Month: October 2020

Can Women Count on Being Heard Within the Context of Their Struggles?

Pat Anderson

Feminist Theories, Winter 1997

Faculty: Ann Russo

Women’s Stories and Narrative Therapy: Can Women Count on Being Heard within the Context of Their Struggles?

            In fundamentals of counseling class a liberal, Jewish, white, male, teacher explained the importance of listening to clients “stories” – to a narrative therapist, client’s stories are the vital therapeutic tool. In  feminist theories I read about the importance of women’s contextual, cut to the bone, honest stories. Surely this story metaphor came into my life through two separate ears for a good reason. Surely the word story will in some way inform my vision about the kind of counselor I want to become and perhaps the kind of counseling that women will or will not  need in the future. I want to pool my learning, see what feminist author say that will inform my vision of counseling that I may not receive within the counseling program.

            My short term goal is to become a feminist counselor. So I have purposely set out to find connections between feminist theories and counseling. To my delight, the connections abound. It’s the meaning of the connections that I seek to make sense of here.

            According to my teacher, Al Ross (1997) what clients want most is to be liked by their therapists. One student asked, “How do we deal with it if we have a client that we don’t like?” He responded, “Narrative therapists believe that it’s hard not to like a person when you listen to their stories.” While hearing this was heartening, I fear it’s an idealistic notion. But I would love to be wrong.

            I see what happens in the world in terms of a universal consciousness; the world’ collective voices sharing their ideas and connecting them within the historical time frame. It’s like societal thinking along the same vein, with a similar progressive world view, despite different geographical, racial, cultural, gender, sexuality, or national locations. It’s a spiritual connectedness whose very vocabulary is still in progress. This kind of thinking is what Mohanty shares in her view of Third World feminism where she envisions a hopeful universal connectedness, that goes beyond gender. I hope to connect what feminist authors have to say that can be useful to the field of mental health and my learning to be a mental health professional.

            Griffin has also thought in these terms. She says that memories of abused children threaten our collective consciousness and question our notions of school, church and family; these people contain the “bad dreams” of western culture. She questions which version of memory will be viewed as “truth” by our culture? New previously hidden narratives surface, formerly hidden, denied histories and literatures from people on the margins. She believes the definition of the war of our times places forces of remembering in an oppositional position with forgetfulness and denial (Griffin 235). I wonder whose truths will be taken seriously within mental health also.

            Autobiography demonstrates the process of self-revision; it is the Operator’s Manual for a fluid, dynamic self, a self-in-time” (236). Our collective selves are shaken to the roots with the competing stories feeling “like madness” (236). She refers to this time in history as, ““revolutionary” reconstruction of our selfhood” (236).  She hyphenates the word re-membering as does hooks (6); it presents an image of putting back together, of unifying . Forgetting is to “dismember,” to take apart – to be without integrity. Women’s studies itself is about counter re-membering. She thinks that collectively our re-membering has the power to overturn patriarchy (Griffin 236). I know that the traditional medical model, of which mental health evolved, has functioned as a tool of patriarchy. I can see their model being left behind in my program, but if men are doing the newer models women still need to be wary.

            Words used to describe the framework of narrative therapy are similar to words used by feminist authors. It’s structural foundation seems to relate well to what feminists say in their writings. The framework that I will present, sounds good, but one wonder about how narrative therapy might work within the world views of different therapists? Can we trust that they will be viewed as they have been experienced within the context of people’s struggle? As a feminist, I  look beyond their words. I will attempt to illustrate the connections I discovered by placing the author’s words themselves within the basic frameworks of narrative therapy. 

1.      Help clients to name their problems that are oppressing them

            hooks says the culture of shame among black folks demanded the silencing of racism’s pain and prevented holistic strategies for healing needed to break the cycle. hooks identified the need to collectively name and confront suffering, before  constructive healing and the end of racist domination could be actualized (hooks 144). hook’s basic strategy is needed by all people seeking liberation.

            hooks also warns us through the example of Black Freudian psychiatrists, who in their book Black Rage, said black rage was a sign of powerlessness; in essence they named it pathological and explained it away (12). As she argues caution is appropriate in the naming process.

            Friedan described how suburban housewives were said to have had everything they needed to fulfill themselves: they had houses in suburbia, husbands and kids (18). When women had problems they thought it must be something wrong within themselves. Initially, even psychoanalysts were at a loss to name  their problem for them. The few women who actually sought psychological help denied the “problem” (Friedan 19).

            Eventually mental health professionals did come up with vague names to label women’s problems; names such as “housewives blight”, or “housewive’s syndrome”. One woman spent years on “the couch” working out her “adjustment to the feminine role”. Women experienced a strange feeling of desperation, an emptiness, as if they didn’t exist (20). Many were beginning to ask, “… who am I? (Friedan 20-21). Their inability to name their own situations, precluded their ability to discover a sense of self, let alone a self-defined plural self.

