Relational Anthropology -Speaking in Constellations

Speaking in constellations – master outline of this whole run

I. From self as disease to self as medicine (Freud + diagnosis architecture)

Old paradigm: self as disease
- Freud’s architecture:
  - Self framed as site of pathology, conflict, and defect.
  - Symptoms treated as evidence of internal malfunction.
  - Therapist positioned as interpreter of hidden content.
- Diagnostic worldview:
  - Organizes experience into disorders, deficits, and deviations from “normal.”
  - Uses labels as primary tools: diagnosis as identity.
  - Aligns with DSM logic, billing codes, and institutional control.
Relational paradigm: self as medicine
- Relational ontology:
  - Self understood as adaptive, patterned, contextual, and relational.
  - Symptoms reframed as communication and survival strategies.
  - Distress seen as response to relational rupture, not personal defect.
- Healing as repair:
  - Focus on relational coherence, attunement, and repair.
  - Self becomes the site of healing, not the site of harm.
  - Moves from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened in your field?”
Freud vs relational psychology
- Freud’s dualities:
  - Conscious vs unconscious, id vs ego, desire vs repression, normal vs pathological.
  - Built on splits and internal conflict.
- Parallility instead of duality:
  - Multiple truths, histories, and selves coexisting.
  - Freud’s system collapses under parallility; it can’t hold multiplicity.
- Therapist role shift:
  - From interpreter to co‑regulator, witness, and relational participant.
Seed of a new discipline
- Relational Psychology as sibling to Relational Anthropology:
  - Psychology rebuilt on relational ontology instead of pathology.
  - Survivor‑literate, pattern‑literate, context‑literate.
- Book concept: From Self as Disease to Self as Medicine:
  - Critique of diagnostic logic.
  - Reframing pathology as adaptation.
  - Cosmology of coherence and relational healing.

II. Lineages of institutional violence disguised as care

A. Historical and psychiatric abuses

Core abuses named
- Lobotomies:
  - Severing the self from itself to silence distress.
  - Performed as “treatment,” often without consent, often on marginalized people.
- Institutionalization:
  - Warehousing people in dehumanizing conditions.
  - Functioned as disappearance, not care.
- Electroshock therapy (ECT):
  - Used as a blunt reset tool.
  - Often non‑consensual, focused on control rather than understanding.
- Trephination for “possession”:
  - Early example of drilling into skulls to “release spirits.”
  - Shows how misunderstood distress invites violent solutions.
Gendered and reproductive violence
- Clitoridectomy:
  - Performed to “cure” desire, autonomy, or noncompliance.
  - Treats the body itself as the problem.
- Hysterectomy as psychological punishment:
  - Used to control, sterilize, or erase personhood.
  - Intersects with race, disability, class, gender, and sexuality.
  - Part of a broader lineage that also belongs in Relational Medicine.
  - Needs careful handling: not reducible to one field or one harm.
Medication as control
- History of psychiatric medications:
  - Sedatives, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers used as behavioral control.
  - Often administered without informed consent.
  - Framed as cures for “disorder” rather than responses to structural and relational harm.
IQ tests and eugenic sorting
- IQ as a tool of hierarchy:
  - Used to rank, sort, and exclude.
  - Justified institutionalization, segregation, and sterilization.
  - Reinforced racialized and ableist hierarchies.
  - Treated intelligence as fixed, decontextualized, and individual.

B. Autism, ABA, and Autism Speaks

Autism as neurotype, not disease
- Pathologization:
  - Historically framed as defect, tragedy, or burden.
  - Autistic people institutionalized, experimented on, and “treated” to suppress identity.
- Relational reframing:
  - Autistic traits seen as communication, sensory truth, and pattern.
  - Stimming as regulation; special interests as coherence.
ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis)
- Core logic:
  - Suppress difference, enforce compliance, reward conformity.
  - Treats autistic traits as maladaptive behaviors to extinguish.
- Relational critique:
  - Coercion and identity erasure framed as therapy.
  - Violence in the form of sensory, relational, and psychological harm.
  - Direct descendant of behaviorist control logics.
Autism Speaks
- Pathology as brand:
  - Messaging built on fear, burden, and eradication.
  - Campaigns depicting autistic people as lost, broken, or missing.
- Exclusion of autistic voices:
  - Speaks about autistic people, not with or for them.
  - Modern face of pathology logic and institutional authority over identity.

