A recurring pattern I have at parties is that, as it goes with small talk, someone will ask me what I do in life.
I love what I do.
It’s not that common. And it’s something most people I meet would find great value in if they got to try it.
So as you might imagine, I’d be quite excited to answer that question.
…if it weren’t for 1 tiny, pesky little detail:
I have no clue how to explain what a “relational facilitator” is, or what “Authentic Relating” is.
This isn’t a coincidence. The challenge is that Authentic Relating is best understood by experiencing it. And that hearing it described often leads to people interpreting it as something else they already know.
- Teambuildings
- Communication trainings
- Deep conversation with a friend (usually referring to level 3 or 4 from my “levels of conversational depths”)
And technically, yes, Authentic Relating can be all of these.
But if you think of one of these things and how they typically feel, the experience is very far from what an Authentic Relating workshop (or “games night”) feels like.
Now, I’ve already found a solution for the next time I’m asked that question, and it’s kind of obvious in hindsight:
Just ask if they want to play a 5 minute game with me that answers their question by experiencing it.
But right now, you and I are not in the same room, so I’m taking up the challenge to explain it through writing instead.
What Is Authentic Relating?
Authentic Relating is a wide collection of practices that help us connect more deeply with ourselves, with each other, and with reality, all at the same time.
…that is what it is on paper. If I were to give you my own experience, I would say this:
Authentic Relating is a doorway.
A doorway to what? That depends on the person. But most people, when trying it the first time, perhaps after some initial clunkiness, will feel a clear moment where something changes:
They may describe it as “suddenly, we dropped into really deep presence together”, or “suddenly, the room became a magical space”, or “suddenly, I felt seen like I was never seen before, saw others in a way I hadn’t seen people before, and it changed something in me, maybe even permanently“.
I believe it’s a doorway in the sense that I can always choose to walk through. No matter where I am and what’s happening. If I can bring myself to embody the practices, it will open the door and lead me to something magical.
What it can not do is control or create what I believe “magical” is supposed to look like, or what “connected” is supposed to look like between me and someone else…and that is not a short-coming. It’s one of the requirements for its magic to work.
Now, if I were to be a bit less vague and more practical, I’d put on a nice teacher suit and say this:
At its heart, it’s a set of principles that help you show up more honestly, more caringly, and without ignoring the context of the room you’re in, all at the same time.
This is quite unique, because in general, when Experts™ share advice on these topics, it includes sacrificing 1 or more of those 3 in favor of the others (e.g. “fuck what everyone thinks, be unapologetically you” or “always put a compliment next to your criticism“).
While by now, Authentic Relating has developed a sort of coherent curriculum, and you can expect that any certified facilitator will both embody and teach the same principles, it is technically an open source work.
The core is strongly defined, but we continue to innovate on it, share with each other as facilitators, cross-pollinate with other frameworks, and occasionally new variations or lineages pop up.
In practice, this means that while the core principles are easy to remember, you can keep learning nuances for many years. Possibly forever, as the field keeps growing (much like psychology or philosophy).
Three things that are quite unique about the experience of learning Authentic Relating are this:
1) With remarkable consistency, people report discovering levels of connection much deeper than what they’ve experienced before. It’s not uncommon for people to have a 10 minute conversation with a stranger and feel a deeper connection than they experience with people they’ve known intimately for 10 years. (There is a risk to that too, but we’ll look at this later.)
2) You don’t learn Authentic Relating by watching a lecture or reading a book. You learn by doing. One of the most common ways of learning is by playing “Authentic Relating games”: Little games that you can play which allow you to experience, discover and learn new ways to connect, converse or relate.
3) Depending on your community, Authentic Relating can be uniquely cross-cultural. You might find yourself surrounded by businesspeople working on their leadership skills as much as a group of hippies or your normie neighbor who wants to connect more deeply with his life. And if the group is well-held, none of that will feel strange in the slightest.
Who or What is Authentic Relating For?
I’m of course unbelievably biased—yet not blind, see the section on risks below—but I believe this work, in the right dosage, can genuinely be useful for nearly everyone.
Not just as individuals, but with ripple effect on all the people we meet—partners, children, co-workers, clients—and by extension society.
