Feminist Therapy with Dr. Laura Brown

The Feminist Coach Academy podcast is proudly supported by Perk Digital, helping professional and entrepreneurial women amplify their message, build their body of work and leave a legacy through podcasts. For more information about how podcasts can help you build your brand, visit Perkdigital.com.au Welcome to the Feminist Coach Academy podcast where inclusive feminism, business and coaching meet. This podcast is proudly brought to you by the co-founders of the Feminist Coach Academy, Naomi Arnold and Cameron Aaron. We are Feminist Life and Biz coaches, both passionate about helping coaches, therapists, helping professionals, practitioners and entrepreneurs integrate a feminist lens and perspective into their business's life and client practice. On this podcast, we plan to help you do so. Now let's get started. Hello, welcome to episode 6. Today's episode is an interview that may and I did with Dr. Laura Brown, who is the author of Feminist Therapy. And Nay and my creation of Feminist Coach Theory is partly based on Feminist Therapy and Dr. Laura's book. And we had the pleasure and honor of interviewing Dr. Laura last year. And so we want to share this interview with you because it will also give you insight into what Feminist Therapy is all about and the origins of Feminist Coach Theory as well. So often when we think of therapy, we don't really think of Feminist Therapy. Just like when we think of coaching, we may not necessarily think of Feminist Coaching. I mean, we did, which is why we've blended the two. But many people within the coaching world may not put those two together Feminist and coaching, same in the therapy world, Feminist and Therapy, right? But it's crucial, right? It's so crucial that we acknowledge the systemic oppression as well as what's going on inside of us, right? And with our own personal lives, it's all connected. So it makes so much sense to have Feminist Therapy and Feminist Coaching because our lives are political, our personal lives are political and we are affected by systemic oppression. And to not acknowledge this, really it doesn't acknowledge the whole person and our whole experience in life. And more and more people are becoming more aware of this and they're becoming more aware that we need to blend the two and that we can't go to a therapist or a coach anymore who doesn't acknowledge oppression and who doesn't have that Feminist perspective. It's becoming more and more important and that is why we created the Feminist Coaching Academy to help you blend this in your practice. So whether you're a coach or a therapist or a healer or any kind of helping professional and you're an entrepreneur, we have created the Feminist Coaching Academy for you to help you really integrate all of these things together. I hope you enjoy the interview and I want to let you know about one other thing which is that we have a new freebie for you on our website go to FeministCoachAcademy.com. It is a free webinar. It is the four problems Feminist entrepreneurs need to overcome in order to have a successful business. We go over those four problems in the webinar and we guide you to take action on overcoming them. Every workbook along with it. So if you haven't signed up for that freebie yet make sure you do so go to www.feministcoachacademy.com sign up and you will get it. Okay. Let's get to our interview. I hope you enjoy. Okay so let's just start with you know for those that are not yet familiar with you and your work. Would you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit more about the work that you do? Okay so I'm Laura Brown. I am a clinical forensic psychologist who has been practicing in Seattle, Washington for four decades. I'm also pretty central to the development of Feminist Therapy Theory and Social Justice approaches to working in psychotherapy. I've written a lot of books, most of them for colleagues, two of them for the general public. I do a lot of teaching and training all around the world and right now I'm no longer seeing psychotherapy clients. I do consultation supervision and forensic. Oh yes an important thing. I'm a black belt in the martial art of IKIDO when they took up the age of 50. So so. I'm glad you remembered to add that bit. We've been reading your book Feminist Therapy, one of the editions that you released here and have been really interested in that since we've been doing a lot of work with coaches applying Feminist Theory to the work that we do here. So we wondered if you could introduce us to what Feminist Therapy is and how it differs I guess to what most people or some people would think about when they think of therapy. So Feminist Practice which is a broader term that would cover therapy supervision coaching kind of the whole nine yards is a mindset with which the practitioner approaches what they're doing and we're interested in several things. We're interested first of all in power and powerlessness. In the Feminist perspective the root of all psychological distress has to do with power lessness engendered by systemic forms of oppression and discrimination and marginalization. And so when people come to a feminist therapist with psychological distress we look at the symptoms and we ask ourselves the question how is this person been disempowered and how can we utilize the therapy process so that they become more powerful so that they