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.

Feminist and multicultural perspectives in training and supervision can serve women of color graduate students in their professional identity development and promote their success in graduate programs. Presenters will facilitate a collaborative discussion with participants around approaches that can improve the training experiences of women of color while also strengthening systemic commitment to cultural competency.

This structured discussion has a two-pronged focus: the broad implementation of restorative justice practices and principles across the educational spectrum and the seeming paucity of Latin@ facilitators in the restorative justice movement in Oakland. In focusing on broad implementation of restorative justice in education, the presenters seek to destabilize the silo-zation of restorative justice wisdom within and among educators and community organizers. Through this process the presenters hope to stimulate and engage in a richer and deeper cross-disciplinary discussion with the hope of creating connection between different arms and geographical locations of restorative justice practitioners. The second prong of the structured discussion is meant to highlight the apparent lack of Latin@ practitioners in the local restorative justice movement. In contrast to the African-American community which has embraced and, in many cases, led this justice movement, Latin@s seem to lag behind in adopting RJ practices and principles. This is a potentially important oversight given the high rate of Latin@s in the justice system and the long history of cultural, communal and individual trauma with in the Latin@ community. The presenters see restorative justice as a healing and transformative practice with great potential in the Latin@ community. The presenters are curious about the rate of the Latin@ community’s engagement with restorative justice across the country, and would like to know how to better engage with Latin@ community in Oakland. Future trajectories of this discussion include, but are not limited to, creating a community conference that bring all arms of restorative justice to together to discuss practices and principles, bringing existing Latin@ facilitators together to create solidarity, and training Latin@ facilitators to heal their respective communities. The dialogue will be held in circle and use the world cafe method to deepen the dialogue with the participants. All levels of participation are most welcome.

Peer education is an approach to psychoeducational learning through which students learn from and interact with their peers rather than faculty or staff. Peer educators may solidify their own learning through facilitating workshops and presentations with their peers on topics related to health and mental health (Boud, Cohen, & Sampson, 2011). Additionally, Williams reported, “Learning done in the context of community creates rich opportunities for complex interactions with students different from one another” (Williams, 2011). Interactive learning “in the context of community” lends itself well to focusing a peer education program on the intersections of mental health and social and restorative justice. Although students involved in social and restorative justice based peer education programs have reported profound and transformative learning experiences in terms of insights about others as well as themselves, these programs are rare on college campuses (Voorhees & Petkas, 2011). The Multicultural Immersion Program (MIP) at UC-Davis is celebrating its 18th year as a peer education program sponsored by the Counseling Center that focuses on social and restorative justice work and the intersections of mental health and oppression. This structured discussion will feature past and current MIP peer educators along with their Counseling Center staff coordinators, who will discuss the evolution of their feminist, social and restorative justice work on campus. In the first part of this discussion facilitators will share their experiences in the MIP program, the development of their multicultural dialogue skills through their collaborations with community partners on campus, and the impact the program has had on them both personally and professionally. The facilitators will then engage the participants in discussion and in generating ideas for bringing peer-led social and restorative justice programming to campuses and organizations in which participants are involved.

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.

This discussion will focus on the all-too-common yet aversive experiences marginalized group members endure in academic spaces. Specifically, this discussion will tackle the ways in which experiences of microaggressions, prejudice, and discrimination create inner turmoil, distractions, and strain for their recipients as students, mentors, counselors, instructors, researchers, and faculty (e.g., Gomez, Khurshid, Freitag & Lachuk, 2011; Minikel-Lacocque, 2013). In an oppressive society, the burden of proof is assigned to targets of discrimination to address such comments and behaviors and consider the potential costs and benefits associated with confronting colleagues, peers, and students (e.g., Rollock, 2012). In addition to giving way to internalized feelings of doubt, guilt, and apprehension, power dynamics further complicate the process of determining the worthiness of identifying and confronting issues of injustice in a professional setting. The experience of marginalized group members in higher education has been well documented in the literature (e.g., Turner, 2002). Although universities push diversity initiatives, informal interpersonal interactions can lack respect of diverse experiences and celebration of inclusivity. Despite a safe and welcoming social climate being amenable to productivity, connectedness, and overall satisfaction, many reports indicate an unfortunate narrative of alienation and self-doubt for marginalized group members (Constantine, Smith, Redington, & Owens, 2008). These authors found that those who try to navigate these experiences often feel they must “choose [their] battles carefully.” This discussion will expand on the decision making process for having to address discrimination, and highlight the diverse positions we take in order to survive in academic spaces. We hope to learn from participants ways in which they have navigated (successfully and unsuccessfully) difficult dialogues, discuss the potential impact on our professional development, and seek informal advice from one another on self-care, acts of resistance, acts of silence, etc. amidst adverse academic cultures.

