Wellness Calendar: Sunday 21 December

The twenty-first revolution

[Psychological contact with others; I-it vs I-thou; citizenship]

The belief within person-centred circles is that as social creatures we need to have people around us. As we become unwell when we’re isolated, it’s through relationships that we maintain our psychological health, and through relationships that we’re able to change our personality. It’s through relationships that we overcome our psychological tensions. Put another way: wellness without psychological contact with anyone is a non-starter. Reaching out to others is priceless.

The level of psychological contact you have with others is likely to determine the quality of your relationships and your ability to be supportive to another person as well as receive support.

Communicating face-to-face, on the phone, via text or email or through smoke signals all have their strengths and weakness. Communicating in a quiet environment may help to facilitate a better contact with someone than a noisy café, but not always, as for some people the silence would be off-putting. Communicating in ways other than words can also expand and enhance the contact with others. So, sport, activities, play, movement, dance, painting, drawing, music, sculpture, colour, sounds, gestures, body language, etc., can all come to the fore.

Below are some factors that may be useful to consider when it comes to psychological contact.

The more of yourself you bring to the table, the greater the contact there will be. If, instead, you bring to a meeting a set of robotic skills, a set of mechanised tools, a set of fears, a set of expectations of how things are going to go, you’re likely to be restricting and limiting the quality of the contact with others. If you can only engage in certain parts of another person’s personality, you’re likely to restrict any prospect of them being able to express themselves fully. The following terms can also be useful to consider and reflect upon when it comes to exploring the minutiae of contact...

• Consensualness, reciprocation, mutuality, equality: Is this a two-way meeting of minds, where the power dynamics are shared, or are there elements of ‘power over’ the other?
• Intimacy, engagement, emotional contact: How able or willing are you to get closeness, togetherness? Have you formed an attachment?
• Recognition, knowledge: How far will you go to recognise and understand what’s going on for the other person?
• Responsiveness, engagement, involvement, energetics: How bothered are you about the other person?

In an attempt to make sense of our relationships, 18th century philosopher Martin Buber split our experiences with others into two camps. He called them “I-It” & “I-Thou.”

In an I-It relationship, there’s a distance between two people: they are separate from one another. In an I-It relationship, there’s little engagement between the two parties, and little investment of energy in each other. Neither side wishes to reveal much of themselves, so there’s little to bond them together.

An I-It relationship can be merely a functional, transactional meeting, based on money, a need or a duty. An I-it relationship can come about when one or both parties sees the other as nothing more than an object. An I-It relationship has no channels in which the parties can come together; they are either blocked or were never opened up. Unsurprisingly, an I-It relationship is meaningless – it barely even qualifies as a relationship. It’s largely about people sharing the same space, and little else.

In an I-Thou relationship, however, there’s a connection between the parties, where the two people engage with and truly encounter one another. An I-Thou relationship contains meaning and meaningfulness; there’s openness and trust. In an I-Thou relationship you can be authentic, as there’s no need to pretend.

Would it be useful to go through the relationships in your own life, and see how many of them are I-It and how many are I-Thou?

If you’re not happy with the balance of I-It and It-Thou relationships in your life, could you strive to improve the relationships that you have, or find new people with whom you can form strong connection?

Buber believed that most societies are set up as I-It, and that the disconnection between institutions and citizens has an alienating effect on individuals. What do you think?

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