Techniques of Feminist Therapy

In conceptualizing a client’s concerns, counselors often use cultural analysis,

gender-role analysis, and power analysis. This provides a basis for making cultural
interventions, gender-role interventions, and power interventions. The therapist is not
limited to these three categories and may choose to analyze disabilities, religion, or
other identities. Additionally, feminist therapists may make use of assertiveness
training, reframing and relabeling, and demystifying strategies.

Cultural Analysis:
Feminist therapy maintains that the problems that individuals discuss in
counseling should be seen in the context of culture. In analyzing culture as it relates to a
client, feminists examine several issues. Therapists may ask to what extent do the issues
of the dominant culture that the client lives in affect the definition of the problem?

For example, in the United States the culture is White, Western, and heterosexual
dominant. This affects the way issues such as rape and spouse battering are seen.
Incidence of issues provides information about the culture. Rape is primarily done by
men to women. How individuals identify the problem is significant. For example, women
may blame themselves for being raped. Myths about issues also may exist in the society,
such as beliefs that African Americans are not as intelligent as Whites or do not want to
work. Examining these issues provides a way of analyzing the impact of a culture on the
nature of a problem.

Cultural Intervention:
There are many ways to acknowledge and work with cultural problems that are a
significant aspect of individuals’ problems. By analyzing aspects of clients’ lives or
stories focusing on issues that arise from a cultural analysis, a therapist can be sensitive
to cultural issues affecting a client. Understanding the client’s culture can then help
therapists make interventions that require the use of lawyers, social agencies, families,
or others. Suggestions are informed through the therapist’s understanding of the
client’s concerns.
Gender-role Analysis:
To understand the impact of gender-role expectations on them, clients can
participate in a gender-role analysis. Although this gender-role analysis can be
modified, depending on the needs of the client, the steps provide a way of clearly
identifying a sequential approach.

First, identify various gender-role messages that she had experienced during her life.

Second, the counselor helps the client identify positive and negative consequences of
gender-related messages.

Third, the counselor and the client identify the statements clients make to themselves
based on these gender-role messages.

Fourth, the counselor and client decide which messages they want to change.

Last, the client and counselor develop a plan to implement the change and then follow
through.

Gender-role Intervention:
Often feminist therapists respond to a client’s comments or problems by
understanding the impact of gender-role and other social expectations on the client.
They may not go through the process of gender-role analysis described previously, but
they do provide the client insights about social issues as they affect the client’s
psychological problem.

Power Analysis:
Traditionally, White men have had more power than women and non-White men
in many countries; as a result, they have made and enforced decisions about family,
work, laws, and social relationships.

Brown (2010) categorizes power into four types: somatic power, interpersonal power,
inter-psychic power, interpersonal/social-contextual power, and spiritual/existential
power.
 Brown categorizes power into four types: somatic power, interpersonal power,
interpsychic power, interpersonal/social-contextual power, and spiritual/existential
power.

Somatic power: A person is aware of one’s physical senses, such as eating, drinking, sex,
comfort, and rest. The body is experienced as a safe place and is accepted for what it
is, not for what it should be.

Intrapersonal/intrapsychic power: If an individual knows what she thinks and

feels, this would be an indication of power. Such a person would be flexible, but not
suggestible. She would focus on the present, not dwell on the past or future. She would
have powerful emotions and the ability to take care of her emotions so they don’t harm
herself or others.

Interpersonal/social-contextual power: By being interpersonally effective, such an

individual would have a desired impact on others. She would be able to have good
relationships with others and leave relationships if they prove harmful.

Spiritual/existential power: Such a person would be able to make meaning out of her life.
She would be able to integrate her heritage and culture in a way that helps her
understand herself better. Being aware of the social factors that she deals with and
interacting with them rather than being overwhelmed by them would be an aspect of
spiritual/existential power.

Brown uses these categories to assess power issues with her clients. These four
ways of examining power help her to know how to work with her clients and help them
to be more effective in their lives.
By increasing clients’ awareness of the differences between the power of men
and women in society, therapists can then help them make changes where their lack of
power has previously prevented change.

Power Intervention:
Power analysis is a technique that requires planning and follow-up in counseling.
Often, a therapist can strengthen a client’s sense of self through reinforcing her
statements or through giving information. Empowering a client can occur in the course
of therapeutic discussion and does not need to be planned. Therapists try to help clients
become more powerful while at the same time being careful not to use therapy to meet
their own needs to be more powerful.

Assertive training:
Because women often do not feel powerful, they may not act in an assertive
manner and thus may give up some control over their lives. Feminist therapists see laws
and gender-role expectations as contributing to the need for women to be assertive
because the rules have historically prevented women from being treated with equality.

To understand assertiveness, it is helpful to distinguish between assertive

behavior and passive or aggressive behavior. Assertiveness refers to standing up for
one’s rights without violating the rights of others. Assertive behavior is a clear and direct
(no sarcasm or humor) statement or request.

Reframing and relabeling:

The term reframing refers to changing “the frame of reference for looking at an
individual’s behavior”. In feminist therapy, it usually means a shift from blaming oneself
to looking at society for an explanation. Reframing is often used to help individuals
understand how societal pressures can add to their problem.
As a result of reframing this situation, she might relabel her problem from
“depression” to “feeling overwhelmed by and angry at pressures to be thin.”

Therapy-demystifying strategies:
Feminist therapists try to have an open and clear relationship with their clients so
that inequities of power in society are not re-created in the therapeutic relationship.
Therapy should not be a mysterious process or one in which the therapist is more
powerful than the client; rather, it should be egalitarian.
Two important ways to demystify therapy are providing information to the client
and using appropriate self-disclosure when working with therapeutic issues. Therapy is
demystified by providing information about the process of therapy and by sharing some
of the skills of therapy. At the beginning of therapy, feminist therapists describe their
theoretical orientation, relevant personal values, and rights the client has as a consumer
of therapy.
 Another means of demystifying therapy is self-disclosure. In general, self-
disclosure is given to help the client in his growth, not for the therapist to share her pain.
Self-disclosure that the counselor initiates shows that the counselor is a real person,
thus equalizing the relationship. Self-disclosure should feel appropriate to the counselor
and educative for the client.