            New unnamed neuroses were being found among women that were equitable to Freud’s sexual repression theories (Friedan 29). A White House conference questioned whether children were being overdosed on nurturance. Sociologists wondered whether adults were organizing children’s lives so that they lacked time to daydream (Friedan 30). Moms were blamed for focusing their entire lives on children. Therapists even found ways to name and pathologize women’s compliance with their prescribed role.     

2.      Identify the problem’s oppressive intentions and tactics used to dominate the client’s life

            DeBeauvoir says women are right in declining to accept man-made rules, they had no say in making the rules (682). “… equality in difference” to the other sex, is like “equal but separate” to Jim Crow laws. Deep similarities exist between blacks and women, both have been deemed submissive and inferior so that the master could keep them in their place” (DeBeauvoir 683). No doubt about the intention involved in this dehumanization to oppress.

            Throughout life women are repeatedly damaged and corrupted by the notion of her true vocation – submission. She wasn’t socialized to take charge of her existence, so she is left to  count on love and supervision from others (DeBeauvoir 694). Even the meekest of men knows what it’s like to feel superior. This socially intrinsic superiority acts like a miraculous balm any  anxiety they might have about inferiority (DeBeauvoir #684). hooks might also  argue that white women have used their skin color to boost their morale and privileges in a similar fashion.

            The simple answer “to cure this toothache of the spirit” was for women to hand themselves and their will over to God (Friedan 23-24). Freud had said, “anatomy is destiny” and women’s socialization taught them the value of everything but themselves.  Women were told they just need to adjust to their lucky role.

            At the time of Friedan’s writing, relatively new gains in women’s rights were blamed for women’s unhappiness (24). They blamed the supposedly “victorious” victim. DeBeauvoir also discussed women’s lucky irresponsible status (693). I believe the opposite, I think women feel overly responsible for everything.

            Identity is part of the tactics involved. Allison told her story of being poor, queer, sexually and violently abused and the we\they created by each part of her (13). Society urges us to fit into acceptable myths and theories of the mainstream and of lesbian-feminist reinterpretation (15). We use categories such as class, race, sexuality, and gender to dismiss each other with. Allison says these categories need excavation from within (35).

            Allison described her incestuous, violent family as a prison camp with “… normal everyday horrors, fully known and hidden” (53). She talks about her excruciating childhood matter of factly in order to stay sane. She has wondered how love and betrayal become so deeply intertwined. She discusses the profound conflict involved in loving her mother and sisters. Despite the love, she wanted her sisters to sleep nearest the door and hated her mother when she came home late (54-55). This kind of despair can’t be analyzed, it must be lived (Allison 14). Psychological theories that relate to rape, incest, and abuse should come out of the personal experience of survivors, not from theorists seeking to control women’s lives.

            Women don’t know enough about each other, our fears, hopes or the many ways society has acted upon us (113). As a result of great sorrow she learned that all systems of oppression feed on private terrors, kept silent in public, few more forcefully than sexual oppression. Prevailing myths rule that no good girls, even the most radical – don’t have desires for other women (Allison 117).

            Pharr explains how the Right brings racial hatred into fight against homophobia and thus fuels moves both agendas (63). The use of coded language demonizes sexual diversity creating a wedge between gays and people of color (65). Contradictions keep people from thinking about gays in positive ways; the use inflammatory images and misinformation dehumanizes gays as predators, just as Black men were accused of being rapists and black women of being whores and welfare mothers (67). Oppressed groups are pitted against one another (68). Homophobia in the black community makes homosexuality a white thing (Pharr 70).

3.      Investigate how the problem disrupting and dominating the client’s life and the possible tricks used to gain control 

            Friedan says that what was embedded within the feminine mystique was, “… a growing divergence between this image of woman and human reality” (64). Despite there not being a psychological term for the harm, the feminine mystique is not a harmless image (66). She questions the affects of women denying their own minds and their own reality in lieu of an image (Friedan 66). Surely this profound denial cannot foster mental health; the spiritual harm it imposes also lacks moral integrity.

            Social discrimination may appear harmless on the surface but it can lead to moral and intellectual results so profound they seem as if biological for women (685). In discussing the famous psychoanalytic theory, “penis envy” DeBeauvoir’s logic is that women don’t want to castrate men. They see themselves as a mutilation; the penis symbolized privileges accorded him because of it (689). It could certainly be an expression of rage over her inferior dependent position. In an egalitarian world there wouldn’t be an Oedipal Complex and the world would not be phallocentric (DeBeauvoir  699).

