22 July 2023
In psychotherapy, as in life, a lot of what comes up concerns how a person relates to another person, place, or thing. I woke up this morning thinking about the history of the roots of the word relate. Intuitively, it didn’t make much sense. The prefix, re, led me to again, to a re/peated thought, behaviour, or emotion. Late led me nowhere, as I had no etymological hooks on which to hang anything. So I looked ‘er up!
Relate is a transitive (and intransitive!) verb. That means that it is difficult for this action word (verb) to stand alone without an object toward which it is related (!) or by which it is completed. For example, John saw Lucy. In that sentence, saw is a transitive verb because it doesn’t make much sense as simply John saw. In context, it might make more sense if there were a description of a preceding scenario which John was having trouble understanding. Then something changed—around or within John—and John saw. Relate is like saw in that John relates kind of sits there awaiting an object to which to relate! So, what we’ve learned is that relate is sometimes an action requiring an object.
The first meaning provided by my dictionary is 1. To narrate or tell. An example is John related his story, of seeing Lucy, to the group. 2. To bring into logical or natural association. The second meaning is more interesting. It’s about acting to connect one or more existents logically or naturally by association i.e., John connects Lucy and Bill because both are people going to the same school in the same discipline. More generally, some attribute of those existents is similar and thus relatable.
Now we move to the intransitive meanings. Just so you’re feeling confident, the examples of these, provided by Wikipedia really help: Cheryl cried. We smiled. You get it! First intransitive meaning of relate is 1. To have connection, relation, or reference. Used with to. The second one: Jargon [at least in 1975]: 2. To interact with others in a meaningful or coherent fashion.
If you’re not begging for mercy yet, you’re a dedicated learner, indeed. I’m sure regular readers saw where this was going from the outset. If you can’t or don’t relate, you don’t connect with others. If you don’t connect with others, you’re isolated and/or isolating. As Gabor Maté wrote (and Johann Hari broadcasted) the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.
A graph kindly provided online by Oxford Languages is interesting. That graph shows use over time of the word relate which reached a 223 year high in 1800. That peak was almost equalled around 1970 but usage has been in decline since then.
The etymology is also interesting. Particularly the online etymology I found during my first early morning search. I’ll just blast it all out before discussing:
The flashing lights amongst these word histories are “I bear, I carry, borne, carried.” What I’m sensing is the effect of voluntary and involuntary burdens borne, combined with the impact of the families into which each of us is born i.e., our relate ives. (Not punning—just the logic of words in play: born, borne; bear, bearing; relate, relative.)
To relate is to have a tendency to bear (carry) our own pasts with us. To relate is to be a relative of others, past, present, or future. But to bear is also to turn toward, as in turning northward, and relate carries with it this tendency to turn again toward our own sources. If this is accurate, and I can’t see how it could not be, this means an inability to relate is sometimes an inability to connect to our own hearts and origins. What could cause such a blockage?
In a word, trauma, defined as a wound or emotional shock creating substantial and lasting damages to the psychological development of the individual (Morris, 1975, p. 1366). In Cognitive Processing Therapy, a mode of therapeutic treatment designed to resolve PTSD symptoms, there’s a concept called a stuckpoint. The inability to relate might be a stuckpoint so powerful that the client’s sense of emotional overwhelmedness prevents her going there. So she avoids. She drinks, drugs, shops, has random sexual hook-ups...to avoid feeling those terrifyingly huge feelings. And the more she avoids, the deeper the hole she eventually needs to climb out of or, sadly, be buried in.
Life is a full-contact sport. It’s hard and relentless and mean. But equally, when you least expect it, life is also magnificent, beautiful, and generous. Being open to all six of those conditions is to relate—fully and well.
P.S. To find the image for this blog, I Googled "old person, young person" under images. There is a video associated with that image that can be accessed here. At 2:58 that boy demonstrates—brilliantly—how we continue to relate: by leaving our internal channels open.
Dan Chalykoff is (finally!) a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage illustrated dictionary of the English language. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.
Tressler, J.C. & Lewis, C.E. (1961). Mastering Effective English, Third Edition. The Copp Clark Publishing Co. Limited.
Wikepedia, (2023, 16 July). Transitivity (grammar) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitivity_(grammar)
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