Therapy for Social Change Podcast

If you weren’t here last week, here’s Part I

TL;DR: 

If you’re working with an individual client who’s in a fight, or with a couple who are at loggerheads, consider the ways that structures of oppression like patriarchy and white supremacy might be the ultimate source of the conflict. 

By talking about the ways structures provide the context for an “individual conflict,” the therapist can help the client develop empathy for both themselves and the other. Understanding structural violence not only facilitates our compassion for other people’s behavior; it can also open up new ways to overcome internalized oppression and work through a conflict.

Last week, we left Claire and me pondering her feelings of competition, alienation, and loneliness, both in her friendship with Emily, and in her friend group from childhood. She was watching the group split into factions, feeling helpless to stop it. She was defensive about her life choices and her resentment of her friends, and she was angry at herself for having these feelings in the first place.

But there was one feeling that left her particularly unsettled. “Why am I so envious of Emily?” she asked me, flopping back against the couch pillows in a huff. “I’m such a pain in the ass! Nothing is going to make me happy in my life—not my relationships, not my career, not my kids, if I ever even get to have kids, and god knows maybe I’ll hate that, too! Why would anyone want to be with me, anyway? I’m so difficult! I can’t imagine how it feels to date me.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eyes, half-afraid I’d be nodding along with her self-assessment. We laughed together, and then ruefully returned to the subject at hand: what was she going to say to Emily? Would she have to fess up to these difficult feelings? Would Emily be disgusted by her, and walk away? Would it be better to apologize for being difficult, and hope everything would just get better in time?

“You know, I’ve been thinking about your fight with Emily,” I said. “If it’s alright with you, I’d like us to step out of this particular conflict and put it in a larger context. Earlier, I said I thought you and Emily were actually fighting about two versions of female ‘success.’ We noticed the women in your friend group seem to believe they have to choose between having a career and having a successful marriage, with kids. And part of your frustration right now is that you wonder if they’re right. You fear that because you’ve chosen to pursue grad school and a demanding career, you’ll end up alone. 

“The question becomes: what were you and your friends taught, both by the dominant culture, and your families of origin, about what it means to be a successful woman? How did we get to this place, as a culture, where women feel this tension, and this scarcity of available time? Why are the choices women make watched so closely by other women, and why is there so much judgment about what they choose? We can find some of the answers when we look at history.”

The division of the social order into a masculine world of competitive work and a feminine world of home, children, and family began, in the United States, in the nineteenth century, when increasing urbanization allowed for the creation of two “spheres” of work and home, instead of the communal, collective, agrarian homestead that characterized much of eighteenth century American life. 

The role of the middle- or upper-class white woman, hailed as the “Angel in the House,” was to socialize her children, her servants, and her husband in the moral universe of Protestant Christianity. Women were said to be “natural Christians” because they were more emotionally sensitive than men, had greater empathy for others, and in their compassion, were closer in feeling and behavior to Christ.

These traits were said to be innate expressions of the “feminine sex”: their biological difference from men evident in their behavior and contentment with staying in the home. Though men were granted greater institutional power and status than women in this social organization, the opposition between male and female in patriarchy was often represented as not “power over” but rather as “balancing and complementary” sex roles. In other words, the woman’s essential role in society was to morally temper and make acceptable the more aggressive, industrious attributes that were coming to be associated with masculinity.

There was an inherent contradiction between the morality of Christianity, which counseled people to love their neighbor and give generously to those in need, and that of capitalism, which rewarded the ruthless exploitation of others’ labor with the spoils of profit. What was a massive ideological contradiction at the level of the dominant white culture became displaced onto the terrain of biology, or “nature”—the hand of God, visible in the known world. For if God had made men and women in these ways, then white Protestants felt a pressing reason to enact what they saw as a timeless, divine logic.