            Dworkin defined colonization as the acceptance of male priorities as our own. To free ourselves, we have to name it. We must first value ourselves and not expect to have male values get around to honoring us. Our socialization leaves us prone to guilt and realistic fear (131-132), to be indifferent to the plight of other women (134) and to inferiority, which justifies systemic sexual assault (136). If we don’t go forward with decolonization there’s rape, madness, forced pregnancy, prostitution, mutilation, battery, and murder (Dworkin 132). With what we face in our daily lives is it any wonder we question our sanity? Is it any wonder Dworkin refers to patriarchy as a war zone?

            Dworkin deals with normal everyday occurrences considered normal and so systematic they due to their commonality, don’t appear to be abuse (133). Moraga says we’re bleeding out of so many pores, so constantly that it’s now simply seen as “the way things are” (65). Allison said the world labeled what happened to her spanking; violent contempt for girls was so ordinary it was not seen as anything to complain about (55). One wonders whether therapists are any less likely to see abuse in any differently than anyone else?

            Moraga developed empathy for her mother’s oppression after coming out as a lesbian. She was then able to make profound connections with her mother’s silence; it reminded her that the poor, the uneducated and Chicana people are not free.  She compared silence to starvation. When we’re not physically starving we have the luxury of being aware of psychological and emotional starvation. Once this starvation is recognized other starvations can be seen if we are willing to make the connections. She says that lesbianism is also a poverty, like being brown, female or poor (Moraga 52).

            Women are afraid to see how they have also oppressed, and failed each other by taking the values of oppressors and using them against other women and ourselves. It’s frightening to admit how we have internalized “the man’s” (Moraga 57) words. As a lesbian feminist she ignored her own internal homophobia. She brought society’s hatred to bed with her, hating her lover and herself for loving one another. She never felt she women or man enough (Moraga 57). Women are never good enough just as they are.

            In an effort to uplift the black race, a culture of shame was created; any aspect of blackness that resembled mental pathology was kept hidden. This silence made it impossible to acknowledge the traumatic effects of white supremacy’s abuse and assault. There was a desperate need to deny and demonstrate to whites that racism had not wrecked psychological havoc (hooks 134). 

            In order to break the colonizing mentality, hooks says that blacks must focus on the development of black genius while engaging in the resistance that can address the psychological trauma (135). She asks that blacks with privilege not deny the existence of self-hatred or the profound psychological pain (hooks 136). The black community’s failure to address the mental wounds from racism encouraged the psychology of victimhood rather than finding ways to use rage and despair to empower and promote well being (hooks 137). Griffin adds to this conversation. There are no survivors who have not first admitted their victimization, if the “victim bandwagon” seems full it’s a “sign of a profound socio-cultural dis-ease,” not evidence of the weakness or masochistic nature of victims (Griffin  245). Griffin talks about racism and sexism from a white female perspective. The dominant “we” excludes so many people, it’s so easy for the excluded to swallow the hurt (Griffin 133). It’s heartening to blend these black and whites voices in common struggle.

            Griffin says “Girls learn to identify outside themselves, negating themselves”, because they’re taught to hate femaleness and to glorify maleness (79). Numerous forces within our culture work to remove a girl’s loyalty from herself and her mother over to patriarchy. She identifies one of the forces as the rock star socialization tool. Classic behavior of female fans: screaming, fainting, weakness, mobbing stage doors (waiting for others), and sexual submission represent caricatures of female traits (Griffin 79).

            Griffin spoke of peoples denial of other’s testimony to ensure that institutions that maintaining the horrors would be preserved (234). We deny horrendous truths because we fear they’ll crush us. We don’t have tools or frameworks to deal with such information, it’s too hard to bear (234). The self is made up of memory, some memories crumble it’s very make up (Griffin 234). I am left to wonder about the frameworks of mental health, have they been any better than the rest of society in facing truths it doesn’t want to know?

            Pharr explains how the Right gained power by placing wedges between existing societal faultlines of race, class, gender and sexuality and expanding them into larger divisions. Their growth due to ordinary citizens support of individual and institutional domination begins with belief in meritocracy – culture already provides a level playing field (11); since it’s assumed everyone has equal access, one’s failure is earned, deserved or merited, it’s the result of his/her innate qualities – not from  social or cultural structures. Thus some are superior and justified in effort to control (Pharr 11). Their obscene greed and luxury is supported by lay-offs, down-sizing, salary reductions, destruction of unions (Pharr 13).

            Politics of domination idealizes and promotes values of being separate, of being elite, of being responsible for only a small group of people. As Right practices them brings out not only separation, but deep social divisions, forced rivalry and mean spiritedness. Politics of liberation values of sharing power, leading a humane life responsible to and for one’s fellow humans and the earth (Pharr 87).

            Mohanty uses Relations of Ruling – to explain how systems of dominance function by setting up particular historically specific “relations of ruling” (Mohanty 13). Ruling is a complex of organized practices, interpenetrative of many sites of power (14). For instance, the British defined authority and legitimacy of difference rather than commonalties between ruler and natives. A historically specific notion said that the imperial ruler white male, was the self-disciplined protector of women and morals. The creation of the “English Gentleman” as natural legitimate ruler enabled to rule without actually exerting power – because everybody believed it (Mohanty 14).

