2015 Association for Women in Psychology Conference

One of the noteworthy accomplishments of Feminist Therapy (FT) has been to highlight issues of power in the therapeutic relationship. Brown (n.d.) described FT as "a politically informed model that always observes human experience within the framework of societal and cultural realities, and the dynamics of power informing those realities." Historically, this perspective was essential as the therapist was a White, heterosexual, man and the client was a White woman. While White women continue to be the majority of therapy clients, the field of psychology is becoming more diverse. Minority students are increasingly recruited for psychology programs to become professors, therapists, and counselors. These students often bring a keen awareness and first-hand knowledge of issues of power to the counseling relationship. Many minority students experience "-isms" (e.g. racism, sexism) in their personal lives and training programs. As new therapists, they are often told that they have power, especially over the client, and cautioned about its misuse. However, when their clients, often white and female, engage in behaviors that recreate "-isms", minority therapists are often left feeling powerless and helpless. These difficulties are further exacerbated by supervisors who are unprepared to respond to supervisees’ experiences. They may blame/invalidate students for unsuccessful therapeutic work or not know how to help the therapist respond to the client. In this session we will share perspectives from supervisees and a supervisor on how “isms” impact the therapeutic process and the relationship. It is hoped that through engaging in this dialog, students and supervisors alike may learn strategies of empowerment in an inherently dis-empowering situation. Part of this process involves deconstructing the hurtful interaction taking place in the room between therapist and client. An equally important part of the process involves restorative justice, the act of healing these wounds in a safe, responsive supervisor-supervisee relationship.

Feminism can be defined as the promotion of equality among genders (Walby, 2011). In practice, feminism often focuses on women’s experiences. One question that remains is: How does masculinity intertwine with those of femininity in order to promote equality among genders? Instead of looking at the differences between masculinity and femininity, a better approach could be to look at both gender ideas to achieve a higher level of equality. Is there a way to promote the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity simultaneously? Many times there can be a negative view on masculinity based on aggression, discrimination, and societal double standards. These negative issues of masculinity have often been paired with the discrimination of females within our society (Barbeluscu & Bidwell, 2013). It could be easy to think that there may be negative feelings attached to masculinity. Understanding each others’ perspectives on gender and their roles could help bring about restorative justice on equality between genders. In this structured discussion, we will be talking about masculinity and how it relates to equality. Thus, the conversation will be on the promotion of positive masculinity and the ways it could have positive impact on equality. We will explore different ways of promoting masculinity through the thoughts and feelings of the survivors, offenders, and community members. By promoting femininity and masculinity as one, it is our hope that this will unite both concepts together in order to diminish gender-based segregation. Throughout history, societal behaviors have been passive and at times accepting of inequalities placed upon the female gender. By working together, we would no longer be segregating genders, but uniting them and moving forward to promote equality.

Women’s Therapy Center (WTC) is a feminist psychodynamic social justice oriented training clinic. Our faculty wants to talk with people from other training agencies about creating more racial/ethnic diversity among faculty, supervisors and trainees. We have created a diverse training cohort, and hope to learn more about attracting faculty and supervisors. WTC was founded in 1978 as a place for experienced women therapists to train beginning therapists in work with female clients. Although WTC has always had small numbers of women of color affiliated with our training programs, our organization has historically been predominantly White. Our agency has served a diverse client population for many years. We have successfully turned a corner over the past six years, so that people of European descent are no longer the majority of people training with us. This was not an easy thing to achieve. There were many conversations and many mistakes. We made changes to our admissions criteria that expanded access to us, and we changed our curriculum to be more inclusive. We had many diversity trainings aimed at both students and faculty. We have stopped seeing people of color as the only carriers of culture, and begun to recognize the culture of Whiteness that our organization embodied. Having an all-volunteer faculty and supervisory staff added to our challenges for diversifying. In our early years, we were most interested in the way that sexism, within the gender binary, shaped women’s lives. We now include an understanding of the ways that all social location shapes our internal and external lives. Although we continue to be predominantly a women’s organization, our understanding of gender has expanded and we now serve and train transgender/genderqueer people as well as women. We hope our conversation can also include the complexity of this shift.