reclaim the power that has been taken from them directly or indirectly by the systemic forms of oppression. Because Feminist Therapy began as psychotherapy with women breaking away from patriarchal models of treatment 45 almost 50 years ago. We are also particularly interested in gendered experience because everybody has gender. Everybody has gendered experiences and then we are also very interested in people's intersectionalities and the ways in which gender intersects with every single other aspect of identity. We see this as part of how we understand people's capacities and their strengths, their what we think of as their resistant strategies to being psychologically colonized as well as the source of how they've been disempowered and almost hypnotized almost put into a trans by the larger culture to believe that they are somehow less worthy or that something about them is deserving of being marginalized or pathologized. So in feminist therapy we try to create a relationship in which we analyze those issues of power and powerlessness and in which the therapist models and engages in the reclaiming of power with the client. The question that we ask the people who come to us is what's the one small, powerful thing you were able to do for yourself and many people have no sense that they have any power. They don't realize how powerful they have always been, how many capacities they've always shown simply to walk in the door of our offices alive and on their own two feet or wheeling themselves in. That's why they come in. So feminist therapy may look sometimes like what other therapists do because we integrate their feminist therapy is an integrated approach to psychotherapy. So you may see us doing EMDR, you may see us doing psychodynamic techniques or somatic techniques or cognitive behavioral or mindfulness. There's a lot of things that you can do. All of them with the goal of how does this allow the person sitting across the room from us to reclaim the power, to know what they know, know what they think, know what they feel and know what they want? That honestly sounds very similar to coaching and what we do in coaching. My guess is that the things that people bring to you are somewhat different. Probably, I mean, a lot of the people I've seen have been surviving. of the childhoods from hell, of one kind or another. And so they're coming to see me because they think about dying every day. They do harm to themselves. They have difficulty knowing what they feel or restraining, acting out on what they feel. They have compulsive behaviors that make their lives difficult for them. They have a hard time allowing people to be close. So I think the severity of the distress that comes to a psychotherapist is probably somewhat different from the coaches I know, come to coaches. But there's a huge amount of overlap because we're focusing on strength and on the reclamation of power. Exactly. And we do focus on emotional intelligence a lot too, and really being able to feel your feelings and own your emotions as well. But we do focus a lot on mindset. And that's what a lot of people do come to us for. Like they want to get the life they want. They might be dissatisfied in our life. But they do have trauma or they do have our dealing with some very severe experiences. But not all coaches are kind of trained to work with that. Yeah. Like therapists are. I know I have a good friend who's the president elected the APA and she's an executive coach. She was trained as a counseling psychologist. And so she has the skill set both to work with people severe distress as someone she coaches the suicidal. She knows what to do. Mostly what she does is very high level international executive coaching. And then I've encountered some people who call themselves coaches. Who in essence decided that they could just set up practice and charge money and do what they wanted. So I admire people who are committed to an ethic of how to coach well and a notion of that there are values in this process. Which is what it says. It says a sense I've gotten of each of you from looking at your websites. Yes. Good. That makes us feel good. Well, you know, we see a big need in the coaching world for a feminist analysis. You know, and that's what we're addressing and for a feminist lens. And so we both have studied feminist theory and we are so interested in applying that to our coaching practice and to helping other coaches apply it to their coaching practice. It's well. Are you able to touch on how you think feminist theory can be relevant across other professions? Absolutely. Because people's experiences have to do with the internalization of the limitations of oppression. The person who comes to you and says, I know I have the talent to do this and I continuously undermine myself. If you trace that back to its beginning, somewhere you might find, oh, people like you can't do that. Oh, people won't like you if people like you do that. So we look at the ways in which the narratives of oppression, the limiting narrative of oppression get between people and their talents and their capacities. I think that absolutely applies to what you do in coaching. I think the ways in which people of marginalized groups have been trained to give away our power in all kinds of interpersonal situations is something that coaches can address. Because you see people who say, my life works well enough and it