Staying With — Relational Integrity Framework
Self-Knowledge:
A Teaching Guide
Exploring the Hidden Dimensions of the Psyche
A set of instruments for looking — carefully, honestly, and without the usual rush toward conclusions. What you find here will not tell you who you are. It will invite you to notice what you have been not-noticing.
Self-knowledge is not an arrival. It is a practice — one that requires a particular quality of attention: curious rather than interrogating, sustained rather than episodic, and always slightly suspicious of its own conclusions. The person who announces that they know themselves very well is usually telling you about their most well-defended position.
What this guide is interested in is the uncomfortable, instructive middle: the person who is willing to look, and who understands that what the looking reveals will keep revising itself over time.
Symbolic Honesty
Attending truthfully to inner experience — including what is uncomfortable, contradictory, or inconvenient — before managing it for others.
Emotional Responsibility
Owning what is mine — what I have brought to a situation, inherited, or contributed — rather than attributing reactions entirely to circumstance.
Narrative Integrity
Holding my stories about myself lightly — open to revision, not defended as fixed truth. Curiosity about the stories as much as their content.
Secure Ambivalence
The capacity to remain in the presence of contradictory feelings without prematurely resolving the tension in favour of one or the other.
Presence Without Rescue
Remaining with difficulty — in myself, in others — without immediately moving to fix, resolve, or explain it away. Being with rather than fixing.
Symbolic Pacing
Honouring the organic rhythm of psychological change — not forcing insight, not hurrying transformation. Allowing understanding to arrive in its own time.
The Structure of the Guide
Each section pairs a theoretical orientation with a named assessment and a practical exercise. The assessments do not produce clinical conclusions. They produce data for reflection. Work through one section at a time.
Who Do You Think You Are?
On the constructed self and the stories we live inside
The self is not found. It is assembled — from the words other people used about us before we could use them ourselves, from the images we formed of who we were in early relationships. Winnicott drew a careful distinction between the true self — the core of spontaneous, unmanaged experience — and the false self — the protective structure built to manage the interface with a world perceived as not entirely safe.
Assessment 1: The Self-Perception Inventory — What this assesses: the degree of coherence — or gap — between how you understand yourself and how you imagine others understand you. Includes a dual-column comparison and the exercise of revisiting writing from ten years ago.
The Childhood That Still Runs
On early experience, attachment, and the patterns that outlast their origins
The early relational environment does not merely form us and then step back. It continues to operate. The attachment patterns established in the first relationships — what we learned about safety and danger, about whether the world is fundamentally responsive or indifferent — become internal working models: templates that we carry into every subsequent relationship and use, often without awareness, to read the new in terms of the old.
Assessment 2: Early Relational Patterns Assessment — Eight scenarios that map how early attachment experience continues to shape expectations, reactions, and strategies in current relationships. Followed by the Parental Voice Audit.
The Intelligence of the Body
On somatic knowledge, affect, and what the body registers before the mind names it
Merleau-Ponty argued that we do not have bodies — we are bodies. The body is the site of experience itself. It thinks, in its own register, before conscious attention catches up. The tightening in the chest before a conversation you haven't yet consciously dreaded. The sudden exhaustion at a particular kind of meeting. These are not symptoms. They are a form of knowing — older, faster, and often more accurate than the narrative mind's explanations.
Assessment 3: Somatic Awareness Mapping — Part A locates specific emotions in the body; Part B asks when the body registered something before the mind named it, and what you do with that signal.
What Do You Actually Want?
On desire, its origins, and the difficulty of knowing what belongs to us
Desire is not something we possess, arising from some pure interior source. It is shaped, from the beginning, by what we learned was wanted of us, by what was celebrated and what was ignored, by the desires of those who formed us that we absorbed before we had a language for the distinction between theirs and ours. The fear of having what one wants is as clinically interesting as the fear of not having it.
Assessment 4: The Desire Clarification Assessment — Ten items that explore what you currently want, whose approval each want carries, and what you would lose if the want were fully satisfied. Followed by the Morning Question exercise.
