Difficult Contexts

An egalitarian relationship makes certain assumptions about client characteristics that allow for a greater equality of power in the relationship. To the degree that any client moves away from these, feminist therapy paradigms may be challenged. One assumption of an egalitarian relationship is that the client is in therapy of her or his own free choice and is identifying some aspect of life as in need of change. Consequently, feminist therapy’s core model will appear most difficult to apply when clients do not have freedom of choice or are at the precontemplation stage of change in which they either do not identify a need to change or experience themselves as incapable of transforming their distress or dysfunction.

However, evidence indicates that feminist therapy can be effectively practiced even when therapy is occurring in a coercive environment. The challenge to the feminist therapist in this circumstance is to create a wall between the coercive norms of the context and the therapeutic relationship, so that the latter continues to exemplify empowerment and egalitarianism.

An example of an application feminist therapy practice in a coercive setting can be seen in Cole, Sarlund-Heinrich, and Brown’s (2007) description of development of a feminist trauma treatment group for women in prison created and run by the first two authors. These feminist therapists practiced creativity and courage in bringing feminist practice and an empowerment model to an antifeminist setting where the absence of choice and power is the norm for their clients. They describe initial encounters with their clients, where, as one aspect of informed consent, it is made clear that attendance at therapy is not mandatory nor a component of the corrections process. Clients in these groups are invited to decide whether or not they will attend a scheduled session; if they choose not to attend, this decision bears no negative consequences. Each inmate client is also informed that within each session she has the choice about what the session focus will be.

In this instance, a very brief feminist therapy intervention was effective in changing trauma-related scores on one psychometric measure; additionally, the women in these groups did not experience the collapse of functioning and increase in symptomatology that was typical for their peers who did not receive feminist therapy upon entering the prison. Finding every possible manner in which to invite clients to a more powerful stance is the theme running through what feminist therapists do in practice; in this instance, by removing any coercive elements from treatment in a highly coercive situation, the clients were invited to begin to know ways that they had choice and, consequently, personal power.

Difficult Client Characteristics

Most people have some belief in their personal power, no matter how small it may seem to be. A challenge to the egalitarian focus of feminist therapy is a person who perceives her/himself as powerless and/or fears becoming powerful because power has been so conflated with abuse. It is seductive for the therapist working with people who relate from a stance of passivity and fear or who experience autonomy as threatening to relational connection. Just as with work with people who utilize self-inflicted violence as a coping strategy, a therapist encountering someone utilizing passivity and dependency as resistance schemes may experience pulls to abandon an egalitarian stance. Using the feminist assessment of this interpersonal position as a form of resistance to loss of self and voice can initiate the process of returning the therapist to a focus on client empowerment; joining with such clients to indicate that the therapist respects their needs to remain in one position for now and will attempt to use the power of the therapist role to dislodge them from their emotional place creates space into which these clients can freely move when they experience the readiness to do so. However, it is clear from abundant anecdotal evidence gleaned from many consultations with feminist therapists that people who present in this way are among the most challenging for feminist therapists.

Another difficult and interesting conundrum for feminist therapists has been how to develop strategies for working with and empowering people who abuse power, such as domestically violent men (Ganley, 1991) or clients who are overtly expressive of malignant bias (Adleman, 1990). These are people who are likely to have encountered a feminist therapist either because of being adjudicated to treatment, as in the case of violent men, or by accident, not realizing that a therapist known for work with, for example, people in substance abuse recovery does so from a feminist framework.

How does a feminist therapist approach these difficult dialogues with clients so as to make them feminist when the client involved maybe anti-feminist in their expressed values? Feminist therapists begin by returning to self-awareness and the acknowledgment that they and this client are more alike than different. All humans have bias; feminist therapists are well socialized to be aware of and work to contain and minimize the effects of their biases but are no less affected by them than anyone else. All people living in patriarchal industrialized cultures benefit from the use of violence, even when not personally perpetrating the act; global and multicultural feminisms lead us to an awareness that privilege comes at a cost of violence done to others. Using these as starting points, feminist therapists can then analyze for themselves what the costs of bias and violence are in their own lives, and from that position, invite clients to become aware of those kinds of interpersonal, intrapsychic, and spiritual costs as well.

Thus, in work with a man who uses interpersonal violence as a problem-solving strategy, a feminist therapist would invite that person to consider how his behavior is ultimately disempowering to him even when, in the moment, it gives the illusion of control and power. The therapist would invite this man to look at both short-term feelings of shame that are related to his use of violence and the longer-term pains and costs of relational distance and disconnection accompanying his current attempts to solve the problem of feeling out of control in a relationship through the use of coercive and violent means.

The therapist would also invite him to notice longer-term consequences of the choice to use violence, including overt disempowerment in the form of risk of arrest, incarceration, and loss of access to people he loves when a restraining order is filed against him. The actual costs of paying for mandated treatment might be noted as an example of the loss of power vis-à-vis one’s economic well-being. In this way, violence would be reframed as a form of extremely powerless and helpless behavior in the context of its effects on the man’s life. The therapist might invite him to experience the powerless feelings associated with the choice to use violence.

Gender role analysis would accompany this discussion of power, with the therapist inviting this man to see how he has been the subject of the lies told to men by patriarchal norms about the utility of violence as a solution to distressing feelings, pointing out how only the most privileged of men (e.g., those ruling nations) are allowed to use violence with impunity, since even very powerful men in U.S. culture will today suffer losses of prestige and access to resources when their use of violence as an interpersonal problem-solving strategy is exposed.

Feminist therapy reframes acts of interpersonal violence and expressions of malignant bias as evidence of extreme disempowerment, desperate attempts to gain power through the use of force or through a rigid alignment with patriarchal modes of devaluation of the “other.” Using the feminist construct of empowerment on the four biopsychosocial/spiritual domains, it is possible to see how such individuals are deeply disempowered. A powerful person does not routinely choose actions that could lead to incarceration, mandated treatment, payment of fines, and estrangement from partner, children, and others who learn of his actions; a powerful person is not manipulated by patriarchal lies into self-sabotaging behaviors such as these in the name of masculinity. In feminist practice, the therapist utilizes this larger picture of power to invite the power-abusing client to become more genuinely powerful.