This text takes a stand: care is not a power, helping is never dominating, and silence in the face of abuse makes us complicit. It is a call for relational justice: recognising the dignity of the person, clarifying responsibilities, and giving relationships back their supporting function rather than a use as control.

When a relationship becomes domination

Coercive control does not always begin with a shout. It seeps in: ambiguous promises, moral debts, subtle isolation, the disqualification of thought, sustained confusion. In a couple, a team, a family, a training programme or a therapy practice, the frame and the quality of dialogue make the difference between a relationship that lifts and a relationship that holds someone down.

In the systemic field, we know that micro-dynamics — loyalties, debts, secrets, double binds — can turn a helping relationship into a mechanics of domination if no one is tasked with thinking through its effects.

Complicit silences: a systemic phenomenon

Institutional omertà has its own drivers: loyalty to the group, fear of reprisals, the rhetoric of neutrality, moral fatigue. Social psychology has long described the bystander effect: the more witnesses there are, the less each of them feels responsible for acting. Care does not escape this diffusion of responsibility — hence the need for explicit roles and alert procedures.

Relational justice: a compass for the ethics of care

In contextual therapy, Boszormenyi-Nagy speaks of relational justice: balance of contributions, reliability, accountability, loyal transmission across generations. This compass invites professionals to position themselves not “above”, but in the service of the reliability of the bond.

Neutrality in systemic practice, as the Milan school conceives it, is not indifference: it is a position of multidirectional curiosity — hypothesising, circularity, neutrality — that prevents domination; it does not tolerate it. When “neutrality” becomes a pretext for silence in the face of violence, it betrays its function.

Why talk about all this now?

Because transparency is called for. I have witnessed, in some institutions, dynamics of control covered over by a façade of loyalty, the veneer of “neutrality” and sometimes omertà. I refuse from now on to normalise them.

It is high time we had the courage to fight them: naming them plainly, documenting them, protecting those who suffer from them, demanding clear procedures and effective checks and balances, and agreeing to put our own practices into question. Care has nothing to fear from the light; what the light threatens are the arrangements that manufacture impunity.

Let us speak, let us act, and let us hold the line of a relational justice that protects. The full talk — in French — can be watched below.