Relational Images
The past helps us predict what will happen in relationship—even when the present may hold another possibility.
What are Relational Images?
Relational images are mental models built from past experiences and cultural forces.
They influence how we anticipate responses, interpret behavior, and show up with others. They include ideas like "disagreement is dangerous"
Applications in therapy
- Listen for the relationship the client is expecting. This will offer clues about relational images shaping their understanding.
- Notice when the past enters the present relationship. Explore experiences that have led to strong relational expectations.
- Create room for something different to happen. Therapy can help develop some flexibility in rigid relational images.
Applications in community
- Get curious about what we expect from one another. Naming these expectations can help us notice when the past is shaping what feels possible now.
- Be curious about group expectations and their origins. Culture teaches us who is allowed to get angry, be helpful, etc.
- Build experiences that expand what feels possible. When conflict leads to deeper understanding, relational images shift.
Evolution of Relational Images
Miller and Stiver used relational images in their 1991 paper, A Relational Reframing of Therapy, where they used the concept to rethink transference. They developed it more fully in the 1995 paper Relational Images and Their Meanings in Psychotherapy, describing the inner pictures and meanings we build from what has happened to us in relationships. These images shape not only what we expect from others, but also what we believe about our own worth and relational possibilities.
Later RCT writing made culture and power more explicit. Jean Baker Miller connected relational images with Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of controlling images, showing how cultural distortions can become part of what people expect from themselves and others. She also emphasized flexibility: repeatedly reinforced images can become rigid, while new relational experiences can modify them or create contrasting ones. How Change Happens
Judith Jordan’s Relational–Cultural Therapy brings these developments together. Relational images can be reworked through mutual empathy, repaired disconnections, and experiences that introduce uncertainty into old expectations. The proposed current RCT framework continues to name both relational images and discrepant relational images as key constructs.
Questions
- When you imagine showing more of yourself in a relationship, what do you expect to happen?
- How do you decipher what your "gut" is telling you about a relationship?
- What are some of your unspoken rules? (for example, don't get angry)
Relational Challenge
Try to recall a recent time you felt like you overreacted to something. Check in with the physical sensations associated with that time, notice the narrative you carry about it.
It is usually the parts of our experience that we feel we cannot share that make trouble for us, the parts we have walled off because we've been led to believe that we cannot bring them into a relational connection.