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APA Psychotherapy Training Videos are intended solely for educational purposes for mental health professionals. Viewers are expected to treat confidential material found herein according to strict professional guidelines. Unauthorized viewing is prohibited.
In Relational–Cultural Therapy, Dr. Judith V. Jordan demonstrates and discusses this increasingly practiced approach to therapy. Relational–cultural therapy is a theory of doing therapy, as well as a developmental theory, that works on connection and disconnection in a client's life. A person's past relationships positively and negatively influence expectations—or relational images—of future relationships. People become disconnected from each other primarily because of negative relational images, and the therapist's job is to loosen the hold these negative images have on the client's present life. In this session, Dr. Jordan works with a young woman who suffered a lot of pain surrounding the death of her father. Dr. Jordan makes use of mutual empathy, an emotionally authentic responsiveness, through which she seeks to understand the client and join her where she is in the moment.
Relational–cultural theory (RCT) emphasizes the power of relationships to create change in individuals and groups. It posits that all people begin life with a yearning for connection: They wish to participate in the growth of others and they wish to be responded to, to "matter." Suffering arises when people experience a sense of "condemned isolation," alone, outside the human community, paralyzed in their efforts to reestablish connection, and self-blaming.
Judith V. Jordan, PhD is the director of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute and founding scholar at the Stone Center at Wellesley College. In addition to her position at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Dr. Jordan is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
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