So many issues in society are downstream from disconnection to self, others and life.
From loneliness. From unresolved issues passed onto others we interact with (often the ones we love most).
Authentic Relating is applicable in all areas of life, whether it’s dating, making friends, improving your meetings or changing your relationship to the things that happen in your life to feel both more alive and more at peace.
I also find it profoundly useful for building nervous system capacity, stress resilience and decreasing reactivity.
This may not be what it’s advertised as, but in the end, stress is relational , and emotional capacity is a bottleneck for honest communication.
It’s also a useful method for coaching and teaching. In my own work, I often use Authentic Relating as the delivery mechanism, and then make games or sessions that offer material which is normally found outside of it.
What to Expect from Joining an Authentic Relating Event?
As you join an Authentic Relating event or training (online and offline), you can expect to walk into a room full of people who have a wide range of backgrounds and personalities, but a shared intention.
It’s generally a place where you are welcomed exactly as you are (and by that, I don’t mean “a safe space”, who we are can still interact with others and cause tension, but the shared intention allows us to learn from that).
Most sessions start with a moment of guided self-connection, allowing you to stay firmly rooted in yourself before interacting with others, which can be especially helpful for introverts.
The rest of session can have many forms: Some people just play connection games. Some sessions include teachings on a particular topic or skill, which is then practiced through games or exercises. Others (especially if it involves Circling, see below), are long, deep, practice sessions that can almost feel like “conversational meditation”.
Most sessions end with a moment of debrief, shared appreciation, or something to cool down.
As you practice more frequently, you start to see the impact of these sessions on your relationships.
It’s a bit like how, if you take guitar lessons, or just play a lot of random songs on guitar, you will naturally get better at guitar.
If you practice and play around a lot with Authentic Relating, the same happens to your relating outside of it. And over time, you can keep finding new richness and depths inside your practice.
(But there are some pitfalls to this, which I’ll address at the end of this post.)
Core Principles of Authentic Relating
Personally, I follow the 5 principles as compiled by ART International. Other variations exist, but I find that these 5 elegantly balance each other out and form a coherent framework to map most AR practices on.
While these practices inform many of the games, tools and practices of Authentic Relating, I personally see them more as underlying relational stances we can bring towards anything, ideally all at once.
1. Welcome Everything
Welcoming everything, as I see it, is about allowing ourselves to collaborate with reality.
And for that, we first have to acknowledge and welcome reality as it is:
Welcoming ourselves as we are, including our rich inner experience.
Welcoming others as they are and behavior as it is happening right now.
Welcoming how both of those impact one another.
Welcoming what’s happening between us, through us, and around us.
The more we welcome, the more we can interact with. What we don’t welcome, we can not reach.
(And yes, that includes welcoming when we don’t want to welcome something.)
It’s a stance of allowing the moment to meet you exactly as it is.
In conflict, this can mean learning to welcome more discomfort or tension.
When socializing, this can mean learning to welcome initial awkwardness, not knowing what to say, not being able to control other’s responses.
2. Assume Nothing
This practice, for me, is fundamentally about intimacy with reality.
About recognizing how much of what we see and experience is not about what’s true or real, but about our mind interpreting things, filling in the gaps we don’t know yet, projecting our relationship to others onto them.
The more we can lift that veil, the more access we have to what is real. The more we can see others as they really are, see ourselves as we really are, and see reality more clearly.
When socializing, this can mean tuning into what makes you curious about others and asking those questions.
In group environments, this can mean noticing where you assume there are unspoken rules (“you can’t do that, not appropriate”) and actively checking with people if those rules are real for them.
3. Reveal Your Experience
To be known, seen, touched, or felt, you have to be willing to reveal yourself.
In Authentic Relating, this practice refers to revealing yourself exactly as you are, in that very moment.
To share your experience while it is unfolding, in service to connection and realness, rather than framing it to achieve a certain outcome.
In conflict, this can look like setting the context clearly to avoid misperception:
“I want to talk about something that bothered me, and my hope is that this conversation can help us understand each other better. I’m worried that if I phrase it wrongly, it might have the opposite effect. But I don’t want to not talk about it either. Are you open to try stumbling through it together?”
