Handbook of Feminist Therapy

[Erica Chan]

Handbook of Feminist Therapy: Women's Issues in Psychotherapy

Edited by Lynne Bravo Rosewater, Ph.D. & Lenore E. A. Walker, Ed.D.

A fascinating book that can be found in the Matheson Library at Monash, this book contains articles such as Feminist Assertiveness Training, Getting to 'No', Therapeutic Anger in Women, Feminist Body Psychotherapy, Lesbian Couples and Families, Schizophrenic, Borderline or Battered? Pornography: The Leveler of Women, and other fascinating articles looking at power, transcending sex roles, and looking at Violence against Women.

Here's just a brief excerpt of Adrienne J. Smith and Ruth F. Siegel's essay in here, Feminist Therapy: Redefining Power for the Powerless.

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Empowerment is usually understood as the process of helping a powerless individual or group to gain the necessary skills, knowledge, or influence to acquire control over their own lives and begin to influence the lives of others. As feminist therapists with nearly 10 years of practice, we have become aware of another form of empowerment for women, namely, helping women to gain awareness of power they already have but have not recognised as such.

The temr ‘power’ is used here to include both personal and interpersonal power. Interpersonal power is the ability to influence others who have access to essential resources, with the aim of convincing them to provide one with those resources. Personal power, or the ability to determine one’s own life, is similar to Roberts’ definition of freedom as ‘the right... to conceive of time and space as belonging to the self and to experience a sense of being able to control and direct one’s own movement through the short span of human life’.

Because women have been denied direct access to formal power - access to essential resources and authority, including political, financial, and familial authority - we usually have been described as a group lacking in power (Johnson, 1976). In fact, powerless groups do exercise interpersonal power, but in forms different from that of the dominant group. Specifically, the power exercised by women tends to be covert, indirect, ‘ladylike’. When women are encouraged to recognise these tactics as a form of power - one that is determined by our lack of formal power - we can become more aware of our own strengths and move to use and acknowledge overt interpersonal power tactics. Overt tactics, in turn, will render us more personally powerful and more in control of our lives.

Viewing oneself as powerless leads to feelings of impotence, rage, and depression... we are in a position to empower the woman, that is, to enable her to reclaim her own power by renaming certain aspects of her behaviour, especially that called manipulative or crazy, as attempts to achieve the goals of control and influence under given societal constraints. In our process of validating her perceptions, sharing our own experiences, and introducing her to feminist writings, we facilitate reduction in our... feelings of difference and inadequacy and introduce her to her own strengths.

STATUS AND POWER
Increasing evidence indicates that the differneces between women and men in their expression of power are due to status rather than sex. According to Frieze, Parsons, Johnson, Ruble and Zellman (1978, p. 304) status is ‘a heirarchy of inferiority and superiority on some dimension or set of dimensions.’ Because ‘male in itself means higher status’ (p. 305), the two variables of gender and status are almost completely confounded. Unger (1979), in an extensive review of the literature on status, gender, and power, shows that ‘male-female relationships are essentially similar to relationships between high and low status individuals and thus status is a more parsimonious explanation than gender’ (p. 6).
Women ‘get what they want’ through indirect, covert influencing techniques, often using the assigned sex-role-appropriate behaviours of helplessness, dependency, coyness, and appeal to emotions. Under the oppressive constraints of patriarchy, women, who are low-status people, use second-class power tactics that usually are not acknowledged as power (McClelland, 1975). Even when women achieve their objectives, therefore, both sexes continue to see a woman as powerless. The frequent attribution of women’s successes to luck and men’s successes to skill is evidence that neither sex believes women have sufficient abilities to control their own lives.
The indirect forms of interpersonal power - what we call ‘underground power’ - are used to resist or refuse when overt refusal would invite retaliation. Retaliation can range from physical violence to financial deprivation, shaming, and/or capitalising on the woman’s own internalised belief that she is bad, unnatural, an unloving mother, or a ‘castrating bitch.’

... At some level of consciousness every woman is aware of the discrepancy between her perceptions of the world and the masculist world view; but without validation from other women we are unable to risk defining ourselves. Unvalidated, our perceptions lead to feelings of despair, madness, and occasionally suicide - as has been documented by Chesler (1971) and fictionalised by Gilman (1973) and Chopin (1971).

A focus of feminist therapy is to empower women to become self-defining. As the therapist gives positive acknowledgement of women’s needs, needs not approved of by the dominant male culture, women’s self-esteem rises and they begin to explore the risks involved in using power more directly. Becoming aware of their ‘womanpower’, in other words, can lead to more-overt behaviour that gives them more real power, both interpersonal and personal, and greater ability to direct the course of their own lives.