Ethics and Power: Navigating Mutuality in Therapeutic Relationships, by Pam Birrell, Ph.D. is now available through the Wellesley Centers for Women Publications Office.

This paper explores Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) and the ethics of power-with, of mutuality and relational engagement. It examines how we and those with whom we work become whole and how we help others. Ethics is not a set of rules to follow, but is an attitude and a stance toward the suffering of others and toward helping them to heal. Mutual respect and mutual power, relational engagement, and the importance of uncertainty, being open to the people with whom we work are described as core ethical concerns. This paper initiates a conversation on relational-cultural ethics which can create possibilities and growth fostering relationships for all. - Abstract

Pam Birrell, Ph.D., is a Senior Instructor in the psychology department at the University of Oregon, and a psychologist in private practice. She completed the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute Practitioner Program in 2006.

Comment (0)

REGISTER ONLINE TODAY for The Power of Connection: Tools for Personal and Social Change, JBMTI's  Intensive Institute from June 23-26, 2011 at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.

In response to feedback from our recent constituent survey, we've overhauled our Intensive Institute to focus more on practical applications of RCT and skills you need to be a better practitioner. We expanded workshops, community-building activities, research instruction, and theory-into-action exercises to empower and support participants as relational leaders in their work, families, and communities. We have also brought back on-campus housing accommodations during the Institute.

Highlights: Plenaries: Why RCT Matters in the Real World, "Be the Change" Conversations, and Action Growing from Community;  Workshops: Creating Connection in a Sea of Disconnection: Research-Informed Clinical Practice, Getting Unstuck: The Tools of Empathy, Reclaiming the Connected Brain: A 10 Step Program to Awaken Your Natural Ability to Connect, and "Talking" the Talk through Media Commentary;  Community: Group activities and poster sessions.

See you in June!

Comment (0)

RCT practitioner Judith Lockhart-Radtke recently published, Weaving Yarn, Weaving Cultures, Weaving Lives: A Circle of Women in Oaxaca, Mexico, in which she acknowledges Jean Baker Miller's influence on the book and her work:

This theory depended on the work of Paulo Freire and Jean Baker Miller...Jean Baker Miller has written extensively that women grown best in relationships of mutuality. This was the first experiment with Miller's work in the developing world in a cross-cultural project, and both Miller and the Institute she founded at Wellesley College were interested and supportive participants.

The Circle of Women began in 2002 when Judith Lockhart-Radtke and Pia Scognamiglio, a Swiss-Mexican midwife, joined to support the women of Oaxaca in building healthy and viable communities. Their vision is to "strive to realize social justice for women by supporting self-reliance, raising consciousness of individual talents and skills and enhancing cross-cultural relations."

Comment (0)

New York Times columnist David Brooks has recently released a new book, The Social Animal. Cited neuroscience, scientists, and the importance of relationship, in his recent column, "The New Humanism," Brooks sums up so much of the work and paradigm shifts Jean Baker Miller called for in Toward a New Psychology of Women thirty-five years ago and JBMTI has been proposing for decades. JBMTI highly recommends Brooks's new book, as well as the inclusion of the worldview he is proposing in the larger culture.

Cannot recommend reading the entire column enough (link provided below). In the meantime, following is a short excerpt of the entire article.

Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust that marred that society. While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else. - Column excerpt

Read the entire column

Comment (0)

Dateline recently ran an in-depth 10-segment series on bullying including both boys and girls. While the show missed the opportunity to discuss some key power dynamics such as the role of race and why there are even bullies in the first place, the series is impressive in that it delves deeper into the power dynamics of bullying beyond telling kids to just "be nice."

Watch the complete series

Comment (0)

Dr. Amy Banks, JBMTI's director of advanced training, has long been touting the central role of oxytocin, often called "the love drug," in connection and relational neurobiology. Two recent reports delve into the complexities of the drugs affects on human behavior.

Boston's WCVB-TV featured the story, 'Cuddle Drug' May Help Couples Bond, highlighting a new treatment of doctors giving patients "small tables that contain oxytocin" to increase feelings of intimacy. The report quotes Dr. Matt French of Wellness Solutions in Phoenix, "If a couple is struggling with bonding issues, with intimacy issues, it could be as a result of inadequate levels of the hormone oxytocin."

On the flip side, a January 11, 2011 piece in The New York Times, Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds, clarifies that oxytocin is not a universal answer to better connection among all people or to world peace. According to the article, Dr. Carsten K. W. De Dreu, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, decided to take a closer look at oxytocin after, "he decided on evolutionary principles that no one who placed unbounded trust in others could survive." His experiment found oxytocin to produce ethnocentric behavior, and to create "intergroup bias primarily because it motivates in-group favoritism and because it motivates out-group derogation." 