The Structures of Your Fear
On anxiety, avoidance, and the architecture of limitation
Signal anxiety is organised by the history of the organism, not only by the present situation. The architecture of limitation — the things we do not do, the rooms we do not enter, the work we do not show — is built from material that has a history. Kierkegaard described anxiety as the dizziness of freedom: not fear of a specific danger, but the vertiginous experience of possibility itself.
Assessment 5: Fear Architecture Inventory — What you consistently avoid, what you tell yourself about it, what the actual fear beneath that explanation is, and what each avoidance costs.
The Patterns That Return
On repetition, compulsion, and the logic of what keeps happening
The same disappointment arrives in different disguises. The same relational script re-enacts itself with different cast members. Freud named this repetition compulsion — the tendency to repeat early relational experiences not out of masochism but out of an unconscious hope for a different ending: a replay that might finally resolve what the original experience left unresolved.
Assessment 6: Pattern Mapping — Identifies recurring relational scenarios, what they characteristically involve, and what unresolved need or conflict the repetition may be attempting to address.
Being Seen and Being Looked At
On the gaze, shame, and the difference between recognition and surveillance
Lacan's concept of the gaze describes the experience of being seen not as one sees oneself, but as an object in the visual field of another. To perform is to pre-empt the gaze — to shape oneself for an imagined audience before the audience has delivered its verdict. The question is not whether you perform — everyone does — but whether you know when you are performing and what you are performing for.
Assessment 7: The Gaze and Self-Presentation Inventory — Explores the internalized evaluating audience, the distinction between shame and guilt, and the conditions under which genuine self-presentation becomes possible.
Relational Integrity: A Self-Assessment
The six pillars as a map of where you currently are
The Relational Integrity framework offers six orientations for genuine self-knowledge — not achievements to be reached and held, but capacities to be developed, lost, recovered, and deepened over time. This section provides a structured self-assessment of where each pillar is, for you, at this moment: which are accessible and practiced, which are present but intermittent, which remain largely theoretical.
RI Self-Assessment — 24 items across all six pillars (4 items each), scored on a 1–5 scale. Total scored out of 120. Pillar-by-pillar and overall interpretation included.
"Self-knowledge is not an arrival. It is a practice — one that requires a particular quality of attention: curious rather than interrogating, sustained rather than episodic, and always slightly suspicious of its own conclusions."Nikos Marinos — Relational Integrity Framework
The RI Self-Assessment
Twenty-four items across the six pillars, each scored from 1 to 5. The resulting profile maps where these capacities are currently strong, where they are developing, and where they remain more theoretical than practiced.
A low score on any pillar is not a moral judgment. It is a description of an area where the conditions for genuine self-knowledge are less available than they might be — and where the most movement is possible.
Symbolic Honesty
Attending to inner experience before managing it
Emotional Responsibility
Owning what is mine in a given dynamic
Narrative Integrity
Holding my self-story lightly, open to revision
Secure Ambivalence
Remaining with contradictory feelings
Presence Without Rescue
Staying with difficulty rather than fixing it
Symbolic Pacing
Honouring the organic rhythm of insight
The Self-Knowledge
Quiz
A structured reflective instrument across seven domains: narrative self-awareness, childhood influence, somatic intelligence, desire authenticity, fear relationship, pattern recognition, and relational self-awareness.
Begin the QuizNikos Marinos
Psychologist & Psychodynamic Psychotherapist
Paris
Nikos Marinos is a psychologist and psychodynamic psychotherapist based in Paris, working at the intersection of relational psychoanalysis, literary thought, and clinical practice. He is the originator of the Relational Integrity framework — a way of thinking about self-knowledge that draws on the traditions of Winnicott, Benjamin, Mitchell, and contemporary relational psychoanalysis.
The Staying With series — of which this Teaching Guide is a companion volume — explores the hidden dimensions of the psyche through literary-clinical essays, narrative vignettes, and structured reflection. The first volume, Staying With the Self You Don't Yet Know, is available now.
He writes in English, French, and Greek, and holds that the practice of self-knowledge requires, above all, time — and the willingness to return to the same question, accepting different answers at different moments.