Feminist Therapy’s Integration With Other Models

Feminist therapy, although initially developed with a focus on women, has expanded its reach during the past 4 decades. As the theory has deepened to center on the analysis of gender, power, and social locations and as feminist therapists have brought their work to a wide range of settings, the scope of people for whom feminist therapy can be helpful has broadened. Feminist therapy is technically integrative, and thus protean, taking a variety of applied shapes and forms reflective of each practitioner, each client, and each context. It is possible to integrate the core principles of feminist therapy practice into a wide range of specific interventions, although each approach to therapy must be carefully scrutinized for implicit biased assumptions, so that those threads do not contaminate the feminist nature of the process. The question to be addressed regarding any psychotherapy as a feminist practice is whether its use in therapy supports feminist models of change. In feminist practice, that question is the boundary condition for inclusion of a strategy: Can its use promote feminist models and outcomes? In other words, can it be used in the service of empowerment and egalitarianism; will it promote an understanding of the impact of social factors and patriarchy on well-being and distress? For a detailed step-wise algorithm for analyzing psychotherapy models, see Worell and Remer’s “Theory Transformation Steps” (2003, p. 95).

Feminist therapists have done specific integrations with, among others, cognitive therapies (Padesky, 1989; Worell & Remer, 2003), Gestalt therapy (Caring et al., 1998), psychoanalytic psychotherapies (Alpert, 1986; Benjamin, 1998; Dimen & Goldner, 2002; Luepnitz, 1988, 2003; Toronto et al., 2005), family systems therapies (Hare-Mustin, 1978; McGoldrick, 1998; Silverstein & Goodrich, 2003), psychodrama (Worell & Remer, 2003), and eye-movement desensitization therapy (Brown, 2002). Several models for treating survivors of complex trauma integrate feminist constructs at their core (Courtois, 2000; Gold, 2000; Harvey, 1996), as is the very construct of complex trauma itself (Herman, 1992). Considered in light of the transtheoretical model of psychotherapy, which conceptualizes both stages of change and the therapy interventions best suited at each stage (Prochaska & Norcross, 2003), feminist therapy, or perhaps better put, feminist psychotherapies, in which the goal of empowerment is advanced through a wide range of therapeutic strategies, have the potential to be effective for many people at many points in the change process.

With Whom Do Feminist Therapists Work?

Feminist therapists have practiced with an extremely broad range of people, in each instance finding how the core constructs of feminist practice are applied to the unique needs and characteristics of these diverse groups. Feminist therapists have devised programs for men who batter women (Ganley, 1991) and women in prison (Cole, Sarlund-Heinrich, & Brown, 2007; Harden & Hill, 1997), have worked in collaboration with therapists in Japan (Enns, 2004), and have worked with indigenous refugees along the Thailand–Burma border (Norsworthy, 2007). Van Boemel and Rozee (1992) developed a feminist treatment strategy for Cambodian refugee women survivors of the Pol Pot regime living in the United States. Feminist therapy has been done with children (Anderson & Hill, 1997), adolescents (Gilligan, Rogers, & Tolman, 1991), and families (Bograd, 1991; Luepnitz, 1988; Silverstein & Goodrich, 2003). Although feminist therapy has a theoretical preference not to reify people in terms of their diagnoses (Ballou & Brown, 2002), feminist therapists have described effective work with people whose distress is coded as depression, both women (Strickland, Russo, & Keita, 1989) and men (Levant, 2001), anxiety (Fodor, 1992), disordered eating (Root & Fallon, 1988), posttraumatic stress (Brown, 1986, 2004; Courtois, 2000; Harvey, 1996; Herman, 1992), and psychosis (Sparks, 2002). Rivera (1996) wrote of the development of a feminist inpatient program for people suffering from severe posttraumatic dissociation. Espin (1992) discusses feminist work with immigrants and refugees. Brooks (1998) and Levant (1996, 2001, 2006) describe being men who are feminist therapists, working with other men.

DIFFICULT, PERHAPS SUBVERSIVE DIALOGUES? CHALLENGES ARISING FROM CLIENT AND CONTEXT