Therapy for Social Change Podcast

Last week I explained how treatments for mental health conditions rely on one of three particular definitions of the body that are circulating in the field right now. I noted that two definitions of these bodies, the “physiological body” and the “somatic body,” are “universal”: that is, physiology and soma are said to operate the same way, in all people. We rely on universality in medicine and men...

The understanding of what a body “is” and how it works shapes the interventions we are trained to use and how we think about psychological distress. There are at least three definitions of the body driving today’s mental health treatments, and these definitions are creating unofficial silos in the field, parceling out different understandings of embodiment and selfhood. Many of the mainstream appr...

The way to make deep, lasting change is to be as boring as possible. No flair. You sneak up on the change, like a cat stalking its prey. You tell no one you’re doing it. You waste no time asking others for their advice about your goal. You devote your planning and thinking not to the end result, but rather to the smallest possible action you can take. You make the first step so absurdly small, so...

Including an analysis of structural violence can help us to better understand and solve problems as challenging and complex as why it is that mass shooters are almost exclusively male. This post looks at a NYT article on how to predict a mass shooting, and overlays the experts' analysis with a structural lens. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers...

I think of labor questions for therapists: Could much of the current, epidemic levels of depression and anxiety be caused by loss of meaning, overwork, lack of time to cook healthy food, lack of energy to really listen to the people who matter, because at the end of the day there’s nothing left to give? What would happen to our addiction rates if people didn’t feel compelled to numb themselves out...

I’ve been thinking about harvest, in this late summer moment. How the natural world uses a strategy of abundance to ensure its continuity. A lot of what I write about in this newsletter is how ideas of scarcity, hierarchy, and dominance are impacting us, both individually and collectively. My goal is to make these ideas, and the structures that uphold them, visible. I want to talk with you about t...

Photo by A Koolshooter on Pexels The Climate Psychology Alliance of North America conducted a discussion between the U.S. environmentalist and author Bill McKibbon and the English psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe about her recent book Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis . Weintrobe’s main argument is that the self is divided between a narcissistic aspect, which she names The Exception, and a re...

Talking about and paying attention to what it’s like to be in a body can be a way “in” to recognizing what shifts when the body is racialized. Because white people experience their bodies as at times “non-raced,” they can remain unconscious or oblivious of the ways their racialization is always present. How, then, does this dynamic impact the ways whiteness is suppressed in therapy sessions? This...

Photo by Mathias Reding on Pexels So. This past week was one of those weeks where what I was going to talk to you about kept shifting under my feet. I started the week by working on a piece for you on boundaries.   In the case of the boundaries post, I decided to look at what happens when we take a concept that’s pretty much taken for granted as a “good” therapy practice, and ask what happens to t...

Pexels—August de Richelieu This week's action snack asks you to verbally acknowledge a structure, such as patriarchy or white supremacy, as an ultimate source of violence. If you look around, listen to podcasts, read the news, you’ll notice many conversations about racism and sexism, often dramatized by stories about individuals, such discussions about George Floyd and the cops, or Amber Heard and...

If you weren’t here last week, here’s Part I TL;DR:  If you’re working with an individual client who’s in a fight, or with a couple who are at loggerheads, consider the ways that structures of oppression like patriarchy and white supremacy might be the ultimate source of the conflict.  By talking about the ways structures provide the context for an “individual conflict,” the therapist can help the...

Image courtesy of Liza Summer at Pexels TL;DR:  If you’re working with an individual client who’s in a fight, or with a couple who are at loggerheads, consider the ways that structures of oppression like patriarchy and white supremacy might be the ultimate source of the conflict.  By talking about the ways structures provide the context for an “individual conflict,” the therapist can help the clie...

Photo by Barbara Olsen on Pexels I view the last three weeks as a period of intense, collective trauma. The twin impacts of the January 6th hearings and the Supreme Court decisions have flooded our collective consciousness. Meanwhile, there has been no moment of national mourning; no public reckoning with the fact that below the outrage is a well of grief. As a trauma therapist—and as a human bein...

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash Last week, I wrote about the Dobbs decision as an act of psychological warfare. This week, the Court added to the psychological misery by snarling the EPA and alluding to its desire to challenge contraception, same-sex marriage, and other laws.  With this juggernaut of rulings, we can see evidence of the right’s continued strategy to immobilize resistance by indu...

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is an act of psychological warfare. Its immediate impact is on the physical health of those pregnant people who need abortion care. But the decision marks a decisive victory in the Right’s decades’ long fight to influence the courts. The decision is as much symbolic as it is literal. This decision lands like the culmination of the last six years...

Photo by Amir Arabshahi on Unsplash The practice of asking who, truly, is included in a “we” can make our assumptions visible to ourselves.   Try this: Spend the next 24 hours noticing every time you hear/read/watch a person use the word “we.”   Or, ask yourself: “Who is being addressed, but not explicitly named, as the audience, viewer, or receiver of this information, or kind of art, or cultural...

Picture this: A young child, dreaming of her future. She screws up her face, clutching her pencil as she writes in her composition book. She isn’t the type to write fairy tales, or futuristic fiction.  She’s practical, like her aunts, who scratch the top of her head, pat her back as they walk by. She’s envisioning herself at a lectern, addressing a large crowd. They’re clapping, rising spontaneous...

About a year ago, I started working on the idea for this newsletter.  I noticed there was a lot of talk about a “new” nationwide mental health crisis, said to be caused by the pandemic.  But to my mind, the root cause of this distress was not the pandemic.  It was structural violence, particularly the mutually reinforcing structures of patriarchy and white supremacy.  The pandemic’s scourge reflec...