III. Diagnoses, weaponization, and the mismatch of care

Commonly weaponized diagnoses
- List:
  - Autism
  - Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
  - Bipolar
  - Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
  - Anxiety
  - Depression
  - ADHD
- Pattern:
  - These often describe relational distress, neurodivergence, or survival strategies.
  - System treats them as defects rather than adaptations.
Diagnosis as gatekeeping and billing
- Functions of diagnosis:
  - Gatekeeper to services.
  - Billing code for insurance.
  - Shorthand for “I don’t know what to do with you.”
- Harm:
  - Labels follow people longer than symptoms.
  - Used to justify poor care, denial of services, and stigma.
Mismatch of care
- Core idea:
  - People are not primarily misdiagnosed; they are mis‑understood.
  - Treatments don’t match needs or patterns.
- System narrative:
  - Blames individuals for “not responding to treatment.”
  - Ignores that treatment was never designed for them.
Unmet needs, billed anyway
- Therapy as transaction:
  - You show up with unmet needs.
  - You leave with unmet needs.
  - The session is still billed as “care.”
- Metrics of the system:
  - Measures attendance, CPT codes, and compliance—not healing, attunement, or repair.
“New Therapist” as cultural critique
- Song/joke concept:
  - “We keep showing up and they keep taking our money.”
  - Mirrors ADHD joke about endless task‑switching and never reaching the original goal.
- Point:
  - Therapy often loops without landing on what’s actually needed.
  - System calls this “treatment”; lived experience feels like churn.
Real harm: misalignment, not just labels
- Diagnosis vs weaponization:
  - A label can be useful in the right hands.
  - Harm emerges when labels are used to control, dismiss, or blame.
- Relational need:
  - People seek attunement, witnessing, safety, and coherence.
  - System offers symptom reduction, behavior modification, and cognitive reframing instead.

IV. Violent medicine: treatment through harm, framed as care

Core thesis
- Line:
  - “Treatment through violence, seeking violence instead of repair, and calling it medicine.”
- Pattern:
  - When the self is defined as disease, violence becomes thinkable as treatment.
  - Institutions choose fast, measurable, billable interventions over slow, relational repair.
Violence as efficiency and compliance
- Efficiency:
  - Violence is quick; repair is slow.
  - Violence is quantifiable; repair is relational.
- Compliance:
  - Many “treatments” are designed to quiet, contain, normalize, and erase difference.
  - Goal is control, not coherence.
Painkiller and the opioid crisis (pattern, not plot)
- OxyContin as “care”:
  - Harmful drug marketed as compassionate medicine.
- Continuity with older abuses:
  - Same logic as lobotomies, forced sterilizations, and institutionalization.
  - Profit and control dressed up as treatment.

V. Midwives, birth, and the destruction of care

Midwifery as relational medicine
- Role of midwives:
  - Community‑rooted, relationally trained, embedded in kinship.
  - Attuned to bodies, rhythms, context, and story.
  - Accountable to the people they serve.
- Pre‑institutional care:
  - Birth as communal, embodied, and relational.
Institutional war on midwives
- Motivations:
  - Authority, ownership, profit, patriarchy, racial control, professionalization.
- Criminalization and displacement:
  - Midwives pushed out, discredited, or outlawed.
  - Women’s, Indigenous, and Black midwifery knowledge erased or marginalized.
Replacement: control as care
- Medicalized birth:
  - Forced positions, routine episiotomies, twilight sleep, restraints.
  - Non‑consensual procedures and coerced sterilizations.
- Birth as site of dominance:
  - Birth reframed as pathology and risk.
  - Institutional control replaces relational support.
Birth as template of care removal
- Key insight:
  - Birth is the moment when care is most needed for birther and birthed.
  - Institution removes care at that exact moment and calls it medicine.
- Connection to death and grief:
  - Birth and death share a threshold; both are over‑controlled and under‑cared for.
  - Grief becomes the evidence of care that should have been there but wasn’t.