What does it mean that a chemical basis for ethnocentrism is embedded in the human brain? “In the ancestral environment it was very important for people to detect in others whether they had a long-term commitment to the group,” Dr. De Dreu said. “Ethnocentrism is a very basic part of humans, and it’s not something we can change by education. That doesn’t mean that the negative aspects of it should be taken for granted.”

Bruno B. Averbeck, an expert on the brain’s emotional processes at the National Institute of Mental Health, said that the effects of oxytocin described in Dr. De Dreu’s report were interesting but not necessarily dominant. The brain weighs emotional attitudes like those prompted by oxytocin against information available to the conscious mind. If there is no cognitive information in a situation in which a decision has to be made, like whether to trust a stranger about whom nothing is known, the brain will go with the emotional advice from its oxytocin system, but otherwise rational data will be weighed against the influence from oxytocin and may well override it, Dr. Averbeck said.

Dr. Averbeck said he was amazed that a substance like oxytocin can affect such a high-level human behavior. “It’s really surprising to me that this neurotransmitter can so specifically affect these social behaviors,” he said. - NY Times article excerpt

Both reports confirm the importance of relational neuroscience research in understanding the role of the brain and its neurotransmitters in affecting human and social behavior.

Comment (0)

The complete schedule for the upcoming Intensive Institute, The Power of Connection: Tools for Personal and Social Change, is now available.

Program Highlights: Plenaries: Why RCT Matters in the Real World, "Be the Change" Conversations, and Action Growing from Community;  Workshops: Creating Connection in a Sea of Disconnection: Research-Informed Clinical Practice, Getting Unstuck: The Tools of Empathy, Reclaiming the Connected Brain: A 10 Step Program to Awaken Your Natural Ability to Connect, and "Talking" the Talk through Media Commentary;  Community: Group activities and poster sessions.

Online registration will open soon. Please contact us at jbmti@wellesley.edu with any questions. We look forward to seeing you in June!

15 CEUs awarded (APA approved - NASW, LMHC, LMFT approval pending)

Comment (0)

by Harriet Schwartz, Ph.D.

I submitted a post late in 2010 to tell members of the JBMTI community about Antioch University's Ph.D. in Leadership and Change program, a program that holds relational leadership at its core. As promised, I's writing a second post to tell you about some of the related research that is in the works or has been completed at Antioch.

Martha Miser is a current student who is developing her dissertation topic. Martha writes: "In a sentence, my dissertation topic looks at globalization, growth, and social change from a feminist lens. In particular, I am critiquing the idea of endless accumulation that is the foundation of economic growth, capitalism, globalization, etc. I'm using a number of feminist scholars in this work, including Joyce Fletcher. I can't say yet exactly if/when/how relational theory will be a major element in my dissertation argument, but in any case, I'm also interested as a practitioner in leadership development and organizational change (I'm a coach, educator, consultant)."

Deborah A. Fredricks graduated in 2009. Fredricks drew directly on RCT, citing several Stone Center publications. Deborah's dissertation title is "The Leader's Experience of Relational Leadership: A Hermenuetic Phenomenological Study of Leadership at Friendship." 

And finally, I completed my dissertation "Thankful Learning: A Grounded Theory Study of Relational Practice Between Master's Students and Professors" in May, 2009.  RCT continues to be at the core of my research endeavors and I'm currently conducting a second study looking at relational practice between master's students and professors: this time I am using a different methodology (critical incident technique) and am interviewing current students to try to capture the smaller moments of connection.

I share these research examples with you because I believe that Antioch is unique in the way that the program design and faculty honor and draw from RCT and relational practice more broadly defined. For more information on Antioch's Ph.D. program visit: http://www.phd.antioch.edu/ In addition,  I would be delighted to talk with you or anyone you know who is interested in the program, harrietschwartz14@gmail.com.

Comment (1)

Comment (0)

Dr. Dolores Finger Wright, an associate professor of social work at Delaware State University (DSU), was recently honored for "the role she played in the historic public accommodations demonstrations in Greensboro, N.C. during the early 1960s," as announced in a recent statement from DSU. 

On February 5, 2011 Dr. Finger Wright received the International Civil Rights Center & Museum Sit-In Hero’s Award during a gala commemorating the 51^st anniversary of the Greensboro Sit-ins.

Comment (0)