There are intersections of identities that may appear to be a contradiction. Occasionally these intersections lead to cognitive dissonance whereby accepting one identity indicates the denial of another. This structured discussion will focus on two specific identities, identifying as a feminist and identifying with a culture that is patriarchal. Patriarchal cultures typically have values that are viewed as oppressive to women. Take for example the Hmong culture where daughters are traditionally raised under the notion that they will one day marry and no longer belong with their birth family. Upon marriage, Hmong daughters will be a part of their husband’s family instead. This belief traditionally privileges Hmong sons and men over Hmong daughter or women. Another example is when Hmong women get out of abusive marriages and experience shaming and rejection from their own community. Some Hmong women believe their culture or even their birth parents have betrayed them. Feeling rejected by other Hmong people, divorced Hmong women often feel as though they cannot go back to their cultural community. The current structured discussion will provide some cultural contexts to the examples provided above. The goal of the discussion is to compile ideas for women who feel like they have been wronged by their culture so they may have restorative justice. This discussion gives women in psychology a chance to voice stories, opinions, and ideas on how to be a feminist within a patriarchal culture.

The interaction of the Middle Eastern culture and its constrained depiction of sexuality has brought oppression to women and non-heteronormative sexualities. Middle Eastern women have been desexualized, and this creates an imminent need for a platform for Middle Eastern women to voice and begin a dialogue to reframe their sexuality.

This structured discussion will explore how we as mental health professionals can utilize feminist and multicultural psychology to engage clients in awareness of gender role socialization in ways that increase clients’ empowerment and promote restorative justice, particularly in the face of violence. Drawing on clinical experience and relevant literature, facilitators will consider ideas for effective therapeutic intervention and potential avenues for enhancing clinical training. Gender roles are the behaviors that individuals perform based on socially constructed expectations about what constitutes masculinity and femininity (Mahalik, Cournoyer, DeFranc, Cherry, & Napolitano, 1998). Recent literature on the topic emphasizes the effects of socialization that lead to adoption of gender roles and addresses the need to redefine power-based constructions of gender (Enns, 2004; Jones, 2003). Research has also begun to acknowledge the differences in gender roles across race and ethnicity (Crawford & Unger, 2004; Miville, 2013). In some cultures, unquestioned adaptation of prescribed gender roles, especially when they have power-based sociopolitical implications, can affect a person’s physical and mental wellbeing (Miville, Bratini, Corpus, Diaz, 2013). Using therapy to address such dynamics, clients may be better able to develop a fuller sense of themselves as gendered beings, which in turn may foster greater psychological health (Miville, Bratini, Corpus, & Diaz, 2013). In working with clients from a feminist perspective, special attention should be placed on the impact of gender role identity on physical and emotional violence, which requires therapists to explore clients’ beliefs related to masculinity and femininity (Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005). Special attention should be placed on how a female client’s gender role identity may impact her experience and understanding of physical and emotional violence (Crenshaw, 1991). In addition, when working through experiences of violence in therapy, an examination of gender role expectations may provide female clients with a deeper understanding of such experiences. It may also facilitate an opening to explore novel ways of developing restorative empowerment as clients heal from violence-related experiences. Per recent feminist literature, as instances of violence around the world increase, it becomes ever more imperative that the racial, ethnic, and gendered differences of such experiences are addressed (Crawford & Unger, 2004). It is therefore vital for therapists to gain an awareness of the influence of gender socialization on their clients’ lives and frame the context of therapy from this lens (Steigerwald & Forrest, 2004). Therapists should also evaluate how their own gender-based beliefs may contribute to their conceptualizations of the issues presented by their clients (Steigerwald & Forrest, 2004).