could be working so much better. I have this talent, I have this skill, I have this capacity, you know, WTF that I'm not where some person who's a member of all the dominant groups that a lot less skilled than I have already has gotten yours before me. And this starts with women asking for less money when we start our job so we end up getting paid less over time. It starts with women not interrupting the men who are interrupting them in meetings. It starts with, you know, the two people of color in the office being pitted against one another and not being able to team and stand back and analyze and say, wait a minute. They only want one of us to succeed. Do we really want to cooperate with that agenda? So all of those I think are the kinds of things I know people ring into coaching. And so the feminist, the intersectional feminist analysis of power and identities and the ways in which systemic hierarchies of oppression are everywhere and affect everyone cannot but help expand the analysis. And you know, a lot of people are kind of allergic to the word feminist. I was just teaching feminist trauma therapy in Prague and most people came expecting, I don't know what they were expecting but they weren't expecting what they heard because certainly in the former East block feminist feminism has a bad name because it was imposed from the top down by communism. In the United States, feminism has been given a bad name by people who would like it to fail, who made it sound like it's some organized form of insane hating everyone born with a Y chromosome instead of G feminism is for everybody. It's about a patriarchal system not about people who apparently benefit from it for a little part of their lives. So some of what you have to do is psycho-educate people allow them to realize that they have been as duped into believing that liberatory models are their problem as anything else. The only people who benefit from believing that liberatory models are a problem are people who are at the top of the hierarchies of power and dominance. Yeah, so true. I was going to ask you whether you do have to educate some of your clients on systemic oppression, you know, like if clients are coming up who, because we're not educated on how patriarchy affects our lives, we're not educated on white supremacy or capitalism, right? So you have to do a fair bit of educating and do you do that with your clients or do you find that clients kind of already have an analysis of feminism when they come into the therapy session? I would say it's been about half and half over my career. And with the people who come in and they read my consent form, they say, what is this feminist therapy thing? And I do my elevator speech. And they say, do you think it will be helpful for X? And I say, if I didn't think it would be helpful, I would send you away because I won't take your money in your time if I don't believe I can help you. And then as we go along, I'm able to say, have you noticed that this is a narrative about the group you're a part of, about majorians, the Giordans are a Star Trek ethnic group, I used them a lot as an example. Have you noticed that this is a narrative about the Giordans like yourself, about how you're supposed to be, that you inhaled without even knowing it? And that leads us to begin to talk about broader systems and to look at how broader systems affect people intergenerationaly, how they affect people who appear to be at the top of the dominant hierarchy. And so eventually with most people, we get around to it somewhere. Some people come in the door already fired up and very political. Most people come in the door, in my office came in the door thinking they wanted to die. So first we had to look at why they thought their death would benefit anyone. And do you feel that it can be potentially harmful or not useful to clients or patients if therapists or helping professions don't have some level of feminist or social awareness in their, in the sessions? I think that to ignore that larger systems affect people's lives and well-being is to neglect a really important piece of the picture. Because someone comes in and they're depressed because they got laid off their job after 25 years of faithful service because the company got bought up by a hedge fund. Yes, you want to help them deal with feeling depressed and feeling suicidal. And then you want to invite them to look at the bigger picture because if you don't look at the bigger picture, then the amount of self blame and shame that this person carries is going to be harder to address. When we can say the problem is not in you and the problem wasn't that you believed what you got fed that good and faithful service would protect you. The problem is that we live in what's now a rogue capitalist society where a very tiny number of people make a great deal of money to spend on things they never need. And they do so by exploiting folks like the rest of us. Okay, so I think many people would be wondering, yeah, we live in these systems, but like, okay, you say we're powerful, but like how? What is our power? So I have developed what I think of as my four-dimensional vision of power. Power relationship to your body, in relationship to yourself, in relationship to other people, and in relationship to your existential meaning-making process. Those things, if evoked, can get people to move out of their place of helplessness