While the fruition of dharma practice is awakening, the fruition of becoming a fully developed person is the capacity to engage in I-Thou relatedness with others. This means risking being fully open and transparent with others, while appreciating and taking an interest in what they are experiencing and how they are different from oneself. This capacity for open expressiveness and deep attunement is very rare in this world. It’s especially difficult if you are relationally wounded.
In short, dharma is all too often used as a way to deny our human side. As one Western Zen teacher profiled in The New York Times told of being advised by one of his teachers: “What you need to do is put aside all human feelings.” When entering psychotherapy decades later, he recognized this had not been helpful advice, and it had taken him decades to realize this.
But if we hold a perspective that includes the two developmental tracks, then we will not use absolute truth to belittle relative truth. Instead of the either/or logic of, “Your feelings are empty, so just let them go,” we could take a both/and approach: “Feelings are empty, and sometimes we need to pay close attention to them.” In light of absolute truth, personal needs are insubstantial like a mirage, and fixating on them causes suffering. Yes, and at the same time, if a relative need arises, just shunting it aside can cause further problems. In terms of relative truth, being clear about where you stand and what you need is one of the most important principles of healthy communication in relationships.
The great paradox of being both human and buddha is that we are both dependent and not dependent. Part of us is completely dependent on people for everything—from food and clothing to love, connectedness, and inspiration and help with our development. Though our buddha nature is not dependent— that's absolute truth— our human embodiment is — that's relative truth.
Of course, in the largest sense, absolute and relative are completely interwoven and cannot be kept apart: The more we realize the absolute openness of what we are, the more deeply we come to recognize our relative interconnectedness with all beings.