            Pharr also adds to Mohanty’s arguments. The assumption of the superiority of rich, white, heterosexual, Christian men, is a given and provides them with the divine right to rule and dominate (Pharr 28). Economic distress, social chaos, and confusion give theocratic Right perfect opening to develop agenda of control. Conservative business interests serve Right by working for privatization, clearing way for church-dominated (formerly public) institutions that claim authority from a Christian God (Pharr 41). They both articulated that once the complex motions of oppression are in place within people’s minds the power is in the bag .Feminist stories definitely have the power to de-internalizing harmful ideologies.

4.      Help to identify times when the client was not dominated by the problem, when she managed to rebel, allowing access to alternative narratives which expand possibilities for being

            Mohanty suggests that we study women workers as subjects  who made choices out of their own agency, who have critical perspectives about  their situations and who have  come together to organize against their oppressors (29). She warns that writers should bring out voices “from within”  communities instead of  “for” communities (Mohanty 37). Third World women’s rebellion has expanded their possibilities for being that traditional mental health had not been connected with. Nor has traditional mental health been known to encourage activism.

5.      Find historical evidence that bolsters client is competence and shows how she has stood up to the problem. Point toward narratives of strength, competence and creativity. It’s vital that the therapist be genuinely curious about these stories

            Friedan demonstrates how mental health professionals were just like everyone else, they saw no other option for women in the mid-twentieth century than the vocation – housewife (26). They were actually complicit in telling women that “no other dream was possible” (Friedan 27). If therapists see only the same options that women themselves see as possible there would be no way for women to rewrite their stories, no way for therapists to challenge and support women in their evolution out of oppressive socialization that acted has a barrier to their spiritual growth and self-actualization. By helping women adjust to oppression they were acting as enforcers not healers.

            According to hooks, revolutionary mental health has not been placed on the militant agenda because black males writers have focused on conquering adversity, and have downplayed trauma (141-142). The traditional mental health system has rejected a political understanding of black suffering and has for the most part, left activism and radical politicization out of healing strategies (hooks 142).

            Masking your real identity, useful during severe apartheid when lives were at stake, is not a paradigm for social relations today. It undermines love and intimacy and values duplicity and lying. There has yet to be a collective development of resistance strategies to create healthy minds. Unattended psychological wounds breed learned helplessness and powerlessness. Without agency compulsive and addictive behaviors are promoted. If the realities of coping with black pain are not addressed, the root cause of genocidal addictions flourishes (hooks 143). Psychological pain gets in the way of liberation movements and life enhancing self-determination that would benefit all of society (hooks 144).

            Mohanty says state politics must be linked with everyday life. Third world women’s engagement with feminism, must be seen as historically specific and dynamic – not static, not frozen in time (6). It’s necessary to look at more than social indicators. All groups have their own internal alliances and divisions with class, religious, sexuality – unity is not automatic. There isn’t necessarily a logical connection with females and feminism, it mustn’t define people in terms of their problems or achievements in relation to free white liberal democracy – doing so removes them from history – freezing them in time (Mohanty 7).

            Third world women have rejected feminism label for their struggle due to cultural imperialism and its history of isms and homophobia. False homogeneous representation in media has led to suspicion (Mohanty 7). Mohanty cites Odim who says we should focus on feminism as philosophy, rather than liberal women’s rights (8). The meaning of the personal is political  is different to Third world feminism – economics underlie the public\private distinction. They are aware of the public being personally political. There is no private sphere for people of color other than what they manage to carve out in their hostile environment. Personal life is defined very differently than middle class whites (Mohanty 9).

            Mohanty suggests rewriting history based on specific location and history. She asks, how we extend a “politics of food” to the hungry? (10). History must be informed by experience of poor, previously written out of history. The significance of writing by third world women is producing knowledge for ourselves. The major analytic difference between Western white feminism and third world women is the focus on gender (11). That came out of the focus on white heterosexual women’s proximity to white males. Relationship of women of color with white men is medicated by state institutions (Mohanty 12).

            Mohanty relates Russo’s feeling that because of feminism’s historical focus only on gender, it’s now crucial that white women respond with outrage about racism (12). In the past it’s been assumed that our consciousness as women had nothing to do with race, class, nationality, sexuality, or nation, but gender and race are relational (12).  We must rewrite all our history, not just that of people of color ( Mohanty 13).

            One tidbit of warning about genuine curiosity, imagine Gloria Steinem as the client and Pat Robertson as the therapist. He might be genuinely curious, but the therapeutic value is likely to be lacking. One aspect of the narrative therapy that was left out is how the therapist interprets the stories. I think this is the most vital aspect of any therapeutic method. No doubt any method could facilitate liberation if the therapist’s world view allowed it to.

