ABSTRACT
From a relational perspective, a client's psychology is a process that happens where inner and outer meet, where a client's mental organizing systems make sense of what happens to him in relation to others. Past and present meet here because a client's interpersonal process memory is a powerful organizer of the meanings and feelings moving through his present-day interactions. Popular conceptions of therapy link past and present often with the assumption that therapy is about remembering traumatic events that clients have repressed. For clients all along the continuum of relational trauma, interpersonal trust is riddled with doubt and fear, though when less severe those feelings can be masked. Relational therapy insists that only remembering-with will help a person whose life is constricted by relational trauma. Remembering is a mental event constructed in the here and now, and this very here-and-now is constantly being formed by the sum total of all that one remembers.