The need to not only enact, but defend, this social organization became more pronounced as, during the period from the mid century to 1900, the U.S. experienced waves of immmigration from Ireland, Poland, and Russia. Already reeling from the fractures and violence of the Civil War, America was in search of a clear national narrative of its promised future identity. These immigrants were perceived as an economic and ideological threat, a contamination of the white American racial “stock.” (Great Replacement Theory, I’m looking at you.) 

Accordingly, Irish and Polish Catholics were depicted in political cartoons and editorials as licentious, alcoholic, and overly sexed, traits responsible for their multiple births and chronic poverty. Russian Jews were said to be neurotic and mentally unstable as a racial group, further threatening American “civilization.”

At the century’s turn, African Americans began to migrate to the Midwest and to Northern cities, escaping the Southern agricultural regions that had been decimated by the economic impact of the Civil War and the poor farming practices that had ruined the soil. 

Though affluent white Protestant families were not in direct competition with these migrating families, arguments about the biological differences among the races, with Irish and Black families placed on the bottom rungs of a “divinely ordained” racial hierarchy, reinforced the idea that Protestant success was an inevitable consequence of their moral and racial superiority.

By subtly linking a particular way of organizing the home, and a particular moral ethic, to gender and biology, the white, middle-class Protestant American family could position itself as the most Godly domestic unit and, under the guise of a moral imperative, protect its economic interests from encroachment by the immigrant labor of Catholics, Jews, and following the Great Migration, Southern Blacks.

The smashing success of the film Little Women, nominated for Best Picture in 2020, is an indication of the enduring power of this gauzy representation of family—at least for a white audience. Little Women is a perfect period piece for the current moment, for it at once reaffirms a nostalgia for nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and at the same time offers a tale of a woman’s refusal to hew to its norms. After all, the book’s heroine is Jo March, who struggles to be a paid writer to support her family, and who refuses to marry her best friend.

Most nineteenth-century novels that focus on a female heroine trace her development from girlhood to womanhood. The stories are about triumph over adversity, and a subsection of these novels, known as “sentimental” novels, focus specifically on the role of Christianity in shaping female development. The central task of the heroine in a sentimental novel is to tame her wild temperament. By emulating Christ when she encounters challenges in her life, she can transform from an impulsive, aggressive, selfish child into a generous, empathetic, and sincere adult woman, able to manage her feelings and subordinate her willful nature. 

In these stories, the heroine’s achievement of womanhood—and the ending of the novel—is marked by her successful marriage. (If you’ve read Jane Eyre, you’ll know that the line “Reader, I married him” marks the culmination of the plot.) Not much happens in this kind of novel, or a contemporary rom-com, for that matter, after the proposal and wedding. 

The tale of Jo March—one of a series of portraits of female development dramatized by each of the novel’s sisters—draws from the sentimental tradition. The telltale sign: her impulsive and willful nature. She has difficulty bridling her own desires, and her ambition pulls her away from her family obligations, all of which are represented as aspects of her “boyishness,” her refusal to become a woman.

There’s an explicit nod to the novel’s sentimental theme in the film, when Jo’s mother sympathizes with her struggles, confessing that she had to learn the same lesson in her own life. It’s clear that part of the reason Jo refuses marriage is her awareness of her own deep ambivalence about this necessary transition. She feels lonely and behind her sisters’ development, and yet there she is, laying out her novel’s chapters on the floor.

It’s been more than 150 years since Little Women was published, and yet many straight white women of a certain class still feel stuck in this bind. Jo’s anguish is a perfect mirror of the unaddressed social contradictions these women are still expected to resolve in their individual lives. 

Are women supposed to devote themselves to the care work of home, child-rearing, community tending, and educating others in the morals and values upon which the social order depends? Or should they express their creativity, ingenuity, and capacity to earn money for themselves and their dependents, even if it costs them the opportunity to have an enduring long-term relationship, marriage, or children?

And what does it mean that the denial of abortion care in the U.S. is rooted partly in a romanticized version of a nineteenth-century social order? Why are “women”—with all of the complexities of location, identity, and region that this term overrides—being submitted to policies in the present that are based on a construct that, even in the period in which it was created, represented only a small slice of the American population?

