Relational Pattern Theory: Towards a Contextual Psychology of Coherence
Reframing Symptom as Signal in a World of Contradiction
Relational Pattern Theory (RPT) offers a systems-based reimagining of mental health, reframing psychological symptoms as signals of unresolved relational or structural contradiction. It emerges from the growing consensus that traditional diagnostic models often pathologise adaptive responses to harmful environments (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018), and draws from systems theory (Bateson, 1972), trauma research (Van der Kolk, 2014), dynamic attachment models (Fonagy et al., 2002), and narrative and ecological psychologies.
Rather than assuming pathology lies within the individual, RPT proposes that distress often reflects a breakdown in relational pattern coherence: a mismatch between internal meaning-making and external expectation, often in contexts where contradiction cannot be named or escaped. In such conditions, the ‘symptom’ is not a defect to be corrected, but a signal to be understood.
Pattern, Not Pathology
Psychological life is inherently patterned. People adapt to their environments through feedback loops—some generative, some constraining. Where these loops foster coherence, individuals tend to flourish. But when systems produce contradictory or unsustainable demands—such as being expected to express vulnerability in a culture that punishes weakness—those patterns become strained.
Importantly, coherence does not imply wellbeing or stability—it simply marks the point at which a pattern holds together, however precariously.
Symptoms, in this light, are not evidence of disorder but of distortion. An anxious person may be responding to unpredictability masked as stability. A dissociative response may reflect an attempt to preserve coherence in a context where the self is repeatedly undermined. These are intelligible reactions to contradictory demands.
This approach echoes trauma-informed models that interpret behavioural adaptations as survival strategies (Van der Kolk, 2014). RPT extends this principle beyond trauma to encompass a wider view: all signal may be patterned response, and all pattern arises in context.
Double Binds and Systemic Contradiction
RPT is deeply informed by Bateson’s theory of the double bind (Bateson et al., 1956): a situation in which a person receives conflicting messages in a relationship where they cannot escape and must respond. While originally proposed in the context of schizophrenia, RPT expands this concept to include broader social, cultural, and institutional contradictions.
Consider the adolescent encouraged to ‘be themselves’ while also receiving relentless cues to conform. Or the employee expected to innovate under conditions of constant surveillance. These contradictions create psychological tension not because of individual deficiency, but because of irreconcilable pattern demands.
Practitioners may benefit from explicitly mapping the flows of relational power and contradiction within a person’s ecology, identifying not only personal history but social, institutional, and cultural pattern pressures. This echoes the Power Threat Meaning Framework (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018), while maintaining RPT’s focus on coherence rather than deficit.
Symptoms become the bodymind’s attempt to reconcile, resist, escape, or build coherence around the bind. Anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviour, even psychosis—all may reflect distinct responses to different forms of contradiction, with signal differing depending on the relational structure in which the contradiction is embedded.
The Taxonomy of Pattern Stress
RPT suggests that common psychiatric experiences may be reinterpreted as pattern-level responses:
Anxiety arises when the coherence a person was orienting toward begins to feel unattainable—especially in unstable but high-stakes environments.
Depression reflects sustained contradiction with no clear exit and no viable pathway to coherence.
Dissociation emerges when a contradiction is irresolvable and unnameable; splitting awareness becomes the only sustainable pattern.
Compulsion attempts to impose artificial coherence on systems perceived as chaotic.
Psychosis may represent the emergence of a novel internal logic when dominant relational patterns become unsustainable and social anchoring is lost.
These interpretations do not deny the reality of suffering or the usefulness of clinical tools, but seek to contextualise distress within the broader ecology of lived experience.
Most contradictions cannot be eliminated—at least not without radical societal realignment. In many cases, healing may involve learning to hold contradictory threads without collapse, restoring coherence not through resolution, but through a shift in stance.
Dynamic Attachment, Patterned Identity
Relational Pattern Theory also reconceives attachment not as a static typology but as an ongoing negotiation of coherence within specific relational fields. Where attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) classifies styles as if fixed, RPT sees them as dynamic strategies: contingent, relational, and responsive to pattern conditions.
Drawing on Fonagy et al. (2002), RPT suggests that an individual’s ability to perceive or revise relational pattern is shaped by early feedback loops. What is interpreted as fixed identity may in fact be learned constraint in pattern recognition.
Similarly, the ‘self’ is understood not as a core essence but as a coherence process—a structure that emerges through narrative, memory, and relational feedback. Memory, as Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) argue, is constructed in service of present identity. RPT builds on this, proposing that identity itself is patterned; shifts in environment, relationship, or perception can alter what feels true, possible, or coherent.
From Compliance to Agency
A critical implication of RPT is its rejection of healing as return to normality. In many models, therapeutic success is implicitly defined by restored function within existing systems. RPT questions whether those systems themselves are fit for human coherence.
Healing, instead, is framed as the restoration of meaningful agency—the ability to engage with and re-weave one’s relational patterns. This may involve shifting relationships, reframing narratives, or finding new contexts where previously incoherent patterns become sustainable.
This position echoes narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990) in its emphasis on authorship and interpretation but places that agency within a wider relational ecology. Change does not come from internal correction, but from the capacity to hold, name, and renegotiate the pattern.
Listening Without Myth
RPT is both an analytic and an ethical stance. It asks practitioners, educators, and systems designers to resist the urge to individualise systemic distress. It challenges the mythology of personal dysfunction in a world that often demands incoherence. And it invites a listening practice that hears not only the story but the structure that shapes it.
Naming a relational contradiction is often a crucial step, but not the final one. While making a pattern visible can begin to loosen its grip, RPT invites us to go further: to understand its structure, trace its origins, and explore how coherence might be re-woven—individually and collectively—without demanding that the contradiction itself be erased.
Where traditional paradigms may ask “what is wrong with this person?”, RPT instead asks, “what pattern are they navigating, and where does it strain?”
This reorientation does not prescribe a single method. Rather, it sets the conditions for inquiry: a way of being with distress that prioritises context, relational mapping, and emergent understanding. What follows may include therapeutic work, systems change, or simply a shift in how the story is held—but always grounded in the recognition that pattern is the unit of meaning.
In doing so, RPT offers not a cure, but a different conversation—and perhaps, a more honest starting point.
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J., & Weakland, J. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, 1(4), 251–264.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261–288.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self. Other Press.
Johnstone, L., & Boyle, M. (2018). The Power Threat Meaning Framework: Towards the identification of patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour. British Psychological Society.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. Norton.