In your social life, this can be a powerful solution to any sense of stuckness:
“I want to talk to you but don’t know what to say. But what’s true is I want to.”
“I’m a bit stuck in my head because I judge myself for what I just said.”
4. Own Your Experience
To own your experience is to understand that anything you experience is colored by you as the experiencer.
To understand that you are responsible for your part, without denying what happened to you either.
To own your experience is the opposite of giving your power away. It’s both a principle of empowering yourself, and of honoring where you end and others begin.
In communication, it could mean owning “I didn’t enjoy that movie“ instead of declaring “that was a shitty movie“
In socializing, this might look like acknowledging “I feel ashamed. I imagine people don’t like me and I’m scared to find out if it’s true, so I’m freezing.” as opposed to “Everyone’s judging me.”
To own your experience doesn’t necessarily make the experience easier, but it makes it more honest, and gives you your power back.
When both people own their experience, there is a clear channel of communication, and the perceived need for attacking others or defending oneself can disappear.
5. Honor Self and Other
Honor Self and Other is the principle that ties it all together for me.
You can be authentic in a way that is highly unpleasant for everyone around you.
You can honor others so much that you nearly forget who you are.
But when you honor both at the same time, neither is a threat to the other.
Instead, they figure out a way to share space within you, and between us.
Each of these practices could warrant their own book.
And while I gave conversational examples to illustrate them, they are more attitudes than conversational states (see “pitfalls of Authentic Relating” below).
Additionally, some forms of Authentic Relating (such as Circling) have their own practices, and there are lots of central themes we didn’t explore here (Empathy, or self-awareness for example).
But these 5 principles are a bit like the thread everything else is woven from. And they’ll give you a sense of the overall attitude behind Authentic Relating + how it differs from other perspectives on social skills.
Relationships to Other Practices & Methods
Nonviolent Communication
Perhaps the most well-known set of communication tools for conflict resolution and mediation.
Authentic Relating mostly integrates and transcends all the practices of nonviolent communication, often improving upon them by making them a bit less mechanical and a lot more powerful.
That said, I believe there’s still material in NVC that’s useful and rarely taught in Authentic Relating (for example, Pseudofeelings, or the question “what would make this more wonderful right now?”)which is why I include both in the Connection Dojo curriculum.
Circling
Circling is a connection practice that’s arguably more famous than Authentic Relating, but is a part of it.
On one hand, it’s a “large Authentic Relating game”, on the other hand, it has become a practice in its own right.
(If you’re curious about the history of both, here’s an article on the roots of AR.)
T-Group
A much older connection practice, originally aimed at organizational development and human behavior research. While they are not exactly the same, Authentic Relating is deeply influenced by many of the T-group practices. And some facilitators do offer t-group sessions.
Risks and Pitfalls of Authentic Relating
As much as I am a proponent of this work and actively spreading it in the world. I do want to name a few potential issues you might run into, which I believe can better prepare you:
AR Can Theoretically Be Abused
I’m hesitant to even share this, lest it fall in the wrong hands, but I think it’s important to consider.
In theory, a skilled sociopath with a strong cult/guru dynamic could abuse these practices by actively enforcing them on participants.
They could use “assume nothing” to make you question the world you grew up in and indoctrinate you into theirs.
They could enforce “own your experience” to deflect any and all criticism of their behavior and blame you for their impact.
They could weaponize “reveal your experience” to make sure nothing is hidden from them, and dark as it is, they could use “welcome everything” to chip away at your boundaries.
Now, to be fair, the “Honor Self and Other” practice is a safeguard against this. If the facilitator embodies this practice well, that sort of thing could never happen.
But if a space is cultish, power dynamics and group dynamics can quickly override your initial observation of that. It could be turned into you, the inexperienced newbie, misreading the facilitator’s behavior.
All of this to say: Be mindful who you trust for guiding you in this work.
Authentic Relating involves a lot of making yourself vulnerable and open. It often involves feeling seen and met in ways you may have yearned for, for a long time, and this feeling of deep connection can make you feel really close to the people you’re doing it with, including the host or facilitator.
Make sure you do that in space held by capable people who know their own shadow, have strong integrity and do not use the space to serve any ideology.
