Therapy for Social Change Podcast

Have you all been following the coverage of the diabetes drug Ozempic? Ozempic is the brand name of semaglutide, one of a series of drugs in the category GLP-1 receptor agonists. The drug, which mimics a hormone, works by suppressing the body’s production of glucagon. Since glucagon cues the body to raise its blood sugar, when it’s suppressed, insulin is better regulated and insulin resistance can be prevented. Ozempic sets off the cascade that signals the brain to tell the body it’s “full.” 

The drug received approval for people with type 2 diabetes and/or obesity, to help them eat less and control their weight and blood sugar. Because Ozempic and other drugs, like Wegovy, that use the same chemical, not only produce the feeling of fullness, but also slow down the actual emptying of the stomach, people who take the drug report not only consuming less food, but also not suffering from cravings. Several people who have taken the drug have written in online forums that they feel like a “skinny person” because their brains can now tell them to stop eating. They say that something that was always broken is now fixed.

Here’s the thing I’ve been wondering about, though. For all the press this drug received over the last six months, all the excellent discussions of whether Ozempic is the death knell to the body positivity movement, and a restoration of white thinness as the beauty ideal associated with the rich, there’s a question I’ve yet to see someone raise: what happens to a person’s ability to access their emotions when they are taking a drug that suppresses their appetite?

That is, is there a link between loss of “appetite”—the literal hunger for food—and the loss of connection with desire itself, with feeling itself? One thing I know as a therapist is that our feelings exist on a spectrum and along a continuum of intensity. We cannot suppress grief and terror and still have access to joy and excitement. We cannot dull the level of intensity of one feeling and still have access to the high intensity of another. Most people who are moving from a state of numbness or dissociation to instead feeling their emotions in real time, for example, cannot access their joy without first feeling and processing their suppressed grief.

There’s a beautiful passage by Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist Eduardo Galeano from his series called “Windows.” This one is called “Window on the Body”:

The church says: The body is a sin.

Science says: The body is a machine.

Advertising says: The body is a business.

The body says: I am a fiesta.

When science—the pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly & Company—sees the body as a machine, then Ozempic looks like a miracle. Suppress hormone A with chemical B; trick the brain into engendering the satiety response, and diabetes and obesity, heart disease and sleep apnea, cancer and liver disease all decline. 

But the body isn’t a machine. It’s a feedback loop. We are the ones who impose the metaphor of machine onto the body, to help us tame and study it, specialize in its systems, tweak its engine, bang on its hood. In reality, any intervention we make into one aspect of being will impact other aspects, often in ways we cannot anticipate. 

What happens when our dominant culture, which already encourages us to consume objects, people, drugs, and entertainment, in order to numb out and disconnect from that which terrifies us, is granted a drug so powerful that the numbing could be a kind of permanent state? What kind of capitalist productivity will be achieved by people who never need much to eat, and who can’t access the slowness, the pleasure, the rest that being truly full forces upon us, regardless of what our mind, or our boss, might demand of us?

What happens to our feelings of commonality and connection to others’ bodies, if our own body is unable to tell us what it wants and needs? Will Ozempic usher in a higher level of loneliness and numbness in its consumers? Or will they experience great happiness, looking at how beautiful they are in the mirror?

I’m writing this post to you, and to myself, as a reminder that the body’s hunger, its appetites, its beautiful and unruly nature is a kind of music, always playing, asking me, and us, not just to listen, but also to respond. I wonder what you do with your hungers and your terrors; if you’ve used the flat dullness of restriction to tame your moods, or if you’ve gloried in the music of your own embodiment and refused the siren song of transcendence that promises the ultimate escape from decay and death. I wonder if you know someone on Ozempic or if it’s coming up in your sessions when people talk about their bodies and desires. I wonder what you’re saying in return.

I was on Mt. Tabor last week and as I walked around the circular path at its top I saw the little hemlock in the picture at the top of this post. I had an instant fondness for it, propped between two helpful sticks, guiding it up towards its neighboring trees. Because the tree is shorter than I am, I felt a kinship to it. What will it take for this small tree to survive? What will it need to learn? 

