Structural Relational Psychotherapy
A Psychotherapy for Personality Structure and Relational Change
Structural Relational Psychotherapy (SRP) is a developing psychotherapy model for personality pathology and complex relational difficulties, developed by Justin Jones, Ph.D. and currently used clinically at The Kimberly Center.
Structural Relational Psychotherapy (SRP) is an emerging psychotherapy model for personality pathology that integrates a structural understanding of personality with a relational approach to therapeutic action, emphasizing the therapist’s affective experience and the live therapeutic relationship as mechanisms of psychological change.
What the model addresses
SRP begins with a fundamental question: How do psychological experiences that have become divided, polarized, or incompatible become capable of being held together?
People can understand intellectually that they have complicated feelings about themselves and others while still experiencing those feelings very differently in moments of emotional stress. Someone who feels loving and trustworthy in one moment may suddenly feel entirely rejecting or dangerous in another. A person who feels competent and worthwhile may, after criticism or disappointment, experience the self as fundamentally inadequate or ashamed.
SRP understands these shifts not simply as symptoms, but as expressions of personality structure.
The model combines a structural understanding of personality with close attention to what happens between people. It proposes that experiences arising within important relationships—including the therapeutic relationship—may provide a pathway through which previously separated aspects of psychological experience can be recognized, tolerated, reflected upon, and gradually integrated.
SRP is being systematically articulated and studied through the Center for the Study of Personality Structure and Psychotherapy Process. The model is in active clinical use while its theoretical formulation, clinical principles, and proposed mechanisms of change continue to be developed and prepared for empirical investigation.
Personality Structure
Personality structure refers to the underlying psychological organization through which a person experiences the self, other people, emotions, relationships, and reality.
When personality is relatively integrated, people can usually maintain a complex view of themselves and others even during conflict. Someone can be loving and disappointing, confident and vulnerable, angry and attached. Experiencing one aspect of a person does not require losing access to the others.
When personality is less integrated, contradictory experiences can become more difficult to hold together. Experiences of self and others may become polarized: good or bad, powerful or helpless, loving or rejecting, admired or contemptible.
Under interpersonal stress, one emotional reality may become so powerful that competing experiences become temporarily inaccessible.
This process, often described as splitting, can contribute to abrupt changes in relationships, unstable experiences of self, intense emotional reactions, idealization and devaluation, and recurring interpersonal patterns that feel compelling in the moment but are difficult to understand or change.
SRP approaches these difficulties not only by asking what symptoms a person experiences, but also by asking how the person’s psychological experience has become organized.
The Therapeutic Aim: Structural Integration
A central aim of SRP is structural integration.
Structural integration is the increasing capacity to experience contradictory aspects of oneself, other people, emotions, and interpersonal reality without needing to radically separate or simplify them.
Greater integration may involve a more continuous sense of identity; an ability to recognize other people as complex individuals even when they disappoint or frustrate us; a greater capacity to experience conflicting emotions without becoming overwhelmed by them; and an increased ability to remain reflective and consider multiple perspectives during interpersonal stress.
The goal is not emotional neutrality. Nor is it the elimination of anger, dependency, vulnerability, conflict, or other difficult experiences.
The goal is greater psychological complexity and flexibility—the ability to remain more fully oneself, and to experience others more fully as themselves, even when relationships become emotionally difficult.
Why the Therapeutic Relationship Matters
SRP places particular emphasis on what happens between therapist and patient in real time.
Longstanding patterns involving attachment, rejection, dependency, control, admiration, shame, vulnerability, anger, idealization, devaluation, or withdrawal do not remain outside the consulting room. Over time, aspects of these patterns may emerge within the therapeutic relationship itself.
The relationship therefore becomes more than a setting in which the patient talks about relationships elsewhere. It can become a setting in which important aspects of the patient’s relational world are experienced directly.
This gives therapist and patient an opportunity to recognize patterns as they occur, become curious about the different psychological realities operating within an interaction, and develop ways of remaining reflective when those experiences become emotionally intense.
SRP treats these moments as potential opportunities for psychological change rather than merely disruptions to treatment.
The Therapist as an Active but Responsible Participant
SRP recognizes that psychotherapy involves two psychological subjects.
Patients affect their therapists, just as therapists inevitably affect their patients. The therapist’s emotional and subjective experience—often described within psychodynamic psychotherapy as countertransference—can therefore provide important information about what may be occurring within the therapeutic relationship.
But SRP does not propose that therapists simply say whatever they feel.
A therapist’s emotional response must first be reflected upon and understood clinically. The therapist must consider what may belong to the therapist, what the response may reveal about the relational pattern becoming active, what is occurring between therapist and patient, and whether communicating some aspect of that experience would serve the patient’s treatment.
Under appropriate clinical circumstances, carefully considered aspects of the therapist’s experience may become part of the therapeutic work.