Depth psychological theories, which honor the reality of the unconscious, often hold the reputation of an individualistic psychology, one in which the external realities of oppression may be overlooked in favor of one’s inner landscape (Altman, 2004; Layton, 2009; Watkins, 2000) This dialogue endeavors to challenge the binaried reputation and highlight the unique position a depth perspective holds; one of psyche in the world, where dreams and images co-mingle with the distinctive external realities of daily living particular to each person. Feminist psychological theories provide a framework for encountering privilege, marginalization, and the socially constructed differences that make up the world we share (Butler, 1990). By fostering a dialogue in which the tension between self and other is deconstructed we will enable a subsequent exploration of intersectionality as a point of convergence and elaboration for feminist depth practices. Through the exploration of historical to present day activism within depth psychological practices participants will discover ways in which social justice was an integral component of the early approaches to psychoanalysis and played a formative role in the shaping of psychological theories such as Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian as well as contributed to contemporary theories within humanistic and feminist theoretical approaches (Layton, 2000; Watkins, 2000). Additionally, a critical exploration of the ways in which depth psychologists have turned away from the realities of injustice in favor of the sanctified consulting room will be addressed. This relevant critique will serve to foster intentionality and the valuing of differences by creating community that is meaningful and edifying for all beings. The dialogue will culminate in a collaborative envisioning of the ways in which depth psychologists can engage more deeply in tending to the healing of both the individual patient as well as this dynamic shared world. References Altman, N. (2004). History repeat itself in transference: Countertransference. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14(6). Butler , J. (1990), Gender trouble, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic discourse. In: Feminism/Postmodernism, (Ed.). L. J. Nicholson. New York, London: Routledge, pp. 324-340. Layton, L. (2000). Identity, and sexuality: Discourses of fragmentation. In Rudnytsky, P.,Gordon, A. Psychoanalyses/Feminisms. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Layton, L. (2009). Who’s responsible? Our mutual implication in each other’s suffering. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19:105–120. doi:10.1080/10481880902779695. Watkins, M. (2000). Depth psychology and the liberation of being. In R. Brooke (Ed.), Pathways into the Jungian World: Phenomenology and Analytical Psychology. London: Routledge.

The role of mothers is pivotal in the development of children (Ambert, 1994). The importance of the African American mother-son relationship is exemplified within many African American cultural by products. Seminal works such as Langston Hughes’ poem, “Mother to Son,” and Tupac’s song, “Keep Ya Head Up,” highlight the importance of the mother-son relationship within the African American community. Despite the embedded cultural significance of this relationship, psychological research frequently undermines and stereotypes the role of African American mothers in the development of their children (Bush, 2000). Thus, there is a paucity of research that explores the specific feelings of loss that women may feel when they lose their sons to community violence. Women may find themselves particularly distressed by community violence (Jenkins, 2002). They may suffer disproportionately as they lose sons not only to community violence but also to high rates of incarceration (Jenkins, 2002). The threat of community violence may drastically change the way in which Black women parent their children due to fear and worry they experience (Jenkins, 2002). Although women are often victimized by community violence they are not actively represented in the arena of restorative justice. The notable community leaders with the African American community are often men. This presentation will use feminist theory and concepts of restorative justice to understand the struggle that women go through in losing their sons to community violence. It will also reframe the significance of African American mothers in the lives of their sons. Through feminist perspectives, we will discuss interventions that can be geared at restoring mothers after loss, and empowering these women to themselves become activists. Through the utilization of current victims, we will provide examples to how these interventions may be implemented within our individual communities.

Restorative justice approaches to sexual assault and intimate partner violence move us away from a primarily punitive criminal justice model toward a more holistic focus on survivors, the community, and society. This structured discussion seeks to engage participants in conversations about the many ways that a restorative justice model could be applied to sexual assault and intimate partner violence in the US and abroad. Four guiding questions will be used to promote discussion: 1) What does restorative justice mean in the context of sexual assault and intimate partner violence?; 2) How do restorative justice approaches align with survivor-centric, trauma-informed models of intervention?; 3) What are the implications of a restorative justice approach for prevention efforts?; and 4) How can we ensure that prevention and intervention efforts are culturally informed and appropriate? Three speakers will lead the discussion by sharing lessons learned from their own work in the field. The first speaker will describe culturally responsive approaches to therapy and intervention for survivors of sexual assault and sex trafficking. The second speaker will consider the benefits of a public health perspective for framing prevention and intervention efforts for sexual assault and intimate partner violence. The third speaker will offer insights into community-based intervention, prevention, and research models to address sexual assault and intimate partner violence. Throughout the discussion, participants will be encouraged to address the root causes of violence; consider survivor-centric, trauma-informed, and culturally appropriate models of prevention and intervention; and discuss the myriad ways that we, as feminists, can be involved in restoring justice for those affected by sexual assault and intimate partner violence both at home and abroad.