These are my questions, for myself. When I think about the responsibilities humans have at this moment, both to our communities and to the ecosystems of which we are a part, I feel like that hemlock, in proportion to those trees. That’s when the phrase “It’s ok to be a beginner” came into my head. It felt like an answer, a balm to my worried self. 

One of the many reasons I ended up leaving academia is that I’m an interdisciplinary thinker and it’s difficult to feel a sense of belonging or value in academic institutions unless you’re a specialist. I understand the impulse to go deep in a small area, to give oneself a better sense of certainty about the subject one studies. Yet it has seemed to me that there are some problems, like patriarchy, violence, white supremacy, or ecosystem destruction, that demand both a braiding together of multiple knowledges and a translation of theoretical and specialized language into a vernacular that calls to non-specialists to join in.

What “counts” as expertise? Is it lived experience? Is it identity? Is it credentials, certifying the hours and years we’ve spent reading and communing with an idea? Is it institutional standing and publications? Is it the capacity to receive and send energy where it is most needed? Is it the ability to move and excite others? Is it the capacity to channel information outside the logic and rationality of the mind? Is it embodied knowing? 

So much of what the dominant culture ratifies as expertise is rooted in a very narrow definition of professional specialization. If being a credentialed professional lets you charge money for your services, marks you as “better than” others and thus worthy of high fees, then knowledge acquisition is about separation and hierarchy and the elevation of “rationality” above other sources of knowledge. 

To me this is not a theoretical discussion. These definitions have real world consequences. They exclude entire communities from the arena of credibility. Sometimes it is appropriate for beginners to attend, listen, take in the wisdom of elders and say almost nothing back. But I wonder how many people tell themselves they have nothing to offer to the complex problems we are facing as a collective because they don’t have the training, the expertise, the theoretical sophistication or the credentials to play. 

The fragmentation of being into mind and body, feelings and thoughts, masculine and feminine, is a strategy to push away what is threatening and embrace the fiction that we can attain some kind of transcendent mastery over something. It’s a great distraction from the terror of death and dissolution. It’s a particularly Western phenomenon. For me, when I think about how I was taught to learn, I remember how I was encouraged to see myself as separate from the world, below those who knew more, and only worthy of speaking if I had something absolutely new to add to what was already there. 

I think about how I was set up to objectify myself and the external world, to objectify “nature” and see myself as not that, and how cruel that was, because it made me hate and deny the parts of myself that were weak, and vulnerable, and that didn’t have a fast answer to a complex problem. 

It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the Zen concept of beginner’s mind and how treasured that state is; how difficult it is to stay there. I like to think of all knowledge as partial and transient, and of all of us as having something to bring forward, no matter who might say we aren’t credible, or that we don’t look the way a person should look, we don’t talk the right way, or we don’t belong in the room. I hope if you’re catching your breath, thinking of speaking but then holding it, that you won’t stop yourself next time.

Hey there everyone—

Today I decided to share some information I gathered this week—much of it in very mainstream places—on the impact of inflation on ordinary people and the ways corporations are trying to use “inflation” as a way to continue to increase their prices and maintain their profits, even as inflation is said to be going down. 

I’m going to summarize this information because I think it’s a perfect representation of the ways late stage capitalism is bumping up against limits and fighting with everything its got to extract the last possible bits of money, time, attention, resources and profit from an ever-shrinking source. 

My wish is that we would all look at this information, this ordinary reporting from an ordinary week, and say: this was the moment when it was absolutely fundamentally clear that there is no farther for late stage capitalism to go. That the collective psychosis of believing we can continue to consume and thrive; that the working class and the poor and the starving will find a way to continue to scrounge and work hard and get by; that the growth mindset will save us all—this was the point where its own absurdity reached such heights than even its purveyors could no longer believe it. This was the point where the constant exposure to the suffering of humans and the more than human world hit its own emotional wall.

