I have been thinking about relationships and maturity and about some good psychological ideas that, once they become popular, start losing their depth and sometimes even begin to serve the opposite of what they were originally meant to serve.
For many years, in coaching, therapy, leadership development, and many other helping professions, we have spoken about the importance of boundaries, self-worth, self-love, self-respect, and one’s own voice. There has been, and still is, a very good reason for this, because many people lose themselves in relationships and do not know what they need, or they know it but do not dare to say it. Usually, they confuse, because they have not been taught otherwise, being good with being compliant, being loving with being self-sacrificing, and being accepted with being safe. So, of course, people need to learn to stand more firmly in themselves.
However, lately I have noticed the opposite tendency increasing. I hear a different kind of language, sometimes from people who are not beginners in self-development or coaching. “I have to choose myself first.” “I need to meet my own needs first.” “I am more interesting than other people.” “I think I am smarter than most people.” “I do not find others that interesting.” And sometimes, from coaches, I hear the question: how do I make myself interested in the client? How do I keep my curiosity when I know better?
I find these questions important, and also a little disturbing, not because we should be endlessly fascinated by every person or every conversation, but because they reveal how easily we can begin to see the other person as separate from us, as if their world had nothing to do with ours, as if their way of being were only about them and my reaction were only about me. But in real relationships it is rarely so simple. The other person brings themselves; I bring myself, and something is created between us. When we forget this, even very useful ideas about choosing ourselves, having boundaries or listening to our own needs can slowly become narrower than they were meant to be.
It seems to me that we sometimes move from one immaturity to another and call the second one freedom. First, people lose themselves in others. Then they learn that they should choose themselves. But sometimes “choosing myself” does not lead to maturity, but to a more psychologically educated form of self-centredness, misunderstanding what individuation means. I do not write this from a moralistic place. I think I understand why this happens. If people have spent years pleasing others, adapting to others, trying to be accepted, or proving their value, the discovery of “my needs” can feel like liberation. And it is liberation. At least at first. But if development stops there, then the self that was once too weak to stand may become too defended to relate.
This is where I think we need a more mature conversation, not about whether I should choose myself or others, but about what kind of self is being formed in the way I relate. In relationships, we often make the mistake of seeing too narrowly. We think what happens is about me or about the other person, while in reality every relationship reveals something about me, something about the other, and something about what we create between us. If we learn to see this more carefully, relationships become one of the most important places where we understand and mature ourselves.
We often speak as if human beings were separate individuals who later enter relationships. As if first there is “me,” then “you,” and then, if we decide, a relationship between us. But this is not how life begins, and perhaps it is not how life continues. We are born into relationships, shaped by relationships, and for a long time we may indeed be more a reflection of our families, cultures, languages, expectations, and wounds than we realize. This is why discovering one’s own voice, boundaries and agency is so important. But the mistake begins when we confuse becoming more individual with becoming separate. The more conscious self is not a self outside relationship. It is a self that understands how deeply it has been formed by relationships, and can therefore relate with greater awareness, choice, and responsibility. Kenneth Gergen, for example, challenges the idea that the individual self is the basic unit from which relationship begins. He suggests that meaning and identity emerge in relationship, in language, in culture, in what happens between us.
This does not mean that we are only products of others or that there is no personal agency, no inner life, no responsibility. But it does make the fantasy of the completely self-made, self-sufficient individual look very thin. We do not first become ourselves and then relate. We become ourselves through relating.
I remember once hearing a story about a journalist who decided to spend a long time alone in nature to understand himself more deeply. Unfortunately, I cannot quote the exact source anymore, so I do not want to present it as a reference, only as a story that stayed with me. At the beginning, he journaled and reflected a lot. But after some time, he noticed that his journal entries had begun to repeat. Without other people, without encounters, without the disturbance and surprise of another being, there was less and less new material through which he could discover himself. I believe there is something very true in this. I am not making a case against solitude, because being alone and withdrawing from the noise of other people to hear ourselves is crucial. But physical or psychological solitude alone does not reveal everything. Some parts of us appear only in contact. A simple example can illustrate this: I may think I am patient until I meet someone who is slower than me. Maybe I thought that I was very open to differences until someone’s worldview irritates me. I may think I am mature until another person touches exactly that place in me where I still need to defend, explain, prove, withdraw or be right.
This is also why conversations matter so much. Relationships not only reveal how I feel or behave; they also reveal the way I think about myself, the other person, and what is happening between us. David Bohm wrote that thought is a system. We usually speak about “my thoughts” as if they were private possessions, but much of what we think has been inherited, absorbed, repeated, defended, rewarded and normalized. Family, culture, and our professional environment think through us. Old fears and old needs also think through us. Sometimes even what we oppose continues to shape our thinking, because we are still reacting to it. And this is very difficult to see alone. When I am alone with my thoughts, I may simply continue to think from inside the same pattern. But in a reflective dialogue, especially when there is enough slowness, honesty and willingness to be disturbed a little, I may begin to notice not only what I think, but how I think. I may notice what I cannot tolerate, what I dismiss too quickly, where I become certain, where I become superior, where I stop listening, where I pretend to understand, where I want to be generous but actually want to control, where I say, “I am just being authentic,” but in fact I am protecting a very familiar version of myself. In this sense, conversations are not only exchanges of opinions. They are mirrors of our ways of seeing, choosing and relating.
Of course, I am not advocating for accepting every relationship, every behavior or every person. Some relationships need distance, clearer boundaries, or an end. But even then, if we are willing to look more carefully, relationships can show us something: about the other person, about ourselves, and about the quality of the field that is created between us. This is the perspective I am trying to emphasize — not that everything is relational in some abstract sense, but that we are never as separate from what happens between us as we sometimes imagine.
A few years ago, I started to question the concept of authenticity. I wrote and presented on it previously, so this time I won’t go into a deep reflection on it, but one aspect feels important here. Authenticity is also misused and misunderstood, especially when it is reduced to “being myself” or “expressing my truth.” For me, authenticity becomes more interesting when it is not only individual, but relational: not only whether I am true to myself, but also whether I can remain sincere, responsible and open in relation to another person. Am I protecting a boundary, or hiding behind it? Am I expressing myself, or avoiding being changed? In this sense, authenticity is not only about inner congruence, but also about the quality of truth and responsibility I can sustain in relationship. Adult development gives us a useful language for this. In some theories, a more mature form of consciousness is called self-transforming. I do not want to romanticize this stage, because such labels can too easily become another hierarchy of self-importance. But the idea itself is useful here. A self-transforming person is not someone without a self. They can stand somewhere, because they have values,
boundaries, commitments and a voice, but they are not imprisoned inside their own way of seeing. They can notice that their worldview is still a worldview, not reality itself. They can stay in contact with perspectives that disturb or challenge them, not because they have no ground, but because their ground is no longer so rigid that it must defend itself from everything different. In this sense, they are not only expressing a self; they are also willing to let the self be questioned, refined and transformed through relationship.
I think this is one of the developmental tasks of our time. We have learned to speak about the self, and this was necessary. But perhaps now we need to learn again how to speak about the ways in which the self is formed, revealed and transformed through relationship. Not to diminish individuality, but to understand it more deeply, because we do not become ourselves alone. In the end, every encounter participates in what we become. We shape and are shaped. We affect and are affected. We create more trust or more caution, more openness or more defense, more dignity or more diminishment. And still, we are not passive in this. We can notice, reflect, choose and learn to relate with more awareness. In this sense, relationship is never only relationship. It is one of the ways life continues to reveal and form us.
– Leda