relationships

even in cases where we’re devoted to a person, and know a lot about them, it’s still possible to not see them. You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

If reflection reveals who you are and relationship reveals the world you want to see, then creation is what merges those two domains together. By expressing the core of who you are through the medium of your choice, you act as a beacon for those that share a similar core as well.

Think of it as like a true and close relationship between two conscious beings: neither is of course ‘made up’ by the other, but both are to some extent, perhaps to a great extent, ‘made’ what they are through their relationship.

He likens ritual to the raft that takes you from one side of a river—one phase of life—to the other. “Ritual provides the exclamation points for our lives, more than it does the periods. Ritual is the wrapping that makes even the most outrageous ideals believable.”

Sullivan believed that our struggles were interactional (meaning “relational”). He went so far as to say, “It’s the mark of a senior clinician that he or she is the same person in their living room that they are in their office.” We can’t teach patients to be relational if we aren’t relational with them.