Premiumization

What it is:

A strategy to allow companies to continue to charge the prices they have been charging at the height of inflation, even as inflation “cools” and prices are supposed to go down. Or, as the authors note: “It could be a sign that companies are making last-ditch efforts to justify higher prices and cling to fat profits as the economic outlook darkens.” In the last three weeks, the word “premiumization” was mentioned sixty times in investor calls as a strategy that will allow corporations to continue to ensure that their investors will profit from stock market returns.

Credit Card Points

What it is:

Middle and upper class people are increasingly inclined to use credit cards that have “rewards” or “points” programs. If you have a card with a rewards program and you gather enough points, you can get discounts at fancy restaurants or hotels, free airline tickets, and reduced costs on products and services.

The Current Impacts of Inflation

The U.S. Census Bureau, since April of 2020, has been regularly collecting data on households to determine the impact of the pandemic. It has continued to conduct these surveys, and is now mapping the impact of inflation. Their most recent survey was conducted from Feb 1st through the 13th, 2023. It found:

* 25 million people do not have enough money to buy adequate amounts of food.

* 40 million people are struggling to pay for their household expenses.

* 16% of the people who were surveyed said it was “likely” they would be evicted from their homes in the next two months, and 23.7% said is was “somewhat likely” they would be evicted.

* Between January 14, 2023 and February 14, 2023 the price of eggs went up 8.5%.

* On March 1, 2023 the increase in SNAP benefits that was granted during the pandemic expired, leading to an average loss of $90 per month for beneficiaries.

* Because unemployment benefits from the pandemic are also expiring, people are no longer able to rely on unemployment money to buy food.

* The lack of medicaid expansion in many Southern states means that the number of people suffering from of economic distress, food and housing scarcity is highest in the South.

What’s clear is that an ever-increasing number of people in the United States are suffering. They cannot meet their basic needs. They lack universal healthcare and childcare. The prices of food and services are high, and going up, week by week.

The population is confronting the very real facts of limits: the limits of our economy; the limits of the human body to work so hard without sustenance or healthcare; the limits of the planet’s resources, like healthy soil, minerals, and wood; the limits of the amount of luxury even rich people can consume; the limits of the environment to suck up our pollution and the earth to absorb our toxic chemicals; the limits of how much streaming content we can watch; the limits of how much longer people can buy into the idea that material things are adequate proxies for love, and meaning, and communion with one another, with spirit, with whatever your version is of what binds together the more than human world, and all of us, into a whole.

The white middle class has been encouraged to believe in the fiction of independence. They have been encouraged to meet their needs themselves, or inside their families, and if they can’t do that, to hire people to meet their needs—to spend money on goods and services. Other communities have relied on interdependence, on mutual aid, on sharing economies, on tool libraries, on showing up in a crisis and devising creative strategies to solve problems. 

As the access to money and resources continues to be pushed higher and higher up the chain, with greater numbers of people suffering from poverty and economic distress, I wonder what the middle class will do in response? I wonder about all the people who are already engaged in social change work, in the Just Transition, in efforts to dream a new way of being that depends on reciprocity and staying within our planetary limits. I wonder what percentage of the people in the United States are longing for a completely different way of living, and think they’re alone in that desire, and aren’t sure how to get there. 

Have you heard of the Bechdel test?

Named after Alison Bechdel, the graphic illustrator and creator of the comic Dykes to Watch Out For, the test is the result of a 1985 strip in which two lesbians consider going to a movie. One of the characters says she’ll only see a movie if it meets a simple criteria:

* It has to have two women in it.

* They have to speak to each other.

* They have to talk about something other than a man.

In the original comic, the two go to the theater and can’t find a single movie that passes the test. They decide to go home and make popcorn there, instead. 

I think part of the power of the test is that it’s absurdly pathetic in its requirements. Bechdel says that the idea was actually that of her friend Liz Wallace. The test is used to this day in Hollywood to determine if a movie is “feminist” (cough). 

