Listen to thisWhile I applaud the theme of this month’s journal, I would like to pause for a moment before celebrating, to wonder exactly what constitutes relational practice in the 21st century? I certainly support any effort to increase our capacity to act in relation as a basic premise of practice. I have written quite a lot about the need for relational care and the necessity of having a fundamental understanding of the ways in which we are all connected to each other in the work that we do.
However, I have also cautioned about understanding relational practice too narrowly. I have proposed that understanding relational practice as defined as a relationship between two human beings within the limited confines of an institutional setting, as both inadequate and misleading. None of us lives in a world in which our relationships are composed of only two participants and having those participants be only humans. We have always been engaged at every level of our being in a pattern that connects us in a web of relations well beyond the limitations of humanity alone, that are profoundly influential in how we are composed at every level of our being.
Of course, we can and do ignore this in our work and can come to see what we do as limited to a worker and a young person in relation to one another within the relational coordinates of an institution such as a family, a community, or a school. Many of us have been taught that this is what a relationship is, an interaction in which we form connection to one another in ways that we hope will be helpful or possibly even transformative.
In some models of relational care, it is explicit that the relationship is between a caregiver and a care recipient. That the goal is to sustain a meaningful relationship between these two parties. A successful relationship is one in which the care that is given creates well-being in the physical, emotional, social, and psychological aspects of the care recipient’s lived experience. The tools to meet this goal often include the use of building trust, utilizing compassion, and empathy. The work is person centered and seeks to center the unique needs, preferences and values of the care recipient. The ability to use effective open and honest dialogue in developing respect and clarity is fundamental to effective relational care. The worker should be reliable and consistent and provide companionship and a sense of belonging. This should all be done collaboratively and with a goal of empowering the care recipient. Finally, if this all works, both the worker and the care recipient can share in mutual growth and transformation.
These are laudable goals for practice and if they were to be actualized in any meaningful way in CYC practice across the globe we would all be better for it. However, I worry that to describe relational practice in this way makes it appear as though relational practice can be done within any context and between any set of care givers and care recipients. In my own thinking about relational care and its associate practices, there are three contextual elements that need be accounted for if we are truly serious about what might be called deep care in the same way that Arne Naess talks about deep ecology.
These elements would include, understanding the historical context in which the work is taking place, understanding the politics of a given historical period, and lastly understanding the kind of social subjects being produced by the social forces of the society in which the care is taking place. Of course, one can certainly do the work without this kind of in-depth analysis, but I would argue that such work will lack the transformative power necessary, if our field is going to be able to contribute to shaping a generation that can care enough about all our relations to avoid the ongoing brutality and suicidal impulses of our current system of human society.
In that sense, relational care is a fundamentally ontological project that goes well beyond simple life enhancement and maintenance of any particular life. Instead, it becomes a question of who we are to become as a component of a web of profoundly interconnected living systems. It is a question of producing ourselves ontologically as beings capable of working relationally to care for life itself.
To begin to think about our relational practice as a form of deep ecology, requires that we understand the necessity of learning to care for each other as human beings, but also for all our interspecies relations that we rely on for our sustenance and very existence.
While the escalating ecological crisis of the 21st century can seem as though it is so large and global in scale as to be somewhat irrelevant to the day-to-day functioning of relational practice in CYC institutions, it is precisely at the level of micro-politics that we learn how to care for life.
It is in the way we treat each other at the most mundane level that we set the template for how we will care as a society and a species. The capacity for care is what shapes the parameters of society and culture in terms of the ability to live in harmony or strife. When a society is founded on the lived experience of care at the day-to-day level, it is much easier to live in harmony with each other. When a society is built on a lived experience of indifference or even emotional or physical domination through various forms of violence on a day-to-day basis, there will be strife and trauma.
The ways in which the system of value is determined and reinforced in the daily lives of all of us is what determines the characteristics of a historical period. While the question of value in a given historical moment may also seem a bit abstract, what we value or care about as a collective is built moment by moment by acts that demonstrate what is important to us. The broad parameters of history are set into motion at the micro level as billions of interactions that added together set a template for how we will treat ourselves and the world around us.