and hopelessness. And it's not as if someone comes to feminist practitioner, they're going to go out and make a revolution, that they may become part of one. They may decide, "Okay, this time I am going to vote." They may decide, "I will show up at this town meeting." They may decide, "I will protest this landfill being put in yet another community of color." They may notice that there are small things that they can do when done in the company of others, can have an enormous effect. I think one of the lives of the systems of oppression with which we all live is that nothing we do matters. And when you've been traumatized a lot, you really do feel like nothing you do matters. One of the important messages of feminist and social justice practice is that everything that each of us does matters, and that if many of us together do many small things, it becomes a very large thing indeed. Yes. I really believe in those small acts every day in our language and our beliefs in what we embody, right? And how do I talk about myself, about the world, about the people in the world, things that seem silly like, "Where do I buy my clothing and how do they treat the people who work there?" This is going to sound odd, but part of why I continue to go to Starbucks is that Starbucks covers full health insurance for its part-time employees. I have a regular barista at the Starbucks I go to. He's a musician, and he has a wife who has mental illness, really severe mental illness. Starbucks Health Insurance, which he has because of that job, has made sure that his wife has gotten the air she needed, and he could also continue to be a musician rather than have to give it up. He was part-time at Starbucks. He had full-time health insurance. Okay, that's a choice that that company didn't have to make, because most companies don't make that choice. So despite the fact that they seem to have taken over the world like McDonald's, they have done some really important socially just things. And I get to see the individual experiences of that every day in my conversations with the people who work. That's interesting, because yeah, I think some people would say that supporting a local coffee shop would be more just if you will. But then again, first they were my local coffee shop 40 years ago. True, because you're in Seattle. And it doesn't mean that I don't also go to other places. You're raising a point that it's like it's complex, you know? Exactly. Exactly. It's complex. So if I'm going to buy a cupcake, I'm going to buy it from the cupcake from here in town, that also pays its employees a living wage and was behind the give everybody paid family medical leave in Washington State. I don't know if they have better cupcakes, but they have better politics. And I support them with my money. So I'll support businesses. So that's the kind of thing. It's like what kind of ethical choices do we make, what kind of political choices do we make? Knowing that we will never be pure and that the people who are in elective office will definitely never be pure, because the people who are the purest can't get elected. But who will do most good and least harm? And that's one of the ways I work with people is how do we learn to assess situations rather than simply accept or reject them out of hand? Part of what I think that the larger systems of oppression do is they confuse us about how to assess who and what to trust and how to do those assessments. Imagine that in order to do this work well with your clients or patients that you need to unravel or unpack some of these things within yourself as a therapist. Continuously. Continuously. Every single moment. And now that I'm not doing psychotherapy anymore, now that I'm doing consultation and supervision, it hasn't stopped. The habit of asking myself these questions has become core to my hand. What kind of questions do you ask yourself, you don't mind sharing? I ask myself, what are my choices here and what's leading me to make this choice? I ask myself am I reenacting an old pattern and I am body-ing an oppressive narrative? I ask myself, am I being as kind and respectful to everyone doing every possible job as I possibly can be rather than buying into classes stereotypes? I ask myself, am I making what I do accessible to as many people as possible even if that means stretching a little further than is comfortable for me. I ask myself about my white privilege. I ask myself about my social class privilege. I ask myself about my femme privilege, you know, as a lesbian who presents a stereotypically feminine. One of my ethical responsibilities in life is to never allow someone to assume I'm heterosexual just because I could pass. So I ask myself about those things all the time. And sometimes I make myself uncomfortable and sometimes I'm an utter and total failure. Sometimes I have ruptures to repair. To get to social justice, we have to do a lot of rupture repair. We have to practice a lot of humility. Yes, I think, you know, in the coaching world, there is a lot concern of getting it wrong, making a mistake, and so people don't even try it all because they're scared of saying the wrong thing and, you know, making a mistake. You know, something, if you, well, give you the metaphor I use when I'm teaching people cultural competence in therapy. So in Ikedo, in my martial art, the martial art of peace, we train in our bare feet. It's a very