The test has been adapted to account for the ways people of color are represented in film. The race Bechdel test calls attention to the fact that non-white people often serve as props—voiceless or unnamed characters that populate a scene in which the white main actors are centered. Because the white characters are granted psychological depth and complexity, they drive the story’s plot. The race Bechdel test, like the original Bechdel test, is powerful precisely because it demands so little of the filmmakers:

In both versions of the Bechdel test, the lead—that is, the character with whom the viewer is expected to identify—is presumed to be a straight white man. Of course, straight white men have a simple point of identification in these plots. But what’s interesting about this is less about the content of the story and more about what it asks of the viewer. People who are not white and not male have so much practice identifying with the main character of a story in which they aren’t represented that they have a built-in skillset: they can “cross-identify” with the viewpoint and emotional needs of a white male. 

There can be friction, of course, and anger about the lack of story that matches the lived experience of the viewer. And we are starting to get more movies that push against this master plot. But the fact is that the reason whiteness is said to be “universal,” and maleness is said to be “universal,” is because the psyche, the emotional topography, the priorities, the goals, the drives of white men are represented back to all of us as universal, and we are so used to taking on this cross-identification, often seamlessly, that the needs and priorities of white men often feel like they are “ours” too. (Yes, this makes me think about all the white women who voted for Trump. Though their motivation is likely more about access to patriarchal power and white privilege, I think this perpetual practice of cross-identification, of taking on the needs and prioritizes of the “universal subject” rather than the self could be said to be in there, too.)

It makes sense to me that the cultural rage that is being expressed by some white men right now—looking at you Dilbert creator Scott Adams—is at least in part a consequence of their complete lack of practice empathizing with, let alone understanding and seeing through the eyes of people who doesn’t share their identity. When you believe your understanding of the world is shared by everyone around you, and that you are the most interesting, most capable, most rational, most reasonable, and most suited for power person in the room, then you are going to be stunned and outraged when you are thrown into a world in which your personhood is seen as particular, your worldview as partial and biased, and your skills unsuited for the problems at hand. You’re going to “fight back” and do whatever it takes to maintain the fiction that you can live in a world that is “all white.”

If a Hollywood movie can pass a Bechdel test, and a race Bechdel test, merely by allowing a character of color who is a woman to have a name and enough of a self to have an interest beyond that of being a man’s object of desire . . . then it would make sense that corporate America thinks it’s doing a great job on its DEI goals if it focuses on representation. If it hires “more” white women and “more” people of color, and “more” insert your identity category here, and if it lards its advertisements with images of said folks, then it’s doing great, in terms of addressing its problems with “diversity.”

To increase the number of those who are said to be “marginalized” in relation to the white dominant culture, but to ignore their interiority—their lived experience, their way of being in the world, their knowledge and that of their ancestors, their history, their lenses through which they see and interpret the world—is to continue to prioritize the power structure and cultural values of whiteness at the expense of the being of those who are “invited in.”

When I as a white viewer get to watch movies and television shows that highlight the interiority of people who are non-white, and that invite me in to the experience of being—and not just the experience of discrimination, which again centers white people, white power, white supremacy as the nominal subjects of the story—my inculcation in white supremacy is at least momentarily disrupted. I’m invited to cross-identify with people who do not share my identity, and to be vicariously immersed in a world I do not get to inhabit. When I watch a television show that does not have a single white character, a world in which white people do not appear and are not missed, I am invited to release the fiction that the dominant culture perpetuates, which is that I am the center around which the culture turns. 

In today’s advertising, I am often shown pictures of Black people in positions of affluence and wealth—at the bank, or buying stocks with their financial advisor, or passing their expensive watch down to their offspring—images that yes, don’t traffic in horrifying stereotypes about Black poverty, but that also seduce me as a viewer into thinking that everything is already taken care of, that racism is just fading away, that there is no need for reparations, no need to transform the power structures, that everything is on the way to already being ok. I am being persuaded that I can have everything in my world stay the same, and that Black people are happy to be “in” this world that is set up for me, that privileges white people, and that keeps white people in power. 