6.      Speculate about future possibilities for the strong competent person who emerged from the        interview

            DeBeauvior has a vision of eventual economic and social equality. She foresees this leading to a metamorphosis within (702). Dworkin speculated the effects of a twenty four hour truce without rape (162 ). A world without rape certainly poses the possibility for stronger more competent women to emerge.

            Moraga says that what oppressors fear isn’t difference, but similarity. The actual fear is that he will discover the same aches and longings within himself as these he oppresses. His guilt threatens to immobilize him (56). Kingston’s white ghosts that depicted fear and alienation in Woman Warrior serve to show how very radical this image can be (Moraga 56). Even speculating about changing oppressive images offers promise.  

            Moraga warns that unless feminists deal with the fear and resistance of each other, we’ll all starve. We need each other to form a real power collective (58-59). Third World feminism is about feeding people in all their hungers” (Moraga 132). Mohanty’s context of struggle is also a powerfully uniting image (7).

            Moraga wondered what our relationships with each other and our sexuality might look like if we didn’t feel have to worry about violent male backlash (136). Sexual repression within Latinas is manipulative and controlling – it “… ravages the psyche, rather than satisfying the yearning body and heart (Moraga 137). Allison agrees and says that sexual repression warps desire and hurts all people (142).

            Mohanty places third world women in a way that unites their struggle. She provided an image of the “imaginary community” (4) similar to the lesbian nation in Stein’s title and to hook’s image of beloved community (256). “Horizontal Comradeship” – non-hierarchical political rather than biological or cultural base for alliance (Mohanty 4). It’s not about color or sex, it’s the way we conceive of differences. Mohanty gave us a vision of unity, like weaving the political threads of oppression together (4).

 7.     Since the client’s problem developed within the context of her life, it’s important to make      arrangements for the client’s context to provide support for her new story development

            Interestingly enough the first seven aspects of the framework was developed from an article by Bill O’Hanlon (1994) called, “The Third Wave.” The techniques are used to facilitate this process is called externalization. In externalizing problems it is hoped that one develops the habit of seeing the problem as separate from the person. Then the therapist helps the client to create a meaningful story about standing up to the problem. The purpose of this externalizing is to: decrease unproductive conflict between people, undermine the sense of failure, pave the way for people to cooperate and unite in their struggle and to escape its influence, to open new possibilities for action against the problem and its influence, and present options for dialogue rather than monologue. The therapist must fiercely believe in the power and potential of stories and language to promote healing.

            Mohanty provides insight into how we might unite ideologically. The concept of Third world women is a political constituency, not a biological or sociological one. With her image she hopes to instill viable oppositional alliances within their common context of struggle, not along racial or color lines. Our political relation to oppressive structures is our common bond (Mohanty 7).

            Our vision of inclusion is built on the future, not the past; we are creating that which has not been done before (Pharr 83). We are working against years of society fixing on wrong stars; the nation has built institutions and policies from fundamental lies that certain groups of people are inferior to others (Pharr 85). Our challenge to change hearts and minds, develop empathy with and sympathy for others and help each other discover inextricable links for our common good and survival on planet (88). Pharr proposes a new definition of human rights to include: food, shelter, employment, safety, education, and health (122).

8.   Externalization of the problem

            We have all internalized oppressive imagery that portrays darkness and femaleness as evil. Moraga says that this is how the oppressor externalizes his fears; he projects them into the bodies of women (56).

            Woolf attempts to externalize poverty by having her audience consider poverty from the stance of, … the damage that poverty inflicts upon mind and body … (Woolf 92) and later, brings up the psychological value of poverty to women who lack enough food to eat (Woolf 115). She aptly makes the point that poverty is not simply a question of being viewed as lower class, but a moral question about how the oppressive system effects human psychology.

            Our movement is unpopular because it requires that we feel pain, which may mean the need to seek therapy (Dworkin 138). Yes when the pain is exposed, externalized from within the subconsciousness of women it causes pain for all who face it.

            Another important aspect of narrative therapy is the therapists intention,  the questions the therapist asks are very important. The goal is for clients to rewrite their life stories, to look within their story for times when they were triumphant over their situation and to continually reinforce their times of resistance to the oppressive problem. My impression, so far, of narrative therapy is that it holds the possibility to encourage women to dream about alliance between their own plural selves and with women all over the world. However, it remains to be seen what the intentions among therapists will be in their questioning – it could make all the difference in the world.

9.      Intention

            Woman probably never recover from rape, battery or incest (139). The psychiatric community has defended the fathers of incest survivors, along with the legal system, organized religion and the community in general (Dworkin 140).