Why are women expected to earn enough money so that the government does not need to provide universal health care, pre-K, or subsidized childcare, and at the same time have to “choose” to stay home, because for so many of even the most privileged of women, the cost of these services is more than they could make at a paid job?

And how has the wisdom and strategy crafted over generations by the women and nonbinary and other folks who have been erased from this conversation altogether been excluded from public conversation, in order to maintain the fiction there is only one way to “be”? 

I don’t have room here today to link the slice of nineteenth-century history I just outlined to the rise of the feminist movement, and to the complexities of the fight between liberal and radical feminism about what true, transformational, feminist social change might mean. (That’s coming! Just not today!)

But even this cursory overview of nineteenth-century white, straight gender norms shows that the tension between Emily and Claire, which looks like simple competition between two friends, is rooted in a long history, one that argues that the most moral and selfless choice a woman can make is to get married and raise children, and that women who choose to pursue a career, or to not have children, are somehow selfish and unnatural.

Claire leans in, when I tell her about the nineteenth-century version of white womanhood. She tells me how much she loves movies like Little Women and shows like Downton Abbey; but that part of the reason she thought she loved them is because they were about a world that was past. 

She looks into the distance as she mulls. “It’s creepy to think like this. I was raised by a mom who worked full time, my whole life. Most of my friends were raised by single, working moms. My generation was told the feminist revolution, which was our mothers’ concern, made it so we could work and have kids and that this was freedom from restrictions based on sex or gender.

“Plus, my friends aren’t just straight. They’re gay and trans and nonbinary.  My gay friends get married, too. I never even knew about this history until you told me about it. But it does explain why my gay friends who are married have to race to protect their current rights from the Supreme Court, and why the Republicans just voted overwhelmingly to deny women contraception.

“But that’s why it’s so creepy. It’s like it’s here, and not here. When I think about me, and Emily, and Jo March, it seems that we’re still there, still fighting about those same things. Like, have we made progress? How do I make sense of this world, which feels like it’s radically different from that time, and still the same?”

I tell Claire that part of the reason I like history is that it can help us see why certain social arrangements can feel like the only way to be. We talk about the fact that there’s both forward momentum and a pull back. That it’s easier for our social order to allow freedom of expression—that in certain parts of the country, at least, people can dress in ways that challenge the gender binary, or engage in relationships that aren’t straight or monogamous—but that these challenges are still happening inside an economic structure that requires a large part of the population to perform labor either for free, or for very low wages, which is not counted as part of the GDP, and which is required, in order to allow for capitalism to pursue a strategy of growth. 

“This whole talk is making me sad,” Claire tells me. “I mean, when I think about what we’re saying, then what Emily is choosing makes sense. I get why she got so much approval from her family and friends for planning her wedding, even beyond the fact that she loves her husband. And I get why she’s mad at me, too, for what I’m doing, even though I know she doesn’t have any plans to go to grad school.

“I thought she was lucky to be able to stay home this summer. It didn’t occur to me that her being laid off might have felt like a door closing on a part of her life.”

“I wonder if that makes it easier for you to approach her?” I ask. 

“I’m still nervous. But, I see now that it’s not her fault, and it’s not my fault. And I see why we were so mad at each other, feeling so unsupported. 

“But I still don’t know what to do. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Like, sorry we’re both stuck in a patriarchal time warp?”

“I have an idea. What about, after you and Emily talk, you get together with your group of friends, and talk about what you learned in your families about womanhood, and relationships, and marriages, and family? About work, and careers, and happiness, and stress? About who you fear becoming, and who you want to be, and whether you think it’s possible?

“Maybe if you and your friends start to talk about these things not so much as individual choices, but instead as answers to questions that structures like patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy don’t want you to ask, you will be able to support one another to go against the grain, or figure out how to work together as a unit, to overcome challenges that are too big for one person to solve?”

“Yeah. That makes sense. I think I want the answer. I want this to feel better. But at least this is a place to start.”