The more white viewers and receivers of culture are granted the practice of cross-identifying with the interiority and complexity of people who are non-white, the harder it will be for them to unproblematically absorb and recirculate stereotypes and other two-dimensional representations of others. The more the history of a group of people is allowed to thicken and challenge and disrupt the dominant white culture, the harder it will be to maintain the fiction of white supremacy. In the name of the conservation of power, the dominant culture will celebrate representation, if it allows it to stave off the complexity of anything other than straight white interiority, and the depth of anything other than an all-white history.

Photo by Bruce Jastrow on Unsplash

Hello everyone!

I’m taking a moment to say hello and thank you to folks who have recently subscribed to this newsletter. If you’re new here and you’d like to get oriented, this post talks about what structural violence is and how it works.

Structural violence lands on the body, but what do we—we in mental health, in medicine, in healing practices—really mean when we use the word “body”? In my view there are three very different definitions of the body, or “embodiment,” currently being used in these fields, but I rarely see anyone specify which “body” they’re talking about. So this post will clarify the subject by discussing the universal, somatic, and situated definitions of the body. These two pieces are a foundation on which many other posts rest, so they’re worth checking out.

I also want to say thank you to the people who been part of this newsletter community from the beginning. I can’t tell you enough how grateful I am to have you here!

I just finished a big writing project that I’ve been working on in the background, so I’m taking a break this week.

Take good care of yourselves!

xo

Rebecca

Last week I told you I was heading into a group training for the weekend. It was fantastic—very rigorous. I’m sitting with a lot, because it was long and demanding, and I haven’t had any time off yet to let anything really sink in. The group is rooted, in part, in Modern Analytic theory. One of the key aspects of this method is to translate feelings and thoughts into words, and to vocalize them in the group, in real time. 

The leader encourages the group members to be curious about and receptive to any thought or feeling, regardless of how “wrong,” transgressive,” or “rebellious” it is.  I found it really difficult to not only feel something, but identify it, figure it out enough to put it into words, and then get past my own prohibitions to actually say it out loud. 

One of the principles of this method is to voice thoughts and feelings, rather than act on them, impulsively or unconsciously. It creates the possibility of a gap, an interruption, between a strong emotion and an action. So me being me, I immediately started to wonder how this practice might work to stop or prevent not only interpersonal but also structural violence.

One thing Modern Analytic theory hasn’t talked a lot about is structural violence and oppression. The thoughts and feelings and projections that groups evoke and process are understood, largely, to be related to how we became a person in our families, in our lived experiences, and how we keep re-enacting those past experiences in the present moment.

There appears to be less practice in the field in helping people talk about the ways those experiences are also, at the same time, shot through with ideologies, with the impacts of structural and historical violence, with internalized oppression that stems from our being out of step with the dominant culture’s picture of what a “good” or “valuable” human being looks like, sounds like, what status they have, how much power they wield, etc. 

I’ve been wondering: What would it be like to take this analytic group practice and use it to analyze feelings and thoughts in the context of structural violence and ideologies of domination like patriarchy and white supremacy? 

I’ll give you an example of what I’m imagining as I ask this question. Picture a group of cops, sitting in a circle in an analytic process group.

In the process group, the cops have a chance to look at how they’ve both individually and collectively absorbed and re-enacted this ideology, and the ways in which policing is rooted in the history of enslavement in the United States.

Then the facilitator of the group—ideally also a cop—helps the cops begin to name the ways their feelings and projections onto “criminals” and “people who look suspicious” and “people who look upstanding” are rooted in this larger structure. The participants use the group to explore how their perceptions of others are influenced not just by their own personal histories, but also by these larger structures. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about naming unconscious bias in the individual cop. I’m talking about using the group as a hive mind to explore ideologies, and a space of radical acceptance for all the feelings, all the projections of the group’s members. The purpose of the group is not so much to create insight into the emotional process of any individual member, but rather to employ the root concept in Modern Analytic theory– that to name and process feelings and projections in words can prevent unconscious or impulsive actions that harm.