intimate martial art. We get extremely close to one another. One move has the other person's head on your shoulder as you help them fall on the ground. Another move you hug them around the waist and twirl them around to help them fall on the ground. We are up against each other continuously. And so we step on each other's toes. We elbow each other in the ribs. We do things that we don't intend to do because we're close enough to train. If we're going to get close enough to really engage with someone, we're going to make mistakes. We're going to step on toes. Our toes are going to get stepped on. If we don't accept that full on open-hearted engagement, means you get close enough to bump into somebody, then get out of the humans business. And I have made errors and I've repaired a lot of ruptures in my time. I will continue to make errors in repair ruptures. Right. Exactly. That's the thing. The part of the process. Exactly. What do you find that you have a process for repairing those ruptures? Well, it starts by my saying, you know, I think what I just said and/or did really was not okay. So I take responsibility for it. And when the person says, oh no, no, it was all right. I say, no, actually I know that what I said or did was not okay. So how can we talk about what the obstacles are to you letting in my acknowledging that what I said or did was not okay? Sometimes the other person says I was waiting for you to say that. Because you're right. That was really not okay. And I say, good, it's been sometimes with people who have worked with a long time. They come in and say at that last session, Laura, you said blah, blah, blah. And I'm furious at you and I say, oh, yeah, I'm so glad you're furious with me. How did I react to that? Well, at the beginning, they're like seriously? I say yes because now I know that you believe that I will stick with you no matter what. That I can screw up in a minute and you can be furious at me and we have a relationship. And it's stronger for that. And then, you know, about the 10th time, they're not wondering anymore. They're like, I'm really mad about what that thing you said. I'm like, yes, thank you so much. I am so proud of you. I think that therapy doesn't start until our clients can get angry with us. And then it doesn't continue if we can't do the rupture repair. The silence of it is the cold sticking over in the brains right now. Yeah, and making space for that, right? Like making room for that and saying it's okay. Well, and also not taking it on, you know. Not shaming ourselves. Not so saying you're right. That was not okay. Or you're right, I could have said that differently. Not defending ourselves. Not saying, well, what is it about you that makes it feel like blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like that, you know, that might be the case. That's not how you do a rupture repair. Later on, when you say, "I notice we've had this thing come up several times and I notice it comes up with a lot of other people." So, can we look at your piece? After they can trust that you will look at yours. You model looking at yours. Because liberating ourselves from narratives of perfectionism, which are part of the lives of marginalized people, is that we don't have the right to exist unless we're perfect. By demonstrating liberating ourselves from those narratives of perfectionism, we are demonstrating a liberatory methodology to the people with whom we were. Yeah, and a true collaboration. Not a, you know, "I am the expert and you're here to get insight from me." Correct. Yeah, and this sort of like horizontal power, not this vertical power. I think of it as spiral power. And it goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth energetically between us. Oh, yeah, lovely. Like that. So, what do you, what would you think as some of the core strengths, or characteristics of a feminist therapist, or someone applying feminist theory today work? Well, certainly a deep knowledge of the variety of feminist theories, a deep knowledge of the interaction between feminist and other critical and liberatory models. The willingness to be curious and humble, the willingness to follow the lead of our clients, rather than assume that we know where they need to go. And when they don't know where they need to go, they still not assume that we know where they need to go. But see the first step as helping them reclaim the power to know where they need to go. The willingness to examine our own intersectional identities and how they affect who we are. Clear and flexible boundaries. So, like, you don't have sex with your clients ever, you know, on this planet, on another planet in this or any other lifetime. You might go to their art opening because that's a culmination of a piece of work they did in therapy. You might go to court and sit and listen while they have to testify on their sexual harassment case. You might do therapy walking along the water because they can't tolerate being inside the four walls of an office. You might sit with them entirely in silence for the entire session because that's what they need. And your discomfort with their silence is less important than holding the space for that silence. And of course, any good feminist practitioner, any good practitioner period needs to embrace the ambiguity and the unknown of everything that we do. Maybe we can go to that a bit, but why don't you go back