(In a way less extreme way: This might show up when the facilitator’s ideology is Authentic Relating. That might lead them to have certain desires for the space. Such as making sure everyone opens up about deep things, rather than honoring them where they ‘re at. Or not allowing people to opt out of a game they don’t feel ready for.)
The Impact of Exclusive Language
Authentic Relating has a lot of jargon. This is not meant as cultural signaling (though it’s sometimes still used as such, the humans will always be humaning).
It’s simply a result of discovering some words are more apt than others for this type of work.
They evoke specific experiences and nuances that, when described differently, don’t carry the same meaning (true synonyms are rare).
A lot of the games are conversational, so by practicing them, you’ll naturally find yourself using these words more often.
But this, of course, also creates a potential cause of disconnection in your personal life: Where people who aren’t used to practicing AR have a harder time relating to you. Or dislike the use of that language in casual conversation.
In general, it’s good practice to learn to calibrate your language to the context. Sometimes it’s better to deliver a slightly less accurate message than a correct one which the other person can’t decode. This isn’t specifically taught in Authentic Relating (I do add this aspect in the Connection Dojo).
Diminishing Returns on Social Skills When Exclusively Doing AR
A similar issue can show up in the other direction where, if the bulk of your social experience are had within an Authentic Relating container, it may become increasingly hard to relate to people who don’t have this skillset.
You may find yourself at a social event and being bothered by people’s conversational styles, either growing silent, or struggling to attune to them.
This can feel alienating, and in many ways, it’s where the real work happens. Where the practices start taking on a different meaning.
Can you welcome this?
Can you drop the assumption that other people’s ways of interacting are inferior to Authentic Relating?
Can you reveal this experience you’re having and own that it’s yours, that they are not accountable for it?
Can you honor yourself and other in this situation?
This can take on all sorts of interesting shapes. You may find yourself in situations where you learn deep lessons about relating from unexpected people. You may find yourself re-integrating conversational modes you had temporarily banished and find out what their true value was.
It’s very comparable to what many spiritual seekers go through once they had some peak experiences and find themselves still struggling with daily life.
“After the ecstasy, the laundry”, they say.
And I think this applies to Authentic Relating too, because underneath it all, it’s quite a spiritual modality.
Appearance vs. Essence
It’s possible to follow the practices verbally, to the letter, as a get-out-of-jail-free-card for covert power- or status games.
You can compare this with the way skilled manipulators weaponize therapy speak.
People can learn AR and practice it in a way that looks like following the principles to a T but energetically does the exact opposite. (You can do that with everything, I guess, happens with Christianity too).
Politicians do this all the time. They will ask “curious questions” which are actually forms of frame control, or double binds that paint the opponent in a certain light no matter what.
More commonly, and harder to track, people can practice “Owning Your Experience” by speaking in owned language, while energetically placing all blame on the person they’re speaking to. People can “Reveal Their Experience” strategically as leverage, or even as a way to gain power in a group (by always having a “big experience” so that the group feels a subtle pressure to place them at the center until it has passed).
None of this is uncommon. And most seasoned facilitators are highly aware of energetics and know how to address this in a way that honors everyone involved (and Circling in particular can help you develop this sense).
In the Connection Dojo, we specifically address this at some point by learning to separate “energetically” practicing the principles vs. “verbally” practicing them. This also solves the challenges with exclusive language.
But it’s something to pay attention to when practicing informally.
Where to Learn or Practice Authentic Relating
- AuthRev has a map of Authentic Relating communities all over the world here. If you’re looking for something near you, that’s a great place to start.
- If you worry about finding the right facilitator for this type of work, you can check ART International’s list of certified facilitators. The path to getting certified with ART is thorough and they hold their facilitators to high standards.
- If you want to work with me, you can contact me to see if there are open spots for The Connection Dojo, which is entirely online. We practice all kinds of connection skills, but focus highly on Authentic Relating and have 2-3 sessions per week.
- If you want to try and play some games with friends at home, you can get AuthRev’s games manual or Marc Bénétau’s Circling guide.
- If you want to bring this into your life, but none of the above options appeal to you. Reach out to me and tell me what you’re looking for. I can probably connect you with someone.