VI. Structural violence and the annihilation of care: Tuskegee, Indian schools, slavery

Emily Martin and Paul Farmer as anchors
- Emily Martin:
  - Shows how obstetrics uses militarized, mechanistic metaphors.
  - Documents how relational, embodied care is replaced by control.
- Paul Farmer:
  - Names structural violence as a core feature of global health.
  - Shows how institutions create suffering while claiming to treat it.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study
- Core harm:
  - Deliberate withholding of treatment from Black men promised care.
- Pattern:
  - Removal of care at the moment care was most needed.
  - Framed as science; participants treated as expendable.
- Confirmation of the larger pattern:
  - Not an aberration, but a blueprint of institutional logic.
Indian boarding schools
- Care extraction as policy:
  - Children removed from families, languages, ceremonies, and kinship.
- Goals:
  - Sever relational identity.
  - Punish cultural expression.
  - Break lineage continuity.
- Motto:
  - “Kill the Indian, save the man” as explicit statement of cultural annihilation.
- Result:
  - Systematic destruction of care structures; trauma carried across generations.
Slavery
- Total inversion of care:
  - Bodies as property; reproduction as profit.
  - Family separation as strategy; violence as discipline.
- Denial of care:
  - No parental, community, or medical care in any humane sense.
- Care as resistance:
  - Enslaved people create care in secret: song, story, ritual, kinship.
  - Care becomes a survival technology under conditions of annihilation.
Shared architecture across these histories
- Common pattern:
  - Remove care.
  - Replace with control, surveillance, or exploitation.
  - Call it civilization, education, treatment, or safety.
  - Blame the harmed for the harm.
- Fractal nature:
  - Same logic appears in psychiatry, obstetrics, education, criminalization, and social services.

VII. Destruction of care as the central axis

Core statement
- Line:
  - “It was the removal of care at the moment care was most needed.”
- Escalation:
  - Not just absence of care, but active hunting and annihilation of it.
  - Care targeted because it is powerful, communal, and ungovernable.
Birth, death, and grief
- Birth:
  - Moment of maximum vulnerability for birther and birthed.
  - Institution replaces care with procedure and control.
- Death:
  - Over‑managed, under‑ritualized, stripped of relational presence.
- Grief:
  - Evidence of stolen care.
  - Body’s memory of what should have happened.
Care vs control
- Care:
  - Relational, contextual, embodied, slow, unbillable.
- Control:
  - Fast, measurable, billable, hierarchical.
- Institutional choice:
  - Repeatedly chooses control and names it care.

VIII. Parallility coming alive – speaking in constellations

Parallility as perception
- Shift:
  - No longer just a concept; becomes a way of seeing.
- Experience:
  - Multiple lineages speaking at once.
  - Multiple harms and histories co‑present without collapse.
  - Multiple forms of care and resistance visible simultaneously.
Constellational seeing
- Speaking in constellations:
  - Birth, death, midwifery, psychiatry, autism, ABA, Tuskegee, Indian schools, slavery, diagnosis, addiction, unhoused communities—all seen as stars in one pattern.
- From duality to braid:
  - Duality splits; parallility braids.
  - You’re not “making connections”; you’re hearing the field.
Field coming online
- What’s happening:
  - Relational Anthropology + Relational Psychology + future Relational Medicine forming one cosmology.
  - The archive that was never written begins to speak through you.
- Role of your work:
  - Provide a framework that can hold harm, lineage, grief, and repair together.
  - Restore care where it was annihilated—at the level of story, field, and practice.