to the first thing you said about having knowledge of the various feminist theories out there, which is not common knowledge. And, you know, it's not like feminist theory was a mandatory class that everyone has changed. When I was in school, it didn't exist as a class. It's called, it's called, we had consciousness raising groups because it was, it was the early 70s. And we educated one another. I think that there's a marvelous library of feminist thought in the English language. And as some other languages too, but the English language is rich in a multiplicity of feminist theories, social constructivist theories, radical feminism, lesbian feminism, essentialist feminism, womanism, and the least of feminism, which is Latin feminism, there's, I'm sure in Australia, indigenous feminism, all of this has been written about my library. If I turn around right now, I look at the four bookshelves of my library that go back to 1970, starting with sisterhood is powerful. And moving forward from there, it's not hard to find good writing on feminist theory. What you discover is that feminist don't agree with one another. Wonderful, wonderful. We are not a monolithic mindset. There are huge variations among feminist theorists and feminist thinkers. We are continuing to decolonize ourselves from the systems of misogyny and white supremacy in which we were all raised. And so you'll find big differences. And our job as feminists is to have minds of our own think critically, figure out which of these models makes the most sense to us, or how we integrate models so it makes sense to us. But I think starting with reading, because there's so much excellent to read. And particularly today all you have to do is go online and you will find things. And international global women's feminism, the feminism of the global south, which is beginning to emerge and have a louder and louder voice in our discourses, is bringing a whole new exciting viewpoint to the feminism of cisgender, Euro background women that I came into in the late 1960s. I mean, feminism has grown and expanded so much in the time since I began to call myself a feminist. Yes, me too. Me too. I keep thinking I just want to come and read your bookshelf. Yeah, I mean, that's a really good point. You know, and this is one of the things that I try to tell my audience is that, you know, there are feminism's plural, right? And that, yeah, we're not a model with. We are going to disagree. We're going to agree. And I do actually encourage my podcast listeners to disagree with me. And it's okay that they don't agree. I would call myself like a queer postmodern feminist. You know, that's sort of the theory that I've come from. But I know that that's very challenging for a lot of people or some people will disagree with it or whatever, right? And that's okay. And I think that's why you're saying in the book, like feminist therapy doesn't have like one practice, like one technique or one way of doing things. We have an epistemology. We have a mindset. We have a series of questions we ask. And you know, I'm 66 years old. And so the feminist I am reflects my age cohort reflects my being a lesbian reflects my Jewish social justice roots. It's a very particular blend of a lot of things. It also reflects the fact that until I was sort of hit over the head with feminism in 1970, I didn't realize ways in which I was being treated differently for being female. Because I came from a family of powerful women. And no one ever said girls can't do that. Except at my synagogue, which put a big dent in my interest in practicing normal Judaism. But generally, I had people around me who said you can do that. And so I did whatever that was. And then I began to encounter women who've been told girls can't do that. And I was like, oh, seriously? Really? Wow. Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of one of my favorite athletes who is just superfiving strong and just a killer athlete. And she never got the message that girls weren't as strong as boys, for example. She never got that message, you know, based on her upbringing and her mom. She was mostly raised by her mom. And she just never got that message. So people were like, have been asking her this question of like, you know, how have you kind of combat this or, you know, dealt with this message. And she's like, I just never got that message. I've just always thought that like I could do anything athletically. It didn't matter. We recognize that it's not like that. Yeah, she does. She does. Yeah. But it just goes to show how important it is. these messages, the messages that we give our children, our families in our communities, you know, how important that is. Yeah and it's funny because my my paternal grandmother was a brilliant woman who had the misfortune to be born in the early 20th century. Jewish woman in what's now Poland, then Russia, smarter than anyone around her and she was persecuted for that. Like, no nobody's business and so she was trying to protect me when she told me Laura you're too smart for a girl and my mother stepped in and said do not ever say that to her there is no such thing as too smart for a girl. Because she was raised by someone who raised two daughters to know that there was no such thing as do smart for a girl. Did we circle back to the ambiguity piece? I think I feel like a lot of coaches that I work with and have trained struggle