            Some statistics Dworkin offers questions societal intentions: seventy percent of female prostitutes are incest survivors (147), half of married women have been battered, every three minutes a woman is raped, and every eighteen seconds a woman beaten (163). She rightly says, “That’s not life, that’s war (141). Feminists listening to women is how the world found out about incest and rape being endemic (149). Listening to stories is obviously not enough to occur between a women and a traditionally thinking therapists. It makes me wonder whether or not listening to the women’s stories can ever be enough within the context of such a history. I want to be hopeful, but as a woman – do I dare?

10.   The Questions We Ask

            In the first class of fundamentals of counseling the teacher impressed on us that it’s the questions that we ask that make all the difference, not necessarily the answers we receive.

            Dworkin says that the women’s movement creates ways of understanding the world women live in and creates it’s ideology out of that knowledge. Feminism is a “process of finding out  which questions to ask and asking those questions” (Dworkin 137).

            Griffin says instead of asking how many women were raped in a specific time period, we should ask how many men raped and why do men do this (149)? Pharr also addressed the importance of the questions we ask, when wife beaten we say, “a wife was beaten by her husband” rather than a “husband beat his wife”. This diverts attention away from the perpetrator (32).These are great examples of how big a difference which questions we ask can make. It’s easy to see that women risk their very souls when sexist therapists (colonized men or women) control the questioning. Women have sought treatment after being raped but we haven’t done much treating or moralizing about the rapist’s behavior.

            Postmodern therapy also uses the story metaphor to describe its methods of helping. It seeks to find meaning in the experiential lives of people. People create stories about themselves that include parts that other people have created about them such as, gender, race, class and sexuality. It does not hope to unveil these truths. Instead it hopes to unveil “taken-for-granted” truths that the client may not be aware of (Ross 1997).

11. The stories we tell

            It is my belief that the authors read for this class have done their own therapy, creating their own new stories that pose alternative solutions to our different but equal oppressive states. Women have historically gone to a disproportionate number of white male therapists whose values are in sync with patriarchal notions of domination. What therapy is now attempting to do for the individual, women are globally doing for themselves without mental health professionals.

            I will hopefully form clearer ideas taken from the authors stories that I might use to facilitate steps toward the alternative visions they offer. This paper will hopefully provide evidence about just how uncrazy women really are. If we listen enough to each others stories, if we follow the authors visions, I think I could be out of a counseling career!

            Feminism has been therapeutic for me and since I believe that most of the problems that humans face are actually caused or exacerbated by oppressive ideologies, the authors I have outlined prove my point that feminism and anti-oppressive/liberation psychology can help us to free our minds and hearts.

            I have certainly been deeply touched by the author’s truths. I believe the spirit is even deeper than the psyche and it’s our spirits that have been harmed by oppressive ideologies. Trying to heal only the psyche isn’t enough, doesn’t go deep enough, within and beyond the psyche. That’s how I think traditional therapy has failed to help women and people in general; they might help people to face problems and to cope with them, but they have not helped them enough with resistance and revolution.

            There’s bone chilling and spirit chilling. Oppression chills the spirit. It’s as if our bodies, our physicality were our first superficial layer of self, then the inner, the psyche that also has our outer personality and also our inner psyche that is vulnerable to socialization and internalization of harmful ideologies, and then beyond all that is our spirit. Spirit that is intrinsically intermingled with our genetic cellular selves. A part of our collective memory throughout time. Here evils like slavery and the holocaust are imprinted for future generations to “know.” We can overcome the evil by delving deep beyond our psyches and sharing our stories that tell of our wounded spirits.

            As a tenth grade student Moraga understood images of the holocaust before they were shown to her (73), an example of “rehearsed racial memory” (75). Rehearsed in the flesh of those who have suffered in like ways. Her images are telling, … deep long tears that come when you have held your breathe for centuries (Moraga 94). What is in our flesh, in our genetic structure, also becomes embedded within our spirits. Here is where true healing needs to take place within all of humanity. This is perhaps beyond the scope of any therapy. Therapy will do best to assist in turning our internalized rage into a collective activism.

            Woolf saw two good reasons why psychology can’t be left in the hands of specialists: first, fear and anger prevent freedom within the private home (129). Secondly, fear and anger get in the way of real freedom in the public world, together they play a part in actually causing war (Woolf 130). Woolf connects the private and public worlds to illustrate how the negative feelings there play a role in causing the very problem (war) that she’s asked to respond to. Woolf ‘s telling actual biographical stories and connecting them with the psychobabble of her time makes her arguments undeniable.

            What’s more healing to the human spirit than justice, equality and alliance?  It has been said that the truth will set you free, Moraga  said it’s our personal truths that touch others (vi). Telling your personal truths is also a moral and courageous act; it’s a form of rebellion that can encourage others to do the same (Moraga 177).  So hopefully if we are open to be touched and if we reach out to touch, together we can achieve freedom.

            Oprah Winfrey recently talked about what it’s like to read a good story, “It’s like going inside somebody’s life and getting to feel the interior of their lives” (1997).

