At the Bloomington Center for Connection, we take a unique approach to mental health and community engagement through the lens of Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT). RCT is at the heart of everything we do, shaping our mental health services, playful interventions, and partnerships with the community. But with so many therapeutic approaches now emphasizing connection and the importance of relationships, why RCT?
Why Relational-Cultural Theory?
RCT offers more than just a focus on connection. It invites us to step into relationships with openness, curiosity, and a deep commitment to mutuality and empowerment. These principles transform therapy into a shared journey where both client and therapist grow together.
Importantly, RCT also names how our culture’s emphasis on hyper-individualism and independence can make it harder to form meaningful connections. By understanding the cultural forces that shape us, RCT helps us move toward relationships that foster growth and resilience.
Mutuality: a shared journey
In RCT, mutuality is key. It means therapists don’t stand apart as untouchable “experts.” Instead, they’re open to being moved by their clients. This willingness to trust the connection creates a space of curiosity and exploration. Space to learn who we are, how we impact one another, and how we shape the space between us.
In therapy, this means the process isn’t something the therapist does to the client, but something they do with the client. Together, they navigate challenges, celebrate growth, and foster healing in a shared experience.
Navigating power in therapy
Power dynamics are a natural part of the therapeutic relationship, but they’re often left unspoken. When you seek therapy, you’re entrusting someone with your most vulnerable parts. You’re looking for a guide you can trust to offer stability during tough moments, and help you find your way back when you feel lost.
This trust creates a natural power imbalance. The therapist’s training and expertise can deepen that dynamic. But RCT doesn’t ignore this reality. Instead, it shines a light on it. RCT encourages therapists to use their power not as a tool of control but as a pathway to shared empowerment. Through this lens, vulnerability becomes a bridge to connection, and the therapeutic space becomes a place of mutual growth.
Maureen Walker and Harriet Schwartz discuss these ideas in depth in this video:
Authenticity
Stepping away from the role of expert helps us develop a deeper connection with our clients. We may use a variety of other tools to aid in our exploration— Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Play Therapy, CBT, Narrative, expressive, and other techniques—but the foundational principle is that of authentic connection. If a therapist is focused on doing to, they are stepping out of an authentic connection and into power-over and certainty. Vulnerability, authenticity, and messy uncertainty are essential elements of healing, of doing with. Uncertainty becomes a place for growth.
Our culture’s focus on expertise, productivity, and perfection often makes it difficult to embrace the vulnerability and authenticity that true connection requires. By letting go of the need for certainty, therapists create a space for both themselves and their clients to experience the growth that emerges from the unknown.
While almost everyone wishes they could know the ending to their therapeutic journey (don’t we all want to peek at the last page of the book and see how it turns out?), certainty isn’t a representation of what actually happens when therapist and client are willing to be moved by each other. A therapist anchored in empathy and authenticity can provide room for growth we didn’t even know we were seeking.
Culture
Naming culture as the center of Relational-Cultural Theory shifts the emphasis to one that clarifies both the difficulties our culture places on making good connections and the multilayered relationships that sustain us, often without our conscious awareness. Our culture’s glorification of independence, competition, and individual success frequently undermines our ability to form and sustain meaningful relationships, leaving many of us disconnected and struggling to meet our deepest relational needs.
Committing to center culture means we are called to listen to and amplify marginalized voices in our work, to examine how we contribute to the marginalization and oppression perpetuated by our culture, and to use our layers of deep connection to make change.
RCT is not value-neutral. In The Complexity of Connection, Judith V. Jordan and Maureen Walker write, “RCT recognizes that to feign value neutrality is to perpetuate the distortions of the stratified culture.” In other words, pretending to be value-neutral props up toxic ways of being as the norm. Ignoring inequity and injustice—allowing them to remain unnamed in the therapy room or elsewhere—pathologizes the experience of the client without offering any real hope of change.
Hope
Most therapists enter the field because a therapist helped them or someone they loved, and they hope to do the same for others. Sometimes we are successful. Sometimes we are not. Sometimes we look out and see a world of possibility, other times it feels darker and scarier. Relational-Cultural Theory provides hope not only of helping individuals heal, but of healing our world.
The path of connection is filled with complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty. In the face of unknowns and humbling blindspots, we are dedicated to curiosity. In a world that is increasingly disconnected, violent, and filled with fear, where community needs are obscured by individual greed and competition, we feel a commitment to connection. And in turning to connection, we feel hope.
Judith V. Jordan and Maureen Walker, from Introduction to The Complexity of Connection, 2004