with that. So I love to hear a bit more about that Laura if possible. Like how do what would you say to those who struggle to sit with that ambiguity? So one of the things that I just taught by Vietnam veteran nurse who with whom I worked in the 1980s was the notion of premature temporary closure and she was a nurse who worked with Marines who were being dropped off the Medevac helicopters leading and burned and if you close the wound too soon you would kill them because infection would ground underneath the wound that was what was called premature temporary closure and she applied that metaphor to her own trauma recovery practice. She wrote a poem about it and she said wounds heal from the bottom up and the inside out they must be kept inspected made known in order to heal. Well if we prematurely close something over then we leave something festering inside and embracing ambiguity means being with the wound whatever that might be and being with the fact that the illusion that we know what's going to happen is one heck of an illusion example from my own life so on January 15th I learned that I had a melanoma and on January 24th I had a surgery to remove it really major surgery because of the part of my body it was on and I was going to go to Israel and get on a plane that day to teach a class and instead I was in the hospital recovering from having a major part of me hacked off not knowing how I was going to be we have the illusion that we know what happens and so we have the illusion that we can get things unambiguous when we embrace the fact that we really don't know then when the unknown shows up it doesn't scare us so badly we don't love it I wasn't like oh my god I'm so happy I'm having this experience I was furious and I also knew that oh yeah Laura you can't know what happens next so tying that to you know feminisms is there a right way no there are wrong things like being sexist racist misogynist homophobic heterosexuals classist ableist those are wrong things you can do you can be more interested in being liked than in helping people reclaim their power that's a wrong thing you can turn your flexible boundaries into taking over your clients lives and becoming way too important to them instead of supporting them and having a lot of sources of wisdom and support their lives that's a wrong thing but those are pretty obvious wrong things although sometimes people calling themselves feminists have done those wrong things sometimes that sort of just not being aware but then it's also because we're not perfect humans and you know everyone's gonna say and do crappy stuff and oppressor stuff sometimes see see understep on each other's toes it's what do we do with that I remember I was doing an evaluation on an individual with a Hispanic last name and I mispronounced it twice and I stopped myself and I said I want to apologize that was a microaggression my not pronouncing your name correctly said oh people do that all the time I said I don't care people do that all the time it's my job to respect you and to pronounce your name correctly and so I apologize it's so it's the little things like that that you just sort of catch yourself and sometimes you catch yourself in the moment and sometimes you catch yourself three weeks later and sometimes you catch yourself 40 years later and sometimes someone calls you at well and and and calling out I really don't like this notion of calling people out I think we I think I think we go to each other and we say you are probably not aware of this and you step down my toe we don't shame people shamey people is not a feminist strategy punishing people for making errors is not a feminist strategy and insisting that only that person who's a bejora and can talk about the brain issues a person who's not a bejora and has to have humility when they talk about the joren's but they're not forbidden not from my perspective that's not the feminism I'm a part of so we have to be careful that we don't engage in horizontal hostility because the the patriarchy won't do what's in we'll do ourselves in we do that yeah and sometimes we use oppressive techniques or models to further our feminist agenda but we don't see how we're actually using oppression right and quote the late great prophet Audrey Lord the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house so that's exactly what that means yeah yes so yeah I mean I think a lot of people might be like what do you mean we don't shame other people of course we do you know but it's like well wait let's examine this you know is shame something that is part of you know our feminist practice or is it from oppression and I would say shame is a tool of oppression and that we can respectfully disagree with one another is feminist we can say I think you really did that badly you can say disagree with your tactics and strategy I don't like your version of your politics we can say all those things and not shame someone not humiliate someone not not do the work of the patriarchy for the patriarchy and and that is something that as feminists we have done to one another since I got in the game because of that perfectionism because of that internalized and externalized perfectionism you know people who are members of marginalized groups have to represent a k a b perfect members of the dominant group people whose intersectional identities are mostly dominant group can be way imperfect