Dear Sisters,
In graduate school and during our supervised internships, new therapists are taught that it is unprofessional and potentially harmful to clients if we bring our personal biases into the therapy room. We’re counseled to “meet the client where they are” and to work diligently to present as an apolitical, neutral blank slate in order to best reflect the client’s own image back to them.
This might be some therapists’ view of a utopian ideal if humans were actually capable of objectivity and if traditional theories of human development and psychotherapy weren’t already biased against women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals. The practice of psychotherapy is not immune to the forces of the dominant culture and therapists—despite our best efforts—are only human. We walk into the counseling room carrying the burden of so much culturally enforced bias against anyone who is not a cis white male that we must be relentlessly dedicated to a practice of recognizing these biases and correcting for them. This, in fact, is the only way to avoid harming our clients.
Since humans first began engaging in intellectual and philosophical pursuits, the ways in which we make meaning, assess sources of knowledge, and assign value to people and objects has centered around male experience. In the West, a filter that privileges white European culture is added to this already biased way of seeing. Over the centuries, all forms of intellectual study, including that of human development and psychology, adopted this biased point of view as if it were truly universal and objective, while dissenting or noncompliant points of view were silenced.
Fortunately, awareness of this bias has recently been raised. Unfortunately, little measurable change for the better has happened in the practice of psychotherapy. People will often speak of early psychologists’ practice of labeling women who had survived unspeakable sexual abuse as delusional “hysterics” as if that sort of thing is all in the past. The truth is that contemporary psychotherapy continues to pathologize women, BIPOC people, and LGBTQ+ individuals when they display signs of the trauma and stress that result from the very real social, political, and cultural forms of oppression they face every day.
“Reparative” and “conversion” therapy aimed at the LGBTQ+ community continues to thrive in spite of a slow but persistent change in how we understand sexual and gender identity. People of color face an unconscionable lack of access to mental health services that acknowledge, validate, and specifically treat their racial trauma. Additionally, many psychological constructs have been conceptualized in a gender-biased way. One of the most harmful of these is borderline personality disorder, a diagnosis that is given to more than twice as many women as men. Women who have survived abuse, sexual assault, and a lifetime of gendered inequities are often horribly stigmatized with the diagnosis of a personality disorder when the justifiable symptoms of their trauma become difficult for others to tolerate or are deemed “untreatable.”.
Under these circumstance, a call for neutrality only serves to support the culturally enforced biases—and the oppressive power structures that support them—that are the causes of so much harm to so many people. Instead, we need a radical transformation of how mental health is researched and how therapy is practiced. Therapists who want to avoid harming their clients need to be aware of, and actively work to resist, the normative cultural biases we bring to our work. And we must consciously adopt an ecological and psycho-political approach to our work that acknowledges how these oppressive cultural structures and biases directly impact the emotional well-being of our clients.
Therapists aren’t a blank slate, and what we reflect back to our clients is often colored by the biases absorbed from a culture that privileges the masculine over the feminine, the heterosexual over the sexually diverse, the black-and-white binary over the rainbow.
For these reasons, I unapologetically practice an inclusive, feminist form of psychotherapy. I have a philosophical commitment to viewing women as the sole authority on their own lived experience. I examine how gender affects psychological constructs such as assertiveness, self-esteem, and anger and I resist pathologizing reasonable emotional responses to everyday forms of oppression. Most importantly, I fully embrace the creative subjectivity that is part of being human and make it a daily practice to weed out harmful beliefs and biases that one can’t help but absorb from a culture that devalues the subjective and the feminine.
If you believe that this sort of therapeutic relationship could be beneficial to you, reach out and we can talk about working together.
With love and solidarity,
Sheryl