The question becomes: could the group’s collaboration in “making conscious” these categories of identity help them not only process the shame and rage and hatred and longing and terror that they feel every day on the job, but also could it help them become conscious of these feelings as they arise and shape their behavior on the street and in court? Could they get better and better at seeing these projections and feelings in real time? Could they, instead of blocking this awareness out of shame or self loathing, use it to help them slow down, help them stop their own and their collective brutality?

And if this model worked, could it be used in other contexts, like Fortune 500 companies, or Hollywood, to help executives recognize their internalized patriarchal views of women as objects onto which to project and enact sexual violence?

Within the heteronormative binary of patriarchy, there are two genders, male and female, said to be expressions, at the level of behavior, of the biological sexual difference between men and women. These normative gender expressions are represented back to us by the dominant culture, which also racializes gender. What the dominant culture represents as “White womanhood” is often quite different than that of “Black womanhood” or “Asian womanhood.” 

Women whose personality traits or relationships to power are coded as male/masculine in patriarchy can be punished, shamed, or accused of withholding care, empathy, and flexibility in their relationships with others. They can also be subject to homophobia and violence if they are seen as transgressing gender in ways that indicate they may not be straight—regardless of their actual sexual desire or sexual identity.

In the context of therapy, a woman therapist may be expected to have a “softer” relationship to her own authority and expertise than a male therapist. A woman may shy away from moving into direct conflict with a client, for fear of being read as overly aggressive or cold. She may also not voice or take care of her own needs, either physically or economically, for fear of looking “selfish”—that is, for refusing her socially prescribed gender role.

Wright exhorts therapists to consider enacting what the author and practitioner Nancy McWilliams calls “psychological androgyny,”—to be able to shift and move across ways of being that are labeled masculine or feminine.

The therapist Ali Kimmell reminds us in “Belonging: Queer Theory’s Contribution to Modern Analytic Groups,” that a focus on gender and patriarchy often excludes the being and personhood of trans and nonbinary identified people. They get pushed outside the frame of the male/female binary which, in patriarchy, is understood as the only form in which gender can be inhabited or expressed. 

So for today’s post, I thought I’d generate some questions about gender and throw them out there for your consideration. The questions are, obviously, applicable both inside and outside the therapeutic space. If you are a therapist, you might want to take the questions as a window into how you practice. If you’re in therapy yourself, you might want to use the questions as a way to talk about what you learned about gender, and if you’ve been praised or punished for certain expressions of your own gender. 

You can also use these questions as a way to better understand the choices you make about how you take care of yourself and others. You can use them to think about what power is, and what it means, and the ways you are comfortable and uncomfortable with your own power.

* What did you learn in your family of origin about your gender?

* Did the models of gender in your family of origin match the models of gender you received from the dominant culture?

* Is your perception of your body congruent or incongruent with the dominant culture’s representation of what a “valuable,” “beautiful,” “strong,” or “commanding” body looks like?

* How does your perception of your gender identity interact with your perception of how much power you have, socially and interpersonally?

* What are the gender messages you receive from the institution or organization in which you work? 

* Have you worked in places where the leadership was composed of people with gender expressions that were at odds with the dominant culture?

* When you think of the words power, aggression, and advocacy, what feelings and images arise in you? Are those words attached to ethics and values? Are they linked to ideas about gender? 

* How do you “catch yourself” when you make assumptions about others’ gender presentation and what it means about who they are or how you expect them to behave?

* How are you most often “read” by others, in terms of your gender and gender expression, and does that reading match your own experience of your gender?

* Are there spaces or relationships in your life where you are allowed to express aspects of gender that the dominant culture would label as “opposite” to your current gender identity?

Thanks, as always, for reading and listening. You might want to gather with a group of people to answer these questions, to broaden the discussion. Enjoy!

Sources:

Kimmel, A. (2021). Belonging: Queer theory’s contribution to analytic groups, Chapter 3 in Yoon, Masselink, and Weiss (eds.). Women, Intersectionality and Power in Group Psychotherapy Leadership. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, pp. 33-51.