and no one says of this represents the whole group mean see under the people who are at the top at the the leadership of both of our nations at the moment absolutely do you think that there's that for all of us there's ways where oppressed and ways were privileged all of course because everybody has intersectional identities so as a Jew I am oppressed I'm part of a group of people that's been targeted for violence for the last two thousand years and still is so if you are identified with a Christian religion even if you are a poor person or person of color you have religious privilege and relationship to me because your holidays count and your religion's history is of trying to kill my people off people also losing game privilege when they move social contexts the Syrian physician from Damascus who's now sweeping the floors as a refugee in Seattle was a person of privilege in her own hometown she was a physician she was a Muslim she was a Syrian she belonged and now she's a refugee and a Muslim and a Syrian whose English isn't good enough yet to pass the exam to allow her to practice as a physician once again so we gain and lose privilege as we go things change yes yes it's it's complex and I'm glad that you went into that more I think that's important to acknowledge yeah and how can that privilege show up in a therapy context within between a patient therapist relationship well it shows up on both ends certainly it can lead each person to make assumptions about the other person's resources what's available to the other person what the other person has or had it can lead us to think the other person is exaggerating or misinterpreting a situation like surely they couldn't have meant it that way when probably they did mean it that way so privilege makes the ground look even privilege makes the world look just And we have to be willing to admit that the ground is not even, and justice is an ideal not a reality. And that's why that self-work that you were talking about in those questions that you ask yourself is so important. So absolutely essential. Because I have two big pieces of privilege. I have white skin privilege, and I have social class privilege. And then I have a couple of big pieces of oppression. I'm a Jew, and I'm a lesbian, and I'm a person with a disability. But if you don't know the stereotype of what Jews look like, although everybody here does, it's mostly the microaggressions that I experience for that. As a lesbian whose a fam is mostly the microaggressions, my disability is something other people don't deal with very much. So I have to look at the fact that my privilege and the power of my privilege in most places has much more social weight than any of the ways that I'm oppressed. Because everybody has bias, but bias pressed privilege equals you can really harm people. So I need to remember continuously that the privileges I carry are the kind that can really harm people here. And then every time someone murders people with a synagogue, I'm reminded that actually I'm not safe. Yeah, it depends. Do you have any more than any questions, Ken? I mean, I think we could go home for hours. To say, so what would what would I say in parting, which is I think it's all of our jobs to look at the ways we've been colonized by oppressive mindsets. And to ask ourselves, how do we free ourselves from them? And that that's a lifelong process. And and well worth it. What's a vigorous head nodding happening? You can't see. I'm really going to want links to your podcast, please. So I may put them on my own website. Oh, thank you. And on that note, for those who are listening, if they want to connect with your work or follow what you're doing now, is there anything you would like to share with them that can enable that? Well, I have a website. It's drlorabrown.com. And on it, you can find listings of all the things I've written. You can find links that you can go directly through to buy all of my books on a large publisher, international seller of things. I'm not going to say their names. I don't want to advertise for them. But you can buy directly through the links on my website. You can see upcoming talks I'm going to give. You can listen to some recorded things that I've done for other folks. You can find out about the services I have to offer. And you can, oh, and you can find my email there too. All right. Well, thank you again so much. You're very, very welcome. And the best of skill to each of you, because as you know, success has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with skill. Early feminist psychology research. Mm-hmm. Totally agree. Yes. Thank you. Bye-bye now. Bye-bye. Have a nice day. Bye-bye. Have a nice day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Have a nice day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Before you go, make sure you grab our webinar for problems. Go to www.feministcoachacademy.com. And if you're interested in joining any of our current classes in feminist coach academy, go to feministcoachacademy.com. And you can sign up for any or all of our current classes. Thank you for listening. Make sure you subscribe. And rate and write a sub-review. iTunes. Spotify. And you can sign up for any of our current classes in feministcoachacademy.com. And if you're interested in joining any of our current classes in feministcoachacademy.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]