Developing a national/international support system for conducting multicultural feminist (MCF) research can foster the productivity required of tenure-track faculty and build connections for continued career development (e.g., networking for future jobs). Building MCF communities develops sustainability in the often patriarchal, competitive, and isolative academic systems (Arczynski, 2014; Porter and Vasquez, 1997). Academic departments can render feminist and multicultural research and scholarship invisible by being unaware, minimally, or by being actively oppositional, maximally, towards scholarship that seeks to investigate MCF topics (Arczynski, 2014). Previous research validated that reaching out for support and connecting with scholars who promoted a MCF orientation can serve to help faculty make sense of being challenged or marginalized for and serve to energize and support a MCF research agenda (Arczynski, 2014; Szymanski, 2003). By building MCF communities, scholarship devised to promote social change, equity, and inclusion can be fostered and supported (Morrow & Hawxhurst, 1984). Creating MCF research communities can emerge in many local, national, and international forms. The purpose of the roundtable is to bring together MCF researchers to talk about how we can support each other in developing publications, grant applications, and overall tenure track career trajectories. Christensen and Arczynski will describe their approach to building a qualitative MCF research community. Then, we seek to examine varied challenges participants have experienced in developing and maintaining supportive research communities. Next, we focus on facilitating participants’ sense of empowerment to build their own collaborative MCF scholarship communities by identifying plans of action. Participants will be encouraged to identify strategies for collaboration. For example, participants may identify the following options as promoting tenure-track sustainability: (a) Peer review before submission (critique papers before submitting for publication); (b) Incorporating authors (inviting colleague MCFs to join manuscripts); (c) Develop collaborations (cross-disciplinary, multi-site); and (d) Acquire seasoned mentors for guidance.

Mentoring is a critical skill for both clinical and academic psychologists. Although we have all benefited from being mentored as students, trainees, and colleagues, few of us have received formal training on how to mentor others. Indeed, many of us learn how to mentor “on the job”. For those early in their careers, there may be difficulties associated with enacting feminist models of mentoring that are typically collaborative and hierarchy-free, especially when mentees are unaccustomed with such models. In this interactive panel, sponsored by the early career caucus, four renowned feminist psychologists and mentors will discuss their experiences of feminist mentoring. Panelists will answer questions and provide advice to those looking to develop and/or improve feminist mentoring of undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students and clinical trainees.

