justice, neuroscience, and the role of dehumanizing power structures as key theoretical counseling considerations (Jordan & Hartling, 2008). Miller (1986) explored the dynamics of equality and how social, racial, and relational systems favor and serve those in power positions. In exploring these systems of inequality, Miller conceptualized relational power imbalances as temporary or permanent. Temporary power imbalances represent socially defined roles, such as teachers and students or parents and children. The goal in these relationships is to eventually equalize the power differentials and serve the growth of those in subordinate positions. Despite this ideal, Miller contended that people often fail at promoting movement toward true equality in these types of relationships. People struggle with giving up power, especially when the voices and desires of those in subordinate roles differ from those in dominant positions.
Likewise, and potentially even more insidiously, permanent inequality represents ingrained power structures that relegate people to social positions on the basis of race, sex, gender identity, sexual affectations, ethnicity, and other ascribed characteristics of a person (Hammer et al., 2016; Miller, 1976, 1986). Within this social-relational framework, the characteristics and attributes of the dominant group set the expectations that define what is normal and abnormal, and people in subordinate social positions lose their voice, identity, and sense of mattering within the larger group. Oftentimes when people challenge the status quo of inequality, they meet acute and sustained violence, subjugation, or exile. Moreover, institutional, criminal, and economic structures serve to maintain inequalities in society and between people (Miller, 1976, 1986).
Many people in the dominant group avoid upsetting the balance of power because it may serve them well. Discussing and developing awareness of the myriad levels and expressions of inequality and power abuse may feel uncomfortable, and counselors serve their clients best when they are attuned to the ways power is experienced in a client’s context. RCT scholars explored the very dimensions of racism, societal injustice, and disenfranchisement that guide conversations today about multicultural and advocacy work (Comstock et al., 2008; Jordan, 2018; Miller, 1976, 1986). RCT offers a counseling framework for healing and advocacy that places a person’s life in context, and RCT counselors work to use their power with people rather than power over people (Jordan, 2018). Counselors also work to create the kinds of relationships that attend to how power hurts and how they can use their power to support equality and liberation from painful contexts. The work done in RCT is relational, mutual, and keenly focused on power to (Jordan, 1991) bring change in the counseling space.
RCT as Social Justice and Multicultural Counseling
From a multicultural and social justice perspective, counselors acknowledge the very real covert and overt experiences of disenfranchisement, racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism that people experience acutely and chronically (Flores & Sheely‐Moore, 2020; Jordan & Hartling, 2008; Singh et al., 2020; Singh & Moss, 2016). Cultural and societal messages propagated by dominant social groups define mental health and deviance. When these embedded narratives enter counseling sessions, counselors and clients can unwittingly engage in the suppression of a client’s authentic experiences and pain while reinforcing the dominant messages that maintain the privilege of the dominant group (Jordan & Hartling, 2008). As evidenced by Hook et al.’s (2016) research, most counselors engaged in microaggressions in counseling with Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, which undermined the potential for true relational healing. Hook et al. found that although a counselor’s multicultural competence reduced microaggressions, a counselor’s level of cultural humility emerged as the strongest predictor of microaggressions in counseling practice. When clients rated their counselors lower on cultural humility, they also noticed that their counselor avoided discussing or minimized cultural issues and racism in counseling, directly and indirectly expressed cultural stereotypes, and denied their own potential biases.
RCT provides counselors with a conceptual framework to address the core issues in working with both marginalized and privileged groups. RCT places the concepts of power and dominance in society and the resultant dehumanizing narratives that flow from these social structures at the forefront of the counseling process. RCT advocates for the use of power that equalizes and honors clients with diverse experiences and identities. RCT honors a client’s experiences, recognizes the damaging effects