Relational
Integrity.
Six orientations toward honest relational life — not as rules to follow, but as ways of attending to what is actually happening.
Developed through clinical practice and writing. Addressed to anyone who thinks carefully about relationships — with others and with themselves.
What we mean
by integrity.
The word integrity carries two registers. In everyday usage, it describes a moral quality — honesty, consistency, keeping your word. But in its older sense — from the Latin integritas — it refers to wholeness, to the condition of being undivided.
Relational Integrity draws on both. It asks what it means for a relationship — between two people, or between a person and their own inner life — to hold together rather than fragment. What makes it possible to be genuinely present with another person, rather than managing the appearance of presence. What allows honesty that does not wound, and care that does not dissolve the self into the other's need.
These are not simple questions. They do not have algorithmic answers. What the framework offers is a way of attending — an orientation, not a prescription.
"The goal is not harmony. The goal is a relationship honest enough to sustain difficulty."
— Relational Integrity, 2026The Framework Addresses
How we speak honestly
How we own what is ours
How we hold our own story
How we tolerate not knowing
How we stay without fixing
How we allow change its own time
The orientations.
Symbolic
Honesty
Speaking the truth of inner experience in ways that invite rather than foreclose connection.
Symbolic honesty is not simply about saying true things. It is about finding the words that carry the actual weight of an experience — not the tidied version, not the socially acceptable summary, but the living thing. It requires a certain courage and a certain precision. It can be learned. And it changes, over time, what becomes possible between people.
Emotional
Responsibility
Owning what is ours without projecting onto others.
In most relational difficulties, both people are contributing something. Emotional responsibility is the practice of identifying one's own contribution — not in a spirit of blame or self-punishment, but with curiosity. What did I bring to this? What was mine? It is the refusal of the posture that places all difficulty in the other.
Narrative
Integrity
Holding our stories lightly — open to revision, never held to ransom.
We all carry stories about who we are, who others are, and what has happened. These stories are necessary — but they can also become prisons. Narrative integrity is the practice of holding these accounts loosely enough that they remain available for revision when new experience demands it. It is not instability. It is honesty about the provisional nature of all self-understanding.
Secure
Ambivalence
The capacity to hold contradictory feelings without premature resolution.
We tend to treat ambivalence as a problem — a temporary state to be resolved as quickly as possible, ideally in a single decisive direction. But in most complex relationships and decisions, ambivalence is the truthful response. Secure ambivalence is the capacity to remain in that state long enough for something genuine to clarify, rather than prematurely collapsing into certainty to escape the discomfort of not yet knowing.
Presence
Without Rescue
Being with rather than fixing — remaining present to what is difficult.
The impulse to fix — to solve, to resolve, to make better — is often not about the other person. It is about the discomfort of the person who cannot tolerate sitting with difficulty without acting. Presence without rescue asks something harder: that we stay in the room with what is painful, without reaching for the exit of premature reassurance or helpful advice.
Symbolic
Pacing
Honouring the organic rhythm of relational change. Nothing forced.
Change in relationships — and in the inner life — has its own rhythm. It cannot be usefully accelerated. Symbolic pacing is the practice of following that rhythm rather than imposing one — of trusting that something is moving even when nothing appears to be moving, and of resisting the anxiety that interprets stillness as failure.
Staying with
What Hurts.
A book-length treatment of the Relational Integrity framework — its origins in clinical practice, its application to everyday relational life, and the question of what it means to remain in difficulty without either collapsing into it or fleeing from it.
About the bookWorking with
the framework.
The Relational Integrity framework has been developed with clinical application in mind. Training materials, clinical vignettes, workbooks, and discussion guides for therapists and students are available in the professional section.
Professional resourcesThe framework has implications for supervision, case conceptualisation, ethical thinking, and the handling of rupture and repair. It is not a method; it is a lens through which existing methods can be examined more carefully.