Authenticity in SRP therefore does not mean unfiltered self-expression. Therapist participation must remain clinically purposeful and responsive to the patient’s personality organization, psychological stability, affect tolerance, treatment needs, and capacity for reflection.
The therapist remains responsible for maintaining the therapeutic frame and for distinguishing therapeutic participation from the discharge of the therapist’s own emotional reactions.
Rupture, Repair, and Relational Change
Significant psychotherapy does not always proceed through uninterrupted agreement or emotional calm.
Particularly in the treatment of personality pathology, longstanding relational expectations may eventually become activated within treatment. Misunderstanding, disappointment, anger, withdrawal, idealization, devaluation, or rupture can occur.
SRP does not deliberately manufacture these experiences, nor does it regard emotional intensity as therapeutic in itself.
When rupture occurs, however, what happens next may matter considerably.
Rather than simply retreating from the conflict or deciding which person was “right,” therapist and patient can attempt to understand what happened, restore the capacity to reflect, and recognize the different subjective realities that became active within the interaction.
Repair does not require eliminating disagreement. It involves developing a more complex understanding of the interaction while preserving the possibility of relationship.
SRP proposes that the capacity to move from relational disruption toward reflection, recognition, and repair may contribute to broader changes in personality integration.
What SRP Treatment Is Like
SRP is an active and relational form of psychotherapy.
Treatment involves careful attention both to what the patient describes and to what develops within the therapeutic relationship itself. The therapist may ask questions, offer interpretations, identify recurring relational patterns, challenge contradictions, explore shifts in how the patient experiences self and others, and, when clinically appropriate, speak thoughtfully about aspects of the interaction occurring between therapist and patient.
The work can involve examining emotionally difficult experiences rather than immediately reducing their intensity. At the same time, treatment occurs within a reliable therapeutic frame in which emotional activation serves understanding and change rather than intensity for its own sake.
SRP is individualized. The therapist’s level of activity and participation depends upon the patient’s personality organization, psychological stability, affect tolerance, relational capacities, treatment goals, and the particular clinical moment.
The objective is not simply to understand recurring relational patterns from a distance, but gradually to develop greater freedom within them.
Beyond the Individual Dyad: Self & Others
Although the therapist-patient relationship is an important setting for SRP, personality structure is expressed across relationships. A group setting creates an expanded interpersonal field in which relational patterns can emerge across multiple people rather than only between patient and therapist.
At The Kimberly Center, this dimension of the model is being developed through Self & Others, a psychotherapy group designed to bring greater attention to how participants experience themselves and other people in real time.
Within the group, patterns involving belonging, exclusion, admiration, competition, shame, dependency, anger, closeness, withdrawal, idealization, and devaluation may become visible across multiple relationships. Participants encounter perspectives, perceptions, and emotional responses that may differ substantially from their own and have opportunities to reflect upon how they affect, and are affected by, other people.
From an SRP perspective, these encounters can be particularly important. An individual’s experience of an interpersonal event may coexist with very different experiences held by other members of the group. Remaining engaged with these differences can create opportunities to recognize multiple subjective realities without requiring one perspective to completely displace another.
The Self & Others group therefore provides an expanded interpersonal setting in which aspects of personality structure can become visible and available for reflection, metabolization, and potentially greater structural integration.
Self & Others represents one developing clinical application of SRP at The Kimberly Center. Its role within the broader model is also an area of ongoing theoretical and research development.
SRP at The Kimberly Center
SRP is currently used by Justin Jones, Ph.D., in his clinical work at The Kimberly Center, particularly with patients experiencing personality pathology and complex, recurrent relational difficulties.
The model informs both individual psychotherapy and the developing Self & Others group application. Depending upon the needs of the individual, SRP may also be used within broader treatment plans incorporating established approaches including Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Mentalization-Based Treatment, Schema Therapy, group psychotherapy, psychiatric care, and other clinically appropriate interventions.
This reflects The Kimberly Center’s broader treatment philosophy: complex personality difficulties often require attention both to immediate symptoms and to the underlying organization of personality, identity, emotion, and relationships.
About the Developer
Justin Jones, Ph.D., is a clinical and forensic psychologist, Founder and Director of The Kimberly Center, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he teaches Personality Disorders.
His clinical and research work focuses on personality pathology, personality structure, object relations, therapist subjectivity and countertransference, relational processes in psychotherapy, and mechanisms of psychological change.
Dr. Jones is the developer of Structural Relational Psychotherapy (SRP) and directs the Center for the Study of Personality Structure and Psychotherapy Process, where he works with graduate students and research collaborators on the continuing theoretical and empirical development of the model.
The theoretical development of the model, and the research programme
The mechanisms of change, the theoretical foundations, and the work being done to investigate the model empirically are set out separately.