Women’s History Month: Showing Advocacy for Women in the Therapy Office

 

Women’s History Month: Showing Advocacy for Women in the Therapy Office

Written by: Kelsey Someliana-Lauer, Therapy Practice Solutions Virtual Assistant

In March, we love to take time to honor our founding female figures - folx like Susan B. Anthony, Marsha P. Johnson, Sojourner Truth, Eleanor Roosevelt, and so on.  While reflecting on our founding femmes is important and needed, discussing the advocacy we can do today is just as important.  Our trailblazing mothers didn’t work for nothing, after all!

How can we promote advocacy in 2022 in the therapeutic space?  Check out these tips on how, as a mental health therapist, we can keep women’s rights on our minds and in our offices.

Acknowledge the Ugly History of Women’s Mental Health

Let’s face it - the history of the treatment of women in the mental health field hasn’t been pretty.  While we’ve moved far past diagnosing hysteria for women clearly having normative stress responses, we haven’t completely equalized the field.  For example, most of our founding research was done on men and operated under the assumption that both genders expressed symptoms in the same way.  As a consequence, we are still uncovering how a variety of mental health disorders present in women versus men.  Keep in mind that symptoms vary between cultural groups, including gender, so we must keep culturally-competent care in mind when performing assessments and diagnosing clients.

Embrace Intersectionality

If you aren’t familiar with the term intersectionality, coined by feminist icon Kimberlé Crenshaw, you should Google it immediately!  Intersectionality is the idea that our identities interlock and impact each other, whether we realize the impact or not.  Being female-identified is bound to impact other areas of our clients’ lives - being a parent, an employee, or someone’s child all mean significantly different things because their identity as a woman changes what it means to be those things.  When working with a female-identified client, assess: what does femininity and a female-identity mean to them?  How does their female identity interplay with their other prominent identities?  What challenges have a different meaning to a woman than to someone of another gender?

Keep Your Coworkers Accountable

Accountability can feel icky - we as counselors know that more than anyone!  However, holding our colleagues to the standards set for counselors of benevolence, fidelity, veracity, and justice is advocacy work in itself.  For example, talk to that coworker in your consultation group that is struggling to see how their female client could feel so unsafe walking home alone at night.  Discourage water-cooler chat that degrades or pokes fun at the challenges of women.  Honor your female-identified coworkers for their unique perspective as women, just as you’d hope they’d do for you.  Empower each other!

Whether it’s springtime March or freezing December, delivering culturally-competent care for our female-identified clients is vital.  Here at Therapy Practice Solutions, we are a team that empowers each other as an all-woman staff and a woman-owned small business.  We’d love to show you the same support we show each other so you can continue the advocacy work for your clients!  Reach out today to discuss what you can get off your plate by hiring a Virtual Assistant so you can pencil in time to take that women’s issues seminar you’ve been eyeing, or read The Body is Not an Apology (finally).  Reach out by filling out a contact form today!