What Is a Relatogen?
What Is a Relatogen?
A relatogen is a substance, practice, or experience that brings relationship into awareness and has the potential to reorganize and deepen how we relate to ourselves, our bodies, our memories, other people, nature, meaning, and the wider field of life.
I use the term relatogen to describe experiences that do more than change how we feel or perceive the world. They reveal the relationships already shaping our lives and how we relate to them.
A relatogenic experience might bring attention to our relationship with grief, fear, family, creativity, death, love, purpose, the body, the Earth, or whatever we consider meaningful or sacred. It may show us where connection has been lost, where conflict remains unresolved, or where a different way of relating is possible.
Psychedelics can be relatogens. So can breathwork, meditation, therapy, grief, ritual, time in nature, near-death experiences, and other transformative or non-ordinary states.
The defining feature is not the method itself, since many practices and tools can shift our relationships.
The Meaning of the Word Relatogen
Relatogen is a hybrid neologism: a newly formed word built from existing linguistic elements.
The first part of the word points toward relation and relationship. The suffix “-gen” generally refers to generating, producing, or bringing something forth.
We find similar constructions in words such as:
Entheogen, referring to a substance understood as bringing forth an experience of the divine within
Empathogen, referring to a substance that increases feelings of empathy, emotional openness, or interpersonal connection
Psychoplastogen, referring to a substance that promotes changes in neural plasticity
Relatogen names a relational process.
It describes something that brings relationship forward, makes relational patterns more visible, or creates the conditions for those patterns to change.
The word relation carries meanings connected to correspondence, connection, reporting, and bringing something back.
Psychedelic and non-ordinary experiences often bring something back into awareness: an old story, a forgotten grief, a memory, a body sensation, a family pattern, a longing for belonging, or a connection that had gone unseen.
A relatogen, then, does not simply produce an effect. It brings relationship back into awareness.
What Does a Relatogen Do?
A relatogen can reveal that our experiences do not exist in isolation, but rather highlight the interconnectedness of our experiences and the world. Everything is interconnected, in relation, and always in process. A relatogenic experience helps us understand and become aware of the processes unfolding and our relationship to those processes.
Our emotions are connected to memories. Our memories are connected to relationships. Our relationships are shaped by families, communities, cultures, environments, and histories. Our mind and body carry traces of what we have experienced, avoided, protected, loved, and lost.
A relatogenic experience may make these connections more noticeable and felt.
Someone might recognize that their anxiety is connected to the way they learned to seek approval. A question to then ask is “What is my relationship to seeking approval? What happens when I stop seeking approval from people in my life?”
Another person might feel grief that has been buried beneath years of work and responsibility. A question to ask is, “What is my relationship to work and responsibility? What have I been avoiding in life when I work all the time?”
Someone else might experience a renewed sense of connection with nature and begin questioning how they live within the larger ecosystem.
The experience may shift how a person relates to:
Their body and emotions
Painful or meaningful memories
Parents, partners, children, or ancestors
Community and belonging
Work, creativity, and purpose
Nature and the more-than-human world
Spirituality, mystery, or the sacred
Mortality, loss, and change
The content will be different for every person. The relational movement is what connects these experiences and how becoming aware of these connections fosters change.
Can Something Other Than a Psychedelic Be a Relatogen?
Relatogen does not need to refer only to a drug or substance.
A practice or experience can also function relatogenically when it brings relationship into awareness and creates the possibility of relational change.
Examples might include:
Breathwork
Meditation or contemplative practice
Somatic and relational therapy
Group process
Ritual and ceremony
Grief and loss
Near-death experiences
Experiences of awe
Deep encounters with art or music
Time in nature
Major life transitions
Meaningful conflict or reconciliation
Not every breathwork session, therapy session, or walk in the woods is necessarily a relatogenic experience. The term becomes useful when the experience reveals something significant about how a person is relating to a process in their life.
The category is defined by the process, not the technique.
Why the Idea of a Relatogen Matters
Language helps us define our reality. As Terence McKenna once said, “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued that language does more than describe reality; it shapes what we are able to notice and think about clearly. He believed that new ideas sometimes require new words because ordinary language carries assumptions that may no longer fit the experiences we are trying to describe. Whitehead developed terms such as prehension, concrescence, and actual occasion to articulate a world constituted through process and relationship.
In a similar spirit, relatogen gives language to a dimension of non-ordinary experiences that is often recognized but insufficiently named: the capacity of an experience to reveal, intensify, or reorganize how we relate.
When psychedelics are described only as medicines, we may focus primarily on symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and individual outcomes. When they are described only as consciousness-expanding substances, we may focus on perception, insight, and extraordinary experience.
The word relatogen encourages another set of questions:
What relationships became visible during the experience?
What changed in the person’s relationship with their body, history, family, community, or environment?
What difficult relational patterns were exposed?
How might the experience affect the relationships surrounding them?
People do not heal, suffer, or transform in isolation. People heal in relationship. Our lives take shape within webs of relationships.
A relational framework helps us see that more clearly. A relational framework is also a process-oriented framework, which I will dive into another time to help deepen this definition and understanding.