In our current era, the relational characteristics of collective care appear to me to be highly ambivalent and riddled with struggles for dominance and control. The historical zeitgeist is one of uncertainty, fear, trauma, and massive violence that is manifested in relational coordinates of alienation and dislocation. To imagine that we can ignore this historical context in developing practices of relational care is a kind of willful blindness.
That said, does it matter if we practice care on a micro level between a worker and a young person? Without a doubt, by the logic I have just described millions of such interactions could begin to shift our social coordinates interaction by interaction. However, the capacity to do the kind of deep relational work that can recalibrate our social identities sufficiently to change the historical trajectory of the 21st century is extraordinarily challenging to say the least. To work in deep relational care requires that we reconfigure ourselves as people who live outside history. That is to say, that we would work to become social subjects that live in an alternative future now. This would mean finding a way through our training as alienated and traumatized people who function out of fear. Instead, we need to find ways that allow us to build new forms of relationship to the world around us premised in the fearless capacity for care.
This is particularly difficult, because the systems in which we are embedded from birth on are saturated with hierarchical power dynamics that confuse narcissistic desires for control and domination with acts of care. This is perhaps most obvious at the micro level in the relationships between those designated as adults and those designated as children. In our contemporary society those care givers often referred to as parents or parental figures are trained in the fine art of asserting dominance and control as acts of protection or even love. This can range from very subtle forms of emotional manipulation to the outright violence of corporal punishment. The justification for this hierarchical imposition of adult force is rooted in notions of human development that would have us view young people as developmentally inferior to adults and in need of control and shaping. This hierarchical orientation that produces us as seeking to be superior to others, is embedded in our social unconscious like a virus that spreads across the social with sometimes deadly symptoms and other times simply understated feelings of unease and dissatisfaction.
There are those who would say that the struggle for domination and control through the assertion of hierarchical imperatives is human nature. Such an argument would propose that such innate human inclinations can be moderated but will always persist. We can strive inspirationally to act more equitably but that is probably the best we can do. Our relationships will always have some element of aggression and a need for control.
While we can certainly see that struggle in the living practices of CYC workers, there are too many exceptions to the rule for dominance and control be human nature. While there are certainly many rule-bound, hierarchical program that use staff authority to manage and control young people, there are also programs and individual workers who center their work on principles of equity and harmony. In many cases, this is not a struggle against an inherent sense of immutable determinism. Instead, it is an affirmation of a radically different sense of difference that arises out of a sense of interconnectedness that operates outside the dominant logic of our current social norms. Such work is every bit as much an indication of human capacity as the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary social system of brutality and hierarchical violence.
Arne Naess, when speaking about the ecological prospects for the planet stated that he was a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. He believed that in the short-term we humans would continue to make a mess of our relationships with the planet and all living things on it. But he believed that there was a failsafe built into human thought which would cause us to realize that what we are doing is fatally flawed. He thought that it was inevitable that we would come to our senses and recalibrate our social organization in such a way as to be sustainable for all living things including ourselves. This shift could take centuries and in the interim, there could be quite a lot of damage and loss of life. But he believed, as a long-term optimist, we would come to our senses in time to build a functional and sustainable future.
I feel very similarly about the field of CYC and our prospects for building relational practices of deep care. For the immediate future, I worry that our attempts at relational care will be compromised by the toxic frameworks of our current system of dominance and control. Escaping the dominant logic of our age is challenging to say the least. But to ignore or minimize the effects our way of life has on the very capacity to form deep relationships of care seriously compromises the force that relational practice offers. It is no mistake that the current system does all it can to keep us at odds, alienated from each other, lonely, and at least slightly desperate. It is to the advantage of any system of domination and control to sustain a sense of incoherence and fragmentation. We are far easier to control alone and lonely.
Under such conditions, we must be careful that within the existing systems capacity for producing fake versions of pretty much everything, we don’t fall for a simulated version of relational practice as well. A version of relational care that skates along the surface of relational possibility and gets used to the ends of assimilation into the system itself rather than building living relationships between all of us. We must beware practices that refuse the depth and complexity that characterizes life itself rather than a simulation of life. Which is why, at the end of day, I can’t yet celebrate Relational Practice. For me, there is far too much work to be done. Like Naess, I remain a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist. I believe we can do it, but we have a long way to go.