To become culturally competent (APA, 2002), graduate psychology students must reflect on themselves and others in a cultural context. Toward this end, taking risks that involve authentic exploration of complex multicultural dynamics often invokes discomfort, fear, and, at times, conflict. In multicultural training, conflicts may involve intersections of multiple identities and dynamics around privilege, oppression, and power. Oftentimes unconscious biases, stereotypes, and internalized oppression are the undercurrents of these challenging dynamics. These classroom conflicts, ruptures, and microaggressions (Sue, 2010) may provide rich examples of the lived experiences of historical and systemic oppression - a microcosm of the larger society. Restorative practices can be used to address conflicts, ruptures and microaggressions that occur in the classroom. Restorative pedagogy helps to inform responses to difficult classroom situations through the teaching of the restorative mindset and values, as well as restorative modeling by the instructors (Hopkins, 2012). Restorative values involve a commitment to community, connection, transformation, and power-sharing (Gavrielides, 2014), which may represent a superordinate goal (Ridley, 2006) that helps students come together to address injustice, not solely from an individual interaction level but from a more interdependent and collective level. Additionally, conflict resolution and shame management within restorative models (Morrison & Ahmed, 2006) are critical to navigate challenging classroom situations. The presenters have many years of collective experience training, presenting, and publishing in multicultural psychology and have worked collaboratively to consider how best to interrupt classroom conflicts and microaggressions. The aim of this structured discussion is to bring educators together to discuss and explore the ways in which restorative practices can facilitate connection and community in the classroom even after ruptures, resistance, and microaggressions have taken place. Practical strategies for applications of restorative practices into curriculum design and group facilitation will be explored through the use of vignettes and structured questions. References American Psychological Association, Joint Task Force of APA Divisions 17 (Counseling Psychology) and 45 (The Society of the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues)(2002). Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pi/oema/resources/policy/multicultural-guidelines.aspx Gavrielides, T. (2014). Bringing race relations into the restorative justice debate: An alternative and personalized vision of “the other.” Journal of Black Studies, 45, 216-246. Doi: 10.1177/0021934714526042. Hopkins, B. (2012, Annual). Restorative justice as social justice. Nottingham Law Journal, 21, 121+. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA327955043&v=2.1&u=nu_main&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=bf02a1c794152edc60972aa4cca07215 Morrison, B. & Ahmed, E. (2006). Restorative justice and civil society: Emerging practice, theory, and evidence. Journal of Social Issues, 62(2), 209-215. Ridley, C.R. (2006). Surmounting resistance to multicultural training. Presented at the Convention of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, LA. Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions, marginality, and oppression: An introduction. D.W. Sue (Ed.), Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

This presentation will focus on the trials and tribulations faced by students of color when negotiating the predominantly White system that is academia. White people, specifically, White women are the majority demographic of doctoral program graduates in the United States and the field of psychology (APA, 2012). Students of color occupy a liminal space in which they are celebrated for their diversity; at the same time, existing stereotypes of minorities are used to create narratives of their identity for them. The expectation to fit this narrative creates internal conflict for these students. Additionally, when minority students do not act according to these expected stereotypes, academia is ill-equipped to respond. Therefore, these students of color end up being typecast as “problematic” and “atypical.” This issue, though an important piece in the broader mosaic of multicultural issues in psychology, is not frequently acknowledged or deconstructed. Ignoring the problem perpetuates a system wherein students of color are disempowered and then question their ability to succeed (Ewing, Richardson, James-Meyers & Russell, 1996). This influences their progress through their graduate program of study. The presenters will deconstruct how this issue affects students’ progress in their academic program and negatively impacts overall well-being. For instance, this disempowerment can manifest itself as students of color trying to change their behavior to become a tokenized minority, between-group struggles, within-group distrust, and trying to “act White.” The presenters will also discuss factors that aid in graduate students’ success and overall well-being. These factors, internal and external, include identifying this phenomena as it occurs, not internalizing it, developing discourses of empowerment, forming healthy support systems, self-care, and confronting impostor syndrome, among others.

Many of us have been trained as change agents in psychology. Women of Color of diverse Asian ethnicities raised at the intersections of gender and ethnic socialization have challenged dominant discourses of the quiet, subservient Asian female worker bee (Okubo, 2013). This panel of women of Japanese, Korean and Filipina descent, trained as counseling psychologists early and mid-career academics but working in non-counseling graduate programs as faculty members and in senior administration will facilitate a discussion on issues related to race, gender, power and privilege and strategies to leverage privileges we have to disrupt oppressive practices in the academia. Counseling Psychologists have unique training that allow us to be aware of power, privilege, and oppression at individual, cultural, institutional, and societal levels, and we are equipped to facilitating dialogues and concerted effort to instigating positive, meaningful changes. By critically examining our positionalities and missed opportunities from the past, we would like to engage with the discussion attendees to generate action plans as social change agents. We would like to facilitate the structured discussion using the following questions: How can we leverage our positionalities to be more effective allies considering our interactionality of privileged and marginalized identities? What have been the missed opportunities? How are we unwittingly serving as what Kivel calls the buffer class between the 1% and the lowest earning 80%? By identifying such instances and learning from them, we aim to facilitate discussion of how we can instigate meaningful changes as social change agents.

