Doubling Down on Striving for Relational Excellence in the Wake of Global Relational Rupture
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| a sanity saving swim at Glencoe |
The death of Renee Nicole Good who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, has become a flashpoint not just because of what happened, but because of how people are talking about it. Thousands have protested her death, not because they all agree on every detail, but because of the sense that something profoundly human has been lost and demeaned. Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, that she was part of a “leftwing network” of paid agitators; a tactic that shifts attention from the human being who lived, loved, and was killed to a political caricature. This pattern; of reducing a person to a political problem, a threat, a label, is itself a form of dehumanisation. It is not only what was said in the aftermath about Renee; it is what has more broadly become the new normal in political language.
Trump’s rhetoric on migration and people crossing borders has repeatedly leaned into dehumanising terms. In April 2024 he said that undocumented immigrants were “animals” and “not human”. These are not isolated moments. The claim that people are “eating the pets” of local residents (used by Trump in a 2024 presidential debate) was widely debunked but nonetheless spread because it taps into a narrative that undermines common humanity. Worryingly, similar language is being used in discourse around immigration in the UK.
This kind of language shifts the field of relational possibility. It reshapes what counts as normal in how we talk about other human beings.
Relationships thrive or falter in the stories we tell about who deserves dignity and who deserves care. Contempt does not stay in political speeches; it leaks into everyday life and influences how people interpret conflict in their own partnerships: whether they see a partner’s concern as care or as threat, whether they respond to difference with curiosity or dismissal.
Harm becomes sustained not only through what is done, but through what is not disrupted. Silence and minimisation shape the relational field just as much as active cruelty.
My professional work is rooted in the idea that connection, communication, conflict handled well, and collaboration grounded in mutual regard are not abstract ideals. They are everyday practices. We pay attention to how language lands, because language is how we live with one another.
How do we stay willing to see people as people, even when our systems and rhetoric increasingly reward the opposite? This is not abstract philosophy. This is everyday relational work. And it matters because the quality of our collective work shapes the fields of connection we all rely on both in public and in private.
This brings me to question on practitioners and politics. One of my favourote books is The Bystander by Petruska Clarkson (2006), where she describes the bystander as:
"someone who does not become involved when someone else needs help....Bystanding is seen as a major way in which people disempower themselves and others. It works at the juncture of the individual and the collective, the person and the group, the citizen and the state, the patient and the psychotherapist.".
This feels acutely relevent now.
How can practitioners not be political when harm is being done to others? When language itself is a site of injury? When silence becomes a form of participation?
For me, doubling down on relational excellence is not about taking sides in a culture war. It is about refusing the erosion of humanity, one conversation at a time.
A good starting point for this trajectory is this recent post on the concept of Positive Politics by Mick Cooper. https://therapyandsocialchange.net/blog/positive-politics