Relational psychodynamics occur within us, around us and between us in relationships all the time, day-in, day-out. To understand more about them, we need to go deeper. Ready?

Psychodynamics are the intra-personal forces and fluctuations that determine our personality and motivations, defined by our unconscious.

Relational psychodynamics are the inter-personal meeting of those forces between individuals or groups of people, such as within teams, our organisations, friendship groups, or in romantic relationships.

There are three levels of consciousness, often depicted as an iceberg, and described by Sigmund Freud within psychoanalysis:

Consciousness: the thoughts, behaviours, feelings and actions we take that we are aware of.

The subconscious (or preconscious): this sits beneath the surface and are automatic though not immediately available, but can be easily accessed when we focus our attention on them, such as memories.

The unconscious: this part of our mind is where the deep programming of who we are resides; formed through early experiences and relationships, chiefly with our primary care givers. This includes our repressed thoughts, feelings and beliefs that are unavailable to the conscious mind.

Schools of thought also note a ‘post-consciousness’, but, to keep things relatively simple, we’re not going there now.

Anything below our conscious awareness we cannot see or experience objectively, unless we bring it into our conscious awareness. Nevertheless, our experiences of unconscious behaviours are deeply powerful. Indeed, Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Albert Einstein agreed, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created them”.

The role of psychodynamic coaching is to support the client to make known the unknown.

What are relational psychodynamics?

Relational psychodynamics are the complex interplay and exchange of each of our unconscious workings, in relationship with each other. This includes all of our unconscious drivers, needs, fears, complexes, impulses and unresolved issues.

Have you ever found a particular relationship to be especially difficult? Or that the same patterns seem to emerge in your relationships somehow, but you’re unsure why? We all have and often it’s because psychodynamics are at play.

The core psychodynamics we support clients to explore are:

Transactions
Projection
Transference
Countertransference

We do this using theory, reflection, evoking awareness, mirror and shadow work. The aim of psychodynamic coaching is to get to the ‘root’ of the ‘real issue’, while recognising that these aspects may not be fully known to us prior to exploration.

The Shadow

We each have what Jung called a ‘Shadow’. Organisations and nations, even, can also have a shadow.

Our shadow is an emotional blindspot, formed from the parts of ourselves that our ego negates, represses, supresses - basically parts of ourselves that we dislike or that were not encouraged in us from a young age - we somehow got the memo that ‘it wasn’t allowed’, and so we hid it away deep in our unconscious. But they’re still there, driving our workings, albeit unconsciously - from ‘the shadow’ of ourselves. Often emerging in our self-esteem, or in the beliefs we tell ourselves.

We project this ‘shadow’ onto others, leading us often to get into conflict with it, because what we see in others that we disliked enough in ourselves to send it packing, unsurprisingly, is often the recipient of our criticism, judgement and attempts to change in others.

Indeed, according to Jung, “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our own shadow onto others.”

Thankfully, there are functional ways we can explore this, and there are indicators we can tune into in the world around us to help with this work. Unsurprisingly, tricky relationships in particular can tell us a lot more about ourselves than the other person.

Click here to read more about the shadow and our functional shadow work.

Mirror work

Have you heard the phrase, ‘we are all mirrors to one another?’ Jung also talked about this, when he described projection - one of the common psychodynamics we see everyday. He said, “Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.” Jung also said, projection happens when we are “certain we know what other people think or what their true character is,” and interact with with them based on those assumptions.

Coaching and shadow work

Coaching and shadow work is not therapy. While it can feel therapeutic, and is informed by psychology, it is not a clinical service and does not claim to be one. It is a functional approach to evoking awareness about ourselves in the everyday and in relationship with others, so that we can experience a fuller sense of self, greater authenticity, personal change and development, and move towards an ideal version of our future self through specific actions.

Why does this matter?

As leaders we want to get the best from our teams, to keep them in response rather than react - out of stress mode - to keep them in executive function, not executive dysfunction. By using emotional intelligence, mirror and shadow work we can consider our own patterns and behaviours, as well as those of others. And we can work towards more effective self-leadership and relationship-management. Relationships in the workplace carry great power, and by becoming aware of how we are operating, and how others are operating, this can improve our ability to maintain healthy adult-to-adult connections.