In this conversation hour, we will open with a brief meditation that invites imagery around Goddesses of mercy and strength. Examples will be provided in regard to distinct ways that Goddess images and one’s relationship with such can foster solace and strength in difficult times of uncertainty and stress for doctoral students. In addition, we will discuss how the use of images of the Goddess from diverse cultures, historical periods, and religious traditions can be used to provide a standpoint for women from multicultural backgrounds and foster a dynamic community. A discussion about nuances of experience around how the embodiment of such qualities may serve a restorative function for one’s relationship with self and others will take place. The humanistic/depth foundations of a feminist and contextual approach to pedagogy will also be discussed. Personal sharing will follow. The conversation hour will close with another brief meditation to ground participants in embodying representative qualities of mercy and strength that have been shared in the conversation circle.

The present discussion will explore (1) the difficulties faced by international students, (2) the function of clinical supervision and academic advising to help reduce and manage the stressors and discrimination experienced by international students in counseling psychology, and (3) discuss the multicultural differences that affect professional and personal identity of the students.

Mandated reporting in psychotherapy is a frequently used intervention. Though the intent of the practice is to be therapeutic in its aim to protect children from inadequate or harmful care, the consequences of its execution can contradict its intent. This presentation will examine these contradictions and the ways in which dynamics of oppression, re-traumatization, and colonization are being expressed through mandated reporting laws. Using post colonial race theory, along with relational and social justice perspectives I will discuss the perpetuation and maintenance of a pervasive culture of oppression, where families of color are intruded upon, separated, and demeaned, in a disabling dynamic of powerlessness. The relationships between corporal punishment and discipline, and between families of color and institutional intervention will be observed through a historical lens. The instillation of fear and exhibition of power for purposes of control and capital are tactics that are still preserved in more subtle and nuanced way. This has been observed in my work in school-based and outpatient community mental health settings with primarily African American children and their mothers. Fear and distrust of the “system” (i.e. Therapists power/privilege to report abuse, threat of removal of children form home, the) in the context of therapy displayed by child clients and their mothers often complicates and slows an already vulnerable process of entering and remaining open through treatment. Consideration of the entire family system receives little attention or clinical thought, when reporting situations arise. Emphasis will be given to finding space to think about the impacts of this practice, while considering alternatives and/or modifications to approaching and implementing this intervention, with an interest in portraying and offering a less threatening, more therapeutic stance for families.

For over 100 years, from Freud’s couch to the 1960’s, gender related inequality was the norm both inside and outside the therapists’ office. Though disparities are present in various forms today, we owe a debt to the feminist therapy pioneers of the 1970’s who through radical action, moved the mental health establishment, from within and without, to consider women as fully human. As we move into the current manifestation of feminism and work for justice, it seems imperative to pause to consider how these “second wave” pioneers gave us the beginnings of feminist therapy. These women, starting from the earliest stages of the movement, gave us consciousness raising, the notion of the egalitarian therapy, female empowerment, the groundswell of women into clinical psychology programs, and many other positive changes. They impacted systems such as criminal justice, divorce, domestic violence, education, medicine and banking to name but a few. We are honored to have Dr. Oliva Espin, Professor Emerita of San Diego State University and the California School of Professional Psychology, and one of our foremost pioneers, to join us in this discussion. It is to honor and record the achievements of these innovators that we are creating a special edition of Women and Therapy: Pioneers. We are looking to have a conversation about and with women who were practicing feminist therapy in the early 1970’s. We are hoping to have some of the pioneers, in addition to Dr. Espin, attend, as well as those who worked with or were influenced by their writings, teaching or supervision. We are hoping to take this conversation forward to develop criteria for defining a pioneer, and forming a list. We will also be recruiting interviewers/writers, preferably early-career, who would be interested in writing an article with or about a pioneer.

The Clery Act requires college campuses and universities to report information about crime on and near their campuses. This structured discussion will explore how recent revisions to the Clery Act may adversely impact victims of sexual violence. Recent revisions to the Clery Act require most university employees to report all details of a sexual violence incident, including the identities of both the perpetrator and the victim, regardless of whether the victim requests that his or her identity remain confidential. The structured discussion will be led by a faculty member and will include the perspectives of student-services employees and current students. For example, a Peer Educator at the Violence Prevention and Women’s Resource Center (a student center that provides services for students who have experienced sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking) will describe training he received in which he was instructed how to discourage students from disclosing experiences of sexual assault victimization. A current student will describe how a student that has experienced sexual assault can no longer turn to a faculty member without being told that an investigation will take place the moment they disclose any information regarding the incident. She will describe her perspective that this policy may create a hostile setting for students, leaving them feeling abandoned and isolated.