If you’ve addressed issues of work and care in your own life, or in your work with clients, please let us know, in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions about this case, and the historical context within which it occurs.

Image courtesy of Liza Summer at Pexels

TL;DR: 

If you’re working with an individual client who’s in a fight, or with a couple who are at loggerheads, consider the ways that structures of oppression like patriarchy and white supremacy might be the ultimate source of the conflict. 

By talking about the ways structures provide the context for an “individual conflict,” the therapist can help the client develop empathy for both themselves and the other. Understanding structural violence not only facilitates our compassion for other people’s behavior; it can also open up new ways to overcome internalized oppression and work through a conflict.

“I got into a fight with Emily, and I don’t know what to do about it.” My client, Claire, a white woman in her thirties, absentmindedly braids the tassels of the blanket on her lap as she ponders the situation.  

“She blew up at me out of nowhere! I’ve done nothing but support her over the last six months. Honestly, I have no clue where she’s coming from.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it,” I say, “And we’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on.”  

“Well, Emily sent me a text last week, the night before my summer solstice gathering. She just said she had a lot going on, and couldn’t come. But here’s the thing—she knows I keep the ritual small and intimate on purpose, and now she isn’t coming, it’s going to be all awkward and stupid. I feel like she ruined it, and didn’t even notice.

“So I sent her a text saying that I deserved her support, and that she knew this ritual is a really big deal to me. That’s when she blew up. She said she’d been having a really hard time, and that it was me who wasn’t supporting her.

“Hard time?” Claire fumed. “She has nothing to complain about! She had her big wedding, and since then she’s been completely free. She got laid off and she’s just been chilling out, gardening, doing a few chores. She knows this ritual is important, and she can’t even show up for a few hours to participate? I can’t believe her selfishness.”

Claire was right—she had been showing up for Emily. Emily’s focus in the past year had been on planning her wedding, and Claire had honored their lifelong friendship by crafting designs for the invitations and staying up late the night before, hand-drawing the table place cards.  

She’d pitched in during the chaos of the day-of preparations, and then danced and celebrated late into the wedding night. When we’d met, two days afterward, Claire told me she’d had a fantastic time. 

But the next day, she confided, she’d had a feeling she couldn’t put words to. The heaviness that accompanied it had made her feel defeated and down. But when we met the following week, she’d moved on to other issues, and let it drop. Now, it seemed, that wordless ‘something’ had returned.  

Emily and Claire’s friendship had been enduring and mutually supportive. But this fight seemed to signify its possible end—Claire said Emily didn’t seem to care about the impact of her cancellation. In truth, Claire said, it wasn’t so much that Emily wasn’t interested in the ritual—it was that she didn’t seem interested in Claire at all. 

“Do you remember how you felt in the weeks after Emily’s wedding?” I reminded Claire. “You told me you had a great time. But then you felt really down. You told me you might just have to be the ‘ambitious one’ in your friend group, going your way, alone.” Claire nodded as I spoke.

 “But what if there’s more going on here than a fight between you and Emily over who is more supportive? What if this fight is about two versions of female ‘success’ and who is ‘winning’—who’s the better woman?

About a year before this fight, Claire had entered a graduate program in architecture and was spending long days, and even some overnights, at the studio. Most of the students were men, and she talked about the pressure she felt to show them she could show up and work as hard as they did. When the professor critiqued the students’ work each month, she prepared for days in advance, so she could take the comments in her stride.

At times in our sessions, she’d tell me how proud she was of her drafting skills and her emerging designs. But at the end of one of our sessions, she’d offhandedly remarked that it seemed like her childhood friends were happier than the grad students. They weren’t so serious and competitive. They knew how to have fun.

There were periods of tension in Claire’s relationship with her boyfriend. At times he was very supportive of her work, showing up late at night with a picnic dinner, and leaving little cards for her, telling her how proud he was. 