Solutions Posed from the Context of Struggle

            Writing is therapeutic for Allison. She developed the ability to craft truths out of storytelling, in a world that lies, in a world where we lie and where lying became habit (55). When she writes she makes up her own rules and discovers her own tools (56). Writing allowed her characters to sneak up on the truth and figure it out slowly. Through writing things out she discovered where her real fears were among the layers of hidden lies and secrets. Self -discovery is what mattered, not publishing. Her imagination shaped what she knows and reveals what she really fears and desires (90). Writing is revolutionary, it will show who you are and can change the world (Allison 91). Outrage and despair and tenacious determination propelled her into feminist activism. Her goal became shaping a life and a literature that came out of truth (167). Our struggles necessitate our learning our own history (172) and developing a new literature true to our own visions (168). “Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies into meaning” (Allison 175). Allison says when she writes she sink down into herself, her memories, dreams, shames, and horrors. She  answers questions asked only by her (Allison 179).

            Allison’s goal is, …to take the reader by the throat, break her heart, and heal it again (180). She fears finding a monstrous self, the one she was told was in her (180-181). Writing gets beyond denial, reveals fear and heals the writer and offers the potential to also heal the reader (181). It’s important to know the cultural myths about your identity so that you can facilitate your survival and positive self-image (198). Writing helped her to relinquish dependency on heterosexual definitions of who she was (Allison 199). If this isn’t narrative self-therapy what is?

            For Allison, discovering her sexual pleasures was a miracle (214), along with not killing herself from the despair of being told she was, “ too lesbian for feminism, too reformant for radical feminism, too sexually perverse for respectable lesbianism and too damn stubborn for the women’s gay, and queer revolutions” (215). She says that sooner or later if you keep pushing yourself, you begin writing stories out of more than rage, and they begin to tear you apart even as you write them. Oddly enough, that tearing open makes possible a healing, not only in the writer but in the world as well. There was no meaning in what her step-father did to her, but the stories she has made out of it do have meaning (218). Tell the truth. Write the story you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked to me, I’ll be naked for you. It will be our covenant (219-220). I need you to write mean stories that honor our dead, to help them survive (Allison 220).This is real feminist narrative therapy. Women should decide what’s therapeutic for them.

            hooks says that the mental health system must address the African-American psyche and link psychological recovery through political awareness of the harm inflicted from institutionalized systems of domination. We cannot rely on the existing structures. Black women writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker address issues of psychic trauma and the interconnectedness of race, class and gender in their literature (hooks 138-139). Despite the reluctance of society at large and black males, there is a need for personal histories to break silence and stopping deferring to black male reluctance in dealing with psychology pain (hooks 140). Stories that refuse to deny have the potential to heal.

            hooks regrets that there is still no collection of material within psychology that progressively addresses black mental health and that studies the connection between victimization and mental disorders (hooks 141). Obviously this fact serves to maintain white supremacy and sabotage liberation.

            hooks says that white and black women will have to be willing to undergo processes of education for critical consciousness raising that supports changes in thinking and behavior; they must see that competition fosters distrust. Lesbian writings has highlighted the tensions in interracial bonding more than any other body of literature (hooks 223). Lesbian literature may hold great insights for the mental health establishment.

            We can’t blame patriarchy if they let racist\sexist thinking shape our relationships with one another; we must examine our own xenophobia (hooks 224). If mental health is to help blacks and women to do more than cope with oppression they need to absorb the literature of truth.

            Love is the antithesis of domination and subjugation; lets’ allow the longing to love to radicalize our politics. Beloved community formed by the affirmation of difference (hooks 265).

            Many whites passively accept that racism is inherent despite instinctive knowledge that tells them its wrong. If whites accept racism as “natural” they won’t be able to see their complicity in the problem (hooks 270). Psychology should strive to de-internalize this notion, seek to externalize it and use it to get beyond racist thinking in white clients too.

            Griffin is an example of white women examining whiteness. White people have demonized black people as “savage”, inferior, and subhuman; this justified their injustice treatment. They were demonized as “primitive,” “not worthy of study.” Both savage and primitive contained a sexual meaning too. This demonization of blacks was used by whites to relieve their anxieties about culture, society, and sexuality (37). White people fear being found guilty so they ignore racial specificity (230). She gives racism the apt metaphor of “original sin” (231) and claims that, “Racism: the supreme repressed memory of white America” (244). To look into whiteness we must be willing to give up our fantasy about innocence (Griffin 231). If white people in general demonize blacks, then the mental health profession has too. It makes one wonder if within the reality of our racist culture blacks could have benefited from a system run by whites?

            Griffin informs us that when we say things like, “I don’t see you as black at all” or “Let’s not talk about gender, let’s talk about humanity” in reality we are asking to deny, to forget the pain of the past (246). She reminds us beautifully that -“We are after the truth, the whole truth, the white light itself – which, as every objective, detached, apolitical physicist knows, is composed of a whole spectrum of colors” (Griffin 181).