APA accredited graduate programs for clinical, counseling and school psychology have a required diversity training component with objectives that include students attaining: “substantial understanding and competence.” Yet these programs seek to achieve these objectives in a variety of ways. A recent meta-analysis concluded that diversity trainings are positively related to cognitive development. However, Bowman found that these cognitive benefits associated with diversity coursework are limited to white and low-income students. How inclusive is this curriculum as it relates to the cultural intersections within the “female graduate student?” We propose to facilitate a structured discussion from a feminist perspective that explores the relationship of the intersections of identity within female graduate students and its corollary influence on the improvement of diversity training effectiveness. Our overarching goal will be to approach this discussion with the aim of encouraging participants to consider their personal training experiences and the feminist perspective in order to inform suggestions. First, participants will have the opportunity to explore their own identity intersections. Then, attendees will be asked to consider and share their personal experiences of their academic diversity training. This will include an exploration of the aspects of diversity training that intersect with, contradict or avoid the female perspective. Simultaneously, we will consider how the female experience and feminist values could be incorporated and emphasized to achieve the heightened awareness and proficiency the APA envisions. Finally, we will scrutinize how diversity programs could be improved. Potential questions include: Where is diversity training effective, and for whom? How can diversity training go beyond raising awareness to increasing actual competency in practice? What does research indicate is most effective for increasing competence? What elements of female cultural considerations should be incorporated into diversity training? How can greater inclusion of the female perspective increase course efficacy?

The challenges faced graduate students with disabilities in acculturating and succeeding in pursuit of advanced degrees has received little scholarly attention. However, the path to degree completion can be stalled or stymied for these graduate students due to a number of institutional hurdles. These may include alternative test administration that may increase exam time to unsustainable levels. Also, graduate students with disabilities may have different challenges in disclosing their disability to faculty members or undergraduate students with which they work. Moreover, support services available to graduate students may be more or less accessible than what was previously offered in their undergraduate institutions. Presenters both work in a disability services office at a public university. They will lead a structured discussion on experiences of group members with applying and matriculating to graduate programs for students with disabilities. Also, the discussion will focus on strategies to strengthen self-advocacy and identity development. Lastly, presenters will focus on methods to improve well-being and practice self-care for these students.

Restoring Justice for LGBT Communities through Professional Education and Training As mental health professionals we recognize the importance of restorative justice as documented by Campbell (2008). When applied to LGBT individuals, restorative justice may require a community rebuilding process (Gumz, 2004) and the development of competencies to treat LGBT individuals who have been victimized by criminal behavior or incompetence of mental health professionals. Rectifying the latter requires us to begin more thorough training in LGBT professional competence. This clearly begins with our education and training programs. One research study found psychologists received little training in areas of sexual orientation and gender identity and limited opportunities to work with these populations during training (Johnson & Federman, 2014). Our presentation will focus on the qualitative data collected from the first graduates of a LGBT Human Services and Mental Health certificate program. The certificate program provides 15 different courses designed to aid clinicians in developing competencies to work with LGBT individuals, couples, and families. Graduates will be interviewed about their satisfaction with the certificate, sense of preparedness in working with the LGBT clients, and experiences restoring clients who have been victims of microaggressions, criminal behavior, and incompetence on the part of untrained mental health professionals. We will present these findings in a conversational style, followed by group discussion of these planned questions: 1. What is essential for mental health professionals to become more competently trained with LGBT clients? 2. How do you guard against microaggressions in your own work? 3. How can mental health professionals become more involved in the restorative justice movement through education and advocacy? 4. How do you provide support to LGBT students in hetero-normative environments within educational institutions? We plan to discuss how the experiential-based component of the student feedback and conference participants’ discussion will lead to changes that need to be made to the certificate program.