Wright, Ellen L. (2021). Redefining female power: the myth of the selfless therapist, Chapter 7 in Yoon, Masselink, and Weiss (eds.). Women, Intersectionality and Power in Group Psychotherapy Leadership. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, pp.93-107.

I have a pretty detailed answer to the question of what makes a therapist different from a good friend, and much of it hinges on my understanding of the concept of transference. I told this client that therapy works in part because it evokes a transference relationship between the therapist and the client.

The client “transfers” onto the therapist a set of assumptions about how relationships work. These assumptions are often rooted in dynamics and experiences we’ve had with our primary caregivers, in our first families. The therapist watches for the transference, and over time, she can start to name it as it shows up. 

When we’re sitting with a friend, we might talk about the fight we had with our partner last night. We might receive love, reassurance, advice, commiseration, or even a snack in return. In therapy, we can talk about the same content, but wrap that conversation in a second one, about how we fight, what we learned about the line between “fighting” and abuse, and whether we are even allowed to fight and at the same time feel love. 

That second conversation, the one about who we “are” in our relationships and why we might be re-enacting dynamics we desperately want to change, as if we are sleepwalking, or on autopilot—that one hinges on how we identify and talk about transference.

The question becomes: what happens to transference if the therapist is known? What happens if the therapist discloses something in a session that makes her less of a blank screen? 

What does it mean to do therapy in the age of social media? What has happened to transference, given the fact that clients often find a therapist by looking at her web page, reading her tweets, listening to the music she posted on YouTube when her band performed last week? What happens when a client searches for a therapist who shares her political views, or her sexuality, or her racial identity? 

Does that make her feel safer, and thus help her attune and attach? Or does it limit her transference, and shut down her capacity to make visible to herself the ways she treats people who she perceives to be different from her?

In Freud’s understanding, the struggle between therapist and client is not an effort on the part of the therapist to dominate and control the client. Instead, it’s a re-enactment: it moves the conflict that is inside the client, but repressed, into her full conscious awareness and externalized. The therapist becomes a stand-in for the part of the self that the client doesn’t like. Then the client can attack it, by attacking the therapist. Over time, the client might accept the interpretation and by extension, accept the parts of herself she used to find too disgusting, or anxiety producing, to face.

When we keep our focus “tight”—when we just look at the interpersonal dynamic in transference, the power that the therapist has over the client appears essential to the work of therapy. It is less that Freud wanted to be an a*****e and overpower his clients, and more that he knew what he was up against, in terms of wrestling with the mind’s complex defenses.

Though Freud did discuss the power of the social order, what he didn’t talk about was oppression, and the ways oppression can saturate the therapeutic dynamic. In his case studies, he didn’t acknowledge the ways patriarchy was impacting his relationships with his clients. He didn’t ask how patriarchy reinforced his “standing” as a person, how it reinforced his power and his confidence in his interpretations of his clients’ mental conflicts. 

He didn’t ask how patriarchy constructed women as emotional, unreliable, less intellectual than men, and thus less capable of pushing back against his interpretations of their lives. He took their disagreement as resistance, as a natural response on the part of the psyche to having its secrets revealed. He didn’t consider how hard it must have been for women to muster resistance at all, in the context of a highly patriarchal culture, made manifest in the incisive mind and formidable body of Freud.

When a therapist discloses information about herself, makes herself more known, she makes it more evident that she is speaking not only as a trained professional—speaking in that historical legacy of the expert who looks, notes, provides feedback and interpretations—but also as a person, with her own history and perspective. 

Perhaps more importantly, she is opening the door to conversations about how she is situated by virtue of her race, class origins, education, sexuality, and other factors. (For more on the situated body, check out this post.) She’s acknowledging she’s more than her individual and familial histories. She occupies multiple identities. She may inhabit multiple locations in the social order, giving her power in some arenas and subjecting her to oppression in others, all of which contribute to and provide a context for her counter-transference, her lived experience in the world. 

