I have written at length over the years about the concept of a “relational home” within the dimension of psychotherapy. Why this term is relevant why it and matters.
While the idea of a relational home sounds appealing, a bit warm and fuzzy, there is a complexity at its core that warrants further exploration.
A relational home isn’t built of bricks and wood. It may or may not include family members. The relational home is created when a therapist (or an emotionally attuned partner, friend, or caregiver) provides a safe non-judgmental space for someone in need of healing to grapple with intense or overwhelming feelings. Within this abstract space, feelings are acknowledged, validated and shared.
In this relational therapy, the clients are heard and assured they are not alone in their suffering. The therapist’s own traumatic experiences come into play.
That’s not always the case. Today, psychotherapy tends to operate under a set of guidelines that includes the clinician as distanced expert, someone who through education and historical insight provides a patient with a set of treatment goals. Through exploration, the therapist seeks to highlight behaviors and choices negatively affecting the patient’s mental state. Then comes course-correction and, presumably, healing. A valid and reasonable path for many … and yet something feels absent. This could explain why some people feel empty and alone after therapy has concluded.
The relational-home concept was introduced by Dr. Robert D Stolorow after the sudden and unexpected passing of his beloved wife, Dede. The pain was so acute and unbearable that his alienation turned him into “a stranger in a strange land.” He feared no one could comprehend his grief. He would be required to move through the pain expeditiously for the sake of others and their comfort.
“My broken heart, unwanted and banished, went into deep hiding,” Stolorow wrote.
Finally, a colleague who became a lifelong friend turned to him and said, “You’re on a train to nowhere.”
Because of his own experiences, Dr. George Atwood, his “brother in the darkness,” understood Stolorow’s suffering on a deeper level. This experience brought a deeper insight into the nature of trauma. The men began a mutual quest for improved treatments. The birth of the “relational home” came to pass.
Stolorow cites the idea of a Harry Potter portkey. In the Potter books a portkey was a magical mechanism that in a flash transports a human being to another place or even time. Stolorow says those in pain can be similarly transported via sense memories to the space where the loss and trauma were first experienced. This can be triggered by a simple sound, a smell, an image, a musical piece.
Stolorow draws on the concept that trauma transcends the temporal. It does not know manmade space and time. He posits that at any time any place a traumatic memory can occur. With this knowledge and understanding, a therapist can lean into such awareness with implicit understanding. He states that the “observer” is also the “observed.” When traumatic pain is shared with relational attunement, the reduction of suffering and/or shame in isolation brings about healing.
Stolorow writes about the importance of drawing on the therapist’s own traumatic experiences. The resulting relational home brings a dimension of experience and comprehension to the unique experience of another individual. Such understanding of shared trauma deepens a needed vital connection for a patient’s losses, which well-intentioned sympathy and empathy cannot quite provide.
Trauma is more deeply understood and possibly even embraced as an integral part of our human condition.
Such a relational understanding of trauma liberates us from any shackles that hold it is shameful, or time limited. Something to be rid of; something to get through or get past.
A sense of relief results from the collaborative experience. We walk as brothers and sisters in the darkness, no longer alone.
Photo illustration: AI via Nano Banana