But other times, he’d sulk. He wasn’t as driven as she was. He liked to go backwoods camping, or to music festivals. He smoked a lot of weed. When they’d first met, she’d loved the way he calmed her down, brought out her silly side. 

But lately, she noticed she’d stopped inviting him to the architecture happy hours. She’d come home afterwards to a note saying he was out with friends. They told each other it was healthy to have separate interests, to prevent becoming codependent. 

It seemed like there was an internal conversation happening for Claire, quietly in the background, about what kind of future she wanted, and how those choices might make her feel.

“You see Emily as having something you want,” I continued. “You’ve told me you want a relationship that is strong, and publicly recognized with a marriage ceremony. You long for time to ‘be’ and not have to push so hard. And yet you feel shame and self-judgment for wanting something ‘traditional,’ when out in the world, you’re fighting for recognition in a field that is still predominantly male. You’ve worked as hard, or harder, than the other students, to prove your mettle. 

“You have an internal contradiction, and it could be that your conflict with Emily is making that internal split more apparent and uncomfortable for you. It sounds like you might feel left behind. Is that right?”

“Yes! I hate to admit it, but my competitive personality is showing up. I feel like she’s beating me. I don’t like to say it out loud, but yeah—I feel left out. 

“I feel like my friend group is splitting apart. In the last six months, three of the friends I’ve known since childhood have gotten engaged or married, and one is pregnant. When we have our monthly potlucks, that’s all they talk about. No one even asks me what I’m doing. They just want to know if my boyfriend and I are still together.”

What Claire was describing, in part, was the ways that some women—particularly those of the white middle and upper classes—start to self-select into ‘tracks’ in their late twenties and early thirties. Some choose family and kids; others choose grad school or high-powered careers; others try to do it all at once, sometimes relying on the paid services of other women, to help them manage their desires for a career with status and a family with kids.

I’ve noticed my clients who are making these choices are often troubled by feelings of guilt, or competition, or shame. But what really gets them upset is the feelings about the feelings. It’s as if they’re blindsided by the intensity of their judgment and competition with other women, and then stunned by what these feelings reveal about their definitions of success. 

Part of why Claire turned away so quickly from that wordless ‘something’ was shame: she couldn’t tolerate being a person who was jealous that a friend got married before she did. Part of why Emily lashed out at Claire’s request for support was rage: she was rootless and lost in the wake of her wedding, unemployed and drifting, not the picture of success she’d imagined. She didn’t want to celebrate. She wanted to be left alone. It was clear to me that each felt disloyal for their resentment of the other. It felt taboo to acknowledge, but then festered, in the silence.

What’s also at play here, for women like Claire and Emily, is the sense that they’re playing out a struggle that shouldn’t still exist. Part of their discomfort is about how retrograde this whole conversation feels: women of privilege—mostly white, but not always—eyeing each other’s strollers, tsk tsking about who took enough time off work. These battles can feel so trivial and petty they often don’t even make it into the therapy room, because the client fears appearing so out of touch with the real problems of the world. 

It’s embarrassing to care; it’s embarrassing to admit; it’s embarrassing to still be fighting about work and home, the care economy or economic success, kids or careers. Shouldn’t these issues just be matters of individual choice? Shouldn’t we roll our eyes at the drama of people who have the luxury to even choose, when so many women are suffering from the burden of having few resources, having to work, having to be away from their children, whether they want to or not?

One thing I think about, when my clients who have this choice dismiss their feelings because of their acute awareness of their privilege, is how the trivializing of this pain works in patriarchy’s favor. It’s sneaky. An entire class of women, who are shouldering unpaid care work, who are working, who want to make a difference in the world, and who yes, certainly, are insulated from the bulk of the oppressive forces in today’s social order, are nevertheless still upholding the patriarchal work of what it ‘means’ to be a woman. 

They are still performing their social function, which is to make up for the fact that there is no universal healthcare, no universal childcare, no universal pre-K, no comprehensive eldercare and dementia services, no remote learning support during pandemics or natural disasters—that, in short, our social order is so patriarchal, so reliant on unpaid or barely paid feminized labor, that even those women at the top can’t seem to make it work. And they’re embarrassed that they can’t, because if anyone can, or could, it’s them. 