By making conversations about structural power a usual and expected part of the therapy session, the client and the therapist can examine the feedback loops that occur between interpersonal dynamics and structural dynamics. They can talk about individual change, but they can also talk about the limits of individual power. They can address the ways structures of oppression create mental distress, and must be fought with the same fierceness with which Freud approached his work on transference. 

The dominant culture often acts a lot like an individual psyche: it resists seeing the pain and the suffering that are its legacy; it refuses change; it re-enacts trauma; it fights with everything it has against acknowledging information and wisdom that challenges how it has always behaved. Therapists, and those who participate in therapy, can use the skills we learn in the therapeutic space to unleash the energy and power we need to overcome violence and domination at the level of the culture at large. And we can start that process in our sessions, by making visible, by saying aloud, the things that are so painful to feel, so terrifying to resist.

Last week I wrote about the meditation on interdependence. I told you I was going to try it at the river and let you know what happened.

The mountain was immense and the river was tremendous. I started thinking about the water in the river being the same water rushing in my blood. I looked out from my perch on the bridge, witnessing this entity I’ve been taught to label “nature” or the “earth” as if I am not nature, not the earth. 

I can tell you that some time after that I did have a moment of perception. I can tell you that the mountain entered my breastbone and I felt it. It was a shock.

The shock threw me out of the moment and back into thinking and my own emotional state. I felt surprise, and then a feeling that doesn’t have words, and then I started noticing and thinking about noticing. The thought was: if I could know in my everyday perception that I am interdependent with all beings, then when this mountain was threatened, or this river was polluted, I wouldn’t be asking myself if I had time to do something about it. 

When I was on that bridge I didn’t see any evidence of separation, except in the houses on the banks of the river that were built and fortified, with walls and hedges and property limits. I could see the rest as one entity, one system, an integration of everything there, except me, the watcher. I took a picture, feeling stupid for doing so. I don’t know if I saw the scene as a whole because we are told “nature” is a thing, and a house is a thing, and a person is a thing. I hope I saw the whole because it is a whole, and what is an illusion is the fact that I can tell myself I am watching when in fact I am in the scene.

For me, it’s easy to engage the philosophy of interdependence, and mind-blowingly difficult to sit and actually perceive interdependence in real time. To perceive interdependence is to obliterate the idea of the self and the false sense that it is a being or thing that is separate from experience, and thus can evaluate it, judge it, enjoy it, feel distant from it, etc. 

Because I was reading his book, and not meditating, and because thinking is easier than meditating, I came up with a thought that I wanted to share with you all. I was thinking about the fact that one of the reasons I write about ideology and structures and systems so much in this newsletter is because I want to make visible the artificial and constructed nature of ideas, ideas that are made real in the world through systems that cause pain and harm and suffering. To make these systems visible as constructions is to make them available to change.

The hopelessness you may have felt, at some point, about actually transforming white supremacy is in part about that wagon wheel recirculating, teaching you not only its content, but also its form: that it won’t budge, that it will just keep turning, keep harming, keep its devastation going. 

The force and the violence of white supremacy in the real world is overwhelming and catastrophic. But it is equally catastrophic to inculcate in a culture the idea that it cannot be contested, that it will not ever leave. Because if the belief that it is timeless and unchanging takes hold, even unconsciously, the person who has that belief is less likely to engage in action for change, or to think of new ways to create a culture that does not depend on white supremacy.

It occurred to me that the meditation on interdependence could be seen as one of the most subversive ways to feel and know the constructed nature of ideologies, and the systems of violence that are its effects. 

To perceive interdependence—rather than think about interdependence—is to achieve, even for a moment, the fact of oneness. It is to evade the mirage of separation upon which so much of the violence of ideologies depend. Because ideologies of domination depend on separation as the ground, the floor upon which they stand: they can only function when there is a subject and an object who is derided, evaluated, judged, found wanting. The subject is granted full personhood; the object is robbed of being.

To perceive oneness—to know oneness in the experience of being is to have one breath, one moment, that systems of violence cannot enter. It is a power that is available at all times. It is a mode of concentration, but it also a practice of self reinforcement, a way of continuing to turn toward violence, to stay with it, to better understand how it works.