Looking for a feminist therapist in Asheville, NC? I can help. My counseling approach is rooted in a robust understanding of how gendered issues impact the mental health of professional women and mothers. As a working mother myself, I have a lot of firsthand experience with the unique struggles that arise around gender socialization and expectations, inherited gender roles, and the effects of a patriarchal, misogynistic society on women’s self esteem, emotional wellbeing, and interpersonal resources. As a clinical mental healthcare professional, I know how important it is to contextualize the mental health struggles of my clients within the systemic and cultural realities that they live.
Here are 6 reasons why women can benefit from working with a feminist therapist:
Feminist therapy can help depersonalize our mental health struggles.
When we are coping with mental health struggles like burnout, depression, anxiety, and perfectionism, it is easy to feel like everything we are experiencing is a “me problem”--something that arises within ourselves and can only be resolved within ourselves.
But our beliefs and even our direct lived experiences cannot be separated from the larger circumstances of our lives, and those circumstances include everything from our upbringing to our current living situation to the inherited social and cultural structures of our society.
The pressure so many women feel to keep it all together for everyone around them, pull from a bottomless well of selfless giving, anticipate and meet the needs of others, and do it all with a big smile on their face, is not an isolated individual issue; these common experiences are very much a product of the gendered roles and responsibilities of the past colliding with the socio-economic realities of the present.
Although women receive the social message that they can strive to “have it all,” what they are actually living is the reality that they are expected to DO it all. This expectation (whether internalized or a result of external influence) is not only impossible, but utterly devastating to mental, emotional, relational, and professional health. Feminist therapy depersonalizes mental health struggle by acknowledging the greater social and cultural context of our individual lives.
Gender socialization and gendered expectations have a huge impact on women’s mental-emotional health, work performance, & relationship satisfaction.
A lot of what people believe to be their intrinsic personality is actually a series of coping mechanisms. A “Type A personality,” for example, often arises from an intense internal or external pressure to either avoid contempt, secure worthiness, and/or exercise control in order to feel safe. A “rebellious spirit” that most often results in feelings of overwhelm with managing the responsibilities of adulthood may be a result of an overly oppressive upbringing. A “social awkwardness” might be an expression of social anxiety or a side effect of depression.
Understanding how our gender socialization process impacts our beliefs about who we are on a fundamental level is essential to changing unhelpful patterns of behavior and breaking intergenerational cycles. Sometimes when we outgrow coping mechanisms, we feel our life has lost its sense of purpose and meaning. This does not have to be a full blown crisis, but can be an opportunity to reevaluate how and why we developed these ways of identifying and behaving. A skilled feminist therapist can help us connect the dots between our upbringing, who we believe ourselves to be, and who we really are.
Many women struggle with the effects of invisible labor in both their home life and their work life.
Invisible labor refers to the unpaid and unseen labor of people in caregiving positions; domestic labor, interpersonal labor, and emotional labor are all valuable and essential forms of work that benefit everyone, yet those who excel at fulfilling these roles are rarely acknowledged for their contribution. When our labor and the value of that labor is invisible, so is our basic humanity.
The toll of invisible labor can be so severe, women may not even recognize the importance of this work themselves. Invisible labor is like a sneaky form of cultural, familial, or marital gaslighting; some part of us knows that we are doing A LOT, but everyone around us seems to think we are not doing enough. Whether it’s that snide comment someone makes about stay-at-home moms lounging about all day, or the chronic fatigue of being the only person in the office that people feel safe bringing interpersonal issues to, invisible labor leaves women feeling like they are never good enough, their efforts don’t matter, and they are not valued as human beings with their own needs and desires.
Feminist therapy can help make the unseen labor seen, affirm the importance of our work, and figure out where we can opt out and draw stronger boundaries.
A feminist therapist can validate the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal, misogynistic society.
Working with a feminist therapist allows women to feel seen and understood through shared, lived experience. Therapists are people, and finding a therapist that we can connect with–someone who feels like a good fit for us as a person, someone who shares our values–is really important. Not all therapists have an educational background in feminist theory or have experienced the effects of misogyny firsthand. Working with someone who is able to clock that our struggles are a result of gendered issues means they will be better equipped to validate and support us in finding solutions or developing self compassion for what we cannot change.
Therapy provides an anchoring relationship within which we can access the empathy that may be lacking from our spouse, boss, family members, or community. This can be especially impactful for women who feel alone in their experience of sexism; women who feel that no one around them is able to see that part of what they are dealing with is a result of gender inequality. This simple recognition can be tremendously healing and humanizing, because being alone in the ability to track gendered dynamics can compound over time to leave women feeling like they are “crazy” or “imagining it” or “overreacting.”
Everyone needs to know their experience is part of consensus reality with the people around them. Without the knowledge that our experience is valid and real, our mental health suffers greatly. A feminist therapist can not only affirm our individual experience, but offer consensus reality and the assurance that it’s not “all in our head.”
Feminist therapy can help women understand the impact of gendered socialization on their mental health and interpersonal resources.
Women are often socialized to take on the burdens of those around them, act as a caretaker for others at the expense of themselves, doubt their own judgment, and minimize their strength, competence, self worth, and authority. Or, on the flip side, women may develop an intense independence to avoid getting hurt in intimacy, or reject anything they deem “girly” because they associate conventional femininity or female roles with their disempowerment. Tracing personal growth arcs back to their original source–gender socialization and upbringing–can help women gain insight into their motivations behind their behavior. It can also help women question those motivations, drop them, and/or redetermine WHY they do what they do.
Learning the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, overt behavior and covert behavior, personality and coping mechanisms, can allow women to take back all the personal resources they have been leaking either appeasing or reacting to the effects of their gendered socialization and upbringing. As the folk wisdom goes: “It’s not what we do, it’s why we do it.”
Feminist therapy acknowledges that our individual hardships are rooted in systemic issues.
When we feel like all our problems are our fault, it’s no wonder we fall into despair, depression, or burnout. If we can recognize and locate how our personal hardships are rooted in systemic issues, we can put down some of the weight of the world and get clearer about what is and is not within our control. From there, we can adjust the dials on personal responsibility and self compassion so that we are less likely to feel frozen or stuck.
In other words: we are not alone. Our individual experience is not the result of our individual choices or character strengths/weaknesses so much as a result of the environment within which we were raised and within which we currently operate. We all make choices based on limitations, and those limitations are as often systemic and objective as they are self created and subjective. Working with a feminist therapist is one way we can begin to understand the relationship between what we are feeling in our own hearts and minds, and what is happening in the larger world.
If you’d like to explore if we’re a good fit, you can learn more by following this link.
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