Feminist Therapy

1. Feminist Therapy

2. What is
Feminist Therapy?
➢ It challenges the male-oriented assumptions regarding
what constitutes a mentally healthy individual.
➢ It emphasizes a diverse approach that includes an
understanding of multiple oppressions, power, privilege,
multicultural competence, social justice, and the
oppression of the marginalized people.
➢ It provides a systematic perspective in understanding the
social context of clients’ lives and are directed toward
affecting social and individual change.
➢ It views therapy as a partnership between equals and built
mutuality and collaboration in the therapeutic process.

3. Key Concepts
❏ Gender-Fair approaches explains the differences in
behavior between men and women due to socialization
❏ Flexible-Multicultural Perspective uses concepts and
strategies that apply equally to individuals and groups regardless
of age, race, culture, gender, ability, class, or sexual orientation
❏ Interactionist view contains specific concepts specific to the
thinking, feeling, and behaving dimensions of human experience
and accounts for contextual and environmental factors
❏ Life-span Perspective assumes that development is a
lifelong process and that personality and behavioral changes can
occur at any time

4. Principles
of
Feminist
Therapy
➢ The personal is political and
critical consciousness
○ We bring in to counseling
our problems that originates
in political and social
contexts
➢ Commitment to social change
○ Direct action for social
change
➢ Voices of those who
experienced marginalization
and oppression are valued and
their experiences are honored
○ Replaces the patriarchal and
other forms of objective truth
with feminist and social
justice consciousness and use
personal experience as a
touchstone for determining
what is reality

5. Principles
of
Feminist
Therapy
➢ The counseling relationship is
egalitarian
○ Authenticity, mutuality, and
respect
➢ Focus on strength and
reformulating psychological
distress
○ Psychological distress is a
matter of unjust systems
○ Our problems are in the
context of living and coping
➢ All types of repression are
recognized along with its
connections
○ We can be understood
through our sociocultural
environment
○ Social and political inequities
have negative effects on
people

6. Therapeutic Goals
❏ To assist individuals in viewing themselves
as active agents on their own behalf and on
behalf of others
❏ Help individuals to come together and
strengthen their collective power
❏ Strives for the transformation of the client
and the society

7. Therapist’s
Function and Role
❏ Integrate feminism, multiculturalism, and
other social justice perspectives
❏ Commitment in understanding the different
forms of oppression
❏ Being present to the client and willingness to
share about themselves
❏ Striving for mutual empathy
❏ Therapists must also be aware of themselves!

8. Client’s Experience
in Therapy
❏ They are considered as partners and should
be able to tell their stories and give voice to
their experience
❏ They should determine what they want
from therapy
❏ Be able to acquire a new way on how to
respond to their world

9. Relationship Between
Therapist and Client
❏ Therapist states their values when asking for the
client’s consent to avoid value imposition
❏ Therapists must be able to demystify the
counseling relationship by sharing their
perceptions about what is going on in the working
relationship
❏ The client is the expert on his or her life and the
therapist must use appropriate self-disclosure

10. Techniques:
❏ Empowering the client
❏ Clarify expectations
❏ Identify goals
❏ Work toward a contract that will
guide therapeutic process
❏ Self-Disclosure
❏ To equalize the client-therapist
relationship
❏ Should be provided when it is judged
as therapeutically helpful
❏ Gender-Role or Social
Identity Analysis
❏ To assess the relevant aspects of
client’s identity, which includes
membership in disempowered and
privileged groups
❏ Gender-Role Intervention
❏ Emphasis on society’s role
expectations.

11. Techniques:
❏ Social Action
❏ Help understand how unequal access to
power and resources can influence
personal reality
❏ Bibliotherapy
❏ Providing a number of books for the
client to read in the upcoming weeks.
❏ Assertiveness Training
❏ Become aware of interpersonal rights,
transcend from stereotypes, change
negative beliefs, and implement
changes in life
❏ Reframing
❏ Shift from placing the problem
internally and consider the social
factors
❏ Relabeling
❏ Changing the label/evaluation applied to
behavioral characteristic

12. Techniques:
❏ Social Action
❏ Encourage clients on becoming
volunteers for social change
❏ Group Work
❏ Joining a group (political or action)
as soon as it is realistic

13. The Role of Men...
❏ Men can be feminist therapists and feminist
therapy can be practice onto men as well
❏ Male therapists understands their own male
privilege confront sexist behavior and attitudes,
redefine conception of gender roles, establish
egalitarian relationships, and engage in efforts for
a just society.

14. Strengths & Limitations
❏ Increasing awareness on
attitudes and biases
❏ Consideration of the contexts
as opposed to merely focusing
on the symptoms and
behaviors
❏ Active community
involvement
❏ Absence of neutrality
❏ Developed by White,
middle-class, heterosexual
women, which may deem it as
biased