            Griffin serves as an example by teaching African American literature with the goal of destroying harmful myths about black people and get whites to look into their whiteness. She does the same for women by teaching women’s studies. Griffin is doing for education what someone needs to do for the field of psychology.

            In her introduction: Cartographies of Struggle Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra Mohanty redrew and broadened our conceptual maps of world through the voices of third world women (3). A nineteen nineties world definable only in relational terms; relational to lines of power and resistance that divide us up by gender, class, race, sexuality and nation. The assumed pivotal global center being the United States and Europe. Collected resistance and revolution has led to a consolidation of third world female politics (Mohanty 2).

            Mohanty points out that anthropology “spoke for” third world women (32). She sees scholarship is a form of resistance and rule. The framework of organized movements is not the only way to understand feminist struggles – political consciousness and self-identification are also crucial. She suggests writing can increase self and collective consciousnesses through life story narratives (Mohanty 33). Over the last twenty years (34) publishing houses have been doing Third World women’s work, thus creating a space for struggle and contesting reality. She used the example of Narratives of resistance in Palestinian writings on childhood – despite their forbidden nature (Mohanty 35).

            Mohanty sees the need for us to speak from within rather than for our communities (37), in order to bridge the gap between public and private, beyond the helpless solitude of Western feminism; since the rise in capitalism it’s more than men we must address. We should adopt the notion of agency through the logic of opposition not identification. Resistance is encoded in remembering and of writing (38). She suggests we remember against the grain, to rethink sociality itself and to rethink the personal is political taking seriously the challenge of collective agency (Mohanty 39).

            Another thing I learned in my counseling class is that there is a measure of feeling better just in telling your story to someone who really listens. If this is applied to the current trend in women of all cultures, sexualities, races, classes and religious affiliations telling their honest stories, storytelling just might be a natural evolutionary vehicle for self healing and revolution. However, storytelling alone won’t lead to psychic or spiritual healing and revolution – it’s how we listen to each other that can make a difference.

            Women’s pain has frequently led them to sexist therapists. They go for help because of the oppression they live with and they are treated by  oppressors. Sounds like the relations of ruling  Mohanty (13) talked about. Sexist therapy maintains oppression! What are the psychological effects likely here? Can women hope to resist in this system? Could it be that by sharing our stories about our true selves we might be healing ourselves, developing our own preventative mental health for the future? Perhaps it’s been women’s stories about rape, incest and abuse over the last ten to fifteen years that have actually led to the development of this therapeutic style. Reading these authors has been social narrative therapy, self-therapy from within the contexts – without a therapist – with other caring women.

            Griffin spoke a lot about Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It makes me think that perhaps, like Dorothy,  women have had the power within themselves all the time. I recently gave my old computer to my seventy nine year old mother because she wants to write stories, stories about her life. She surprised me by saying that she always wanted to write stories, but she just never did. Suddenly I saw a memory in my mind of my mother saying that before when I was a very little girl. She must have had it within her  all the time.     

            I never had a creative writing class until college. Knowing the power and healing that can come out of telling stories it might be a good idea to teach creative writing to grammar school children. There could be special programs developed that take children and their stories around to other schools to share them with other kids, like schools do with spelling bees or sports.

            Finally … the most basic theory of feminist ethics is that you’re not talking morally unless you include people’s oppression in the discourse. Unless therapists look at oppression and listen with ears sensitized to the need for activism and liberation only coping will occur, not healing. Unless the field of mental health addresses liberation and activism it is practicing unethically. I think they have a moral obligation to use what they know about psychology to help eliminate oppression.

Work Cited

Allison, Dorothy. 1994. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books. 

DeBeauvoir, Simone. 1949. The Second Sex.

Dworkin, Andrea. Letters From a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989. E.P. Dutton: New York.

Friedan, Betty. 1983. The Feminine Mystique. Dell: New York.

Griffin, Gail B. 1995. Seasons of the Witch: Border Lines, Marginal Notes. Pasadena CA: Triliogy Books.  

hooks, bell. 1995. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Moraga, Cherrie. 1983.  Loving in the War Years. Boston: south end press.

O’Hanlon, Bill. (1994). “The Third Wave.” The Family Networker. November/December.

Pharr, Suzanne. 1996. “In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation.” Berkeley: Chardon Press.

Ross, Al. 1997. Class, Fundamentals of Counseling. National-Louis University. Wheeling, IL.

Stein, Arlene. 1993. Ed. Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation. NY: Penguin Books.

Winfrey, Oprah. 1997. ABC Broadcasting Company, Channel Seven, Chicago, IL. Feb 28.

Woolf, Virginia. 1938. Three Guineas.  Harcourt Brace: San Diego.