Discrepant Relational Image
A discrepant relational image begins with an experience that makes more than one relational future imaginable. We speak and are heard. We disagree and the relationship survives. We need something and are not shamed for needing it.
What is a Discrepant Relational Image in Relational-Cultural Theory?
A discrepant relational image is an experience that contradicts a person's usual expectations about relationships. When connection works differently than expected, it can expand what feels possible in future relationships
Applications in therapy
- Listen for the exception as carefully as the pattern. Who stayed, listened, or welcomed something others rejected?
- Help the client notice the difference without dismissing older patterns. Change happens through believable experience, not forced optimism.
- Test the new possibility selectively. Notice which relationships are safe enough for a risk.
Applications in community
- Respond in ways people can feel: welcome disagreement, repair harm, and engage in power-with practices.
- Repeat the experience. One surprising moment can matter; steady practice offers somewhere to grow.
- Do not use an exception to deny a larger pattern. One trustworthy group does not erase exclusion or unequal power
Evolution of Discrepant Relational Images in Relational-Cultural Therapy
Discrepant relational images developed within Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver’s broader work on relational images. They used relational images to rethink transference in 1991, then emphasized in 1995 that people carry inconsistent and contradictory experiences rather than one neat relational story. Their clinical examples show how a therapist’s responsiveness can be visible and still hard to take in when it conflicts with an old expectation. The seeds of discrepancy are here: change begins not only by understanding the dominant image, but also by noticing the experience that does not fit.
In The Healing Connection (1997), Miller and Stiver described therapy as a relationship where old expectations can be enacted, understood, and changed. Miller’s 2002 paper How Change Happens made the developmental movement explicit: growth involves modifying relational images or constructing new ones through new experience with other people. Change is not simply a better idea about relationships. It becomes believable through connection.
Judith V. Jordan’s Relational-Cultural Therapy gives discrepant relational images a clear role in practice. Therapist and client look for exceptions to a dominant, limiting expectation. A person who expects anger to bring rejection may remember someone who stayed close and took the anger seriously. As that exception is noticed, tested, and met with more experiences that support it, it can challenge the certainty of the old image and become a place of relational hope.
Current RCT formulations continue to name relational images and discrepant relational images as distinct but related constructs. A relational image is the expectation we carry; a discrepant relational image is the experience that does not follow it. The discrepancy may be found in memory, in a current relationship, in therapy, or in a community that responds differently. It opens possibility without pretending the earlier pattern was unreal or that every relationship is now safe.
Questions
- When has someone responded with more care or openness than you expected?
- What familiar expectation did that experience contradict?
- Where might you safely let this different experience shape one small relational risk?
Relational Challenge
Complete two sentences: “I usually expect…” and “One time it was different was…”
Name what the other person did and what became possible between you. Then choose whether to remember the experience, share it with someone trustworthy, or let it support one small step in a relationship that feels safe enough.
The goal is not to disprove your history. It is to let the exception count.
If negative relational images contribute to a sense of hopelessness and isolation, discrepant relational images challenge their "pathological certainty"; they are places of hope and relational possibility