In dismissing their own pain, or in being dismissed by others, because of their privilege, these women often behave as if they are not impacted by patriarchy, because of the ways they benefit from white supremacy and capitalism. They’re looking around, wondering why things are still so hard, when they have so much. 

So when they dismiss their pain, and others agree that they have nothing to be upset about, we miss the ways this dynamic makes the ‘softer’ patriarchy appear more palatable, more ‘ok’ than its more virulent and violent forms. We miss an entire arena in which patriarchy is taken for granted as ‘the way things are,’ or as a ‘trade off’ between men and women in ‘traditional’ heteronormative relationships. We miss the ways that in this particular context, patriarchy is represented as immutable, natural, and outside the real arena of struggle, which is taking place elsewhere. 

One thing therapists are almost universally taught is that it’s the trivial, the mundane, the embarrassing and shameful content that’s the most revealing. A fight about a party can reveal an explosive internal conflict about decisions that could determine an entire life’s trajectory. Hatred of other women’s freedoms can tell us a lot about how women police their own identities, and how their expectations for success can not only blind them to other possibilities for their own lives, but worse, distract them from noticing the ways their choices impact other women, as a class.

There’s often plenty to work with, in a session, just exploring the ways a client is evading confronting her own desires, if they reveal a conflict between her avowed politics and her emotional wants, or a tension between what she was told in her family of origin and what she craves, and what it might cost her, in terms of belonging.

But if we stay only with the internal psychological conflict, or with the individual and family, we can miss an entire, additional framework of analysis. One that can not only help the client refute their shame and self-blame, but that can help them enter into a space of understanding about the beliefs and choices of the people they resent. 

To introduce the impact of larger structures, such as patriarchy, into the therapy room, is to introduce questions about power. It enables a conversation about an individual’s ability to act, to make a difference, in their private and larger worlds. Examining patriarchy as a structure introduces questions of agency—how an individual is situated, in terms of identities, class, ability, and region; and how these variables constrain a person’s capacity to impact her (or their) own life, regardless of what the dominant culture may insist about their individual freedom to choose.

I have found that when a client and I place ‘trivial’ and explosive conflicts between friends, or between different members of a family system, within the context of a structure like patriarchy, we often end up talking about fractures in the dominant culture. When the dominant culture cannot resolve an ideological question, such as: “What is a woman, and what should a woman do?,” these conflicts are often displaced onto individual women, or subgroups of women, to resolve. But when we examine a larger structure like patriarchy, we can see how it is that a conflict that vexes the dominant culture cannot be resolved by an individual, no matter how much we might try. 

One way to ‘see’ a structure like patriarchy is to move away from the present moment, and into the past. With historical distance, we can look at how a structure like patriarchy creates terms like womanhood, feminine, domestic, nurturing, competitive, and then circulates them through the dominant culture—often while other subcultures fight against them—as a way to limit and narrow the personal and political imagination of an entire class of people. In Part II of this case, we’ll put the conflict between Claire and Emily in this historical context, to better understand why this conflict was so intense, and how working with history and patriarchy helped Claire and Emily heal.

Part II of this case will put this conflict between Emily and Claire in the historical context of the nineteenth century, as America tried to remake itself as a functioning economy in the wake of the Civil War. And it will look at how Claire and I used this information as a way to help her understand her own choices, and then to approach Emily and work through their conflict. 

Please write back!

If you’ve used an analysis of a structure like patriarchy or white supremacy to help a client work through an interpersonal conflict, please tell us about it in the comments. And if you haven’t, from reading this case so far, what kinds of questions might you ask Claire?

*Please note: This case is not based on any particular client. It is a generic case study, exemplifying patterns in conflict that can benefit from an approach that includes attention to structural violence.

Photo by Barbara Olsen on Pexels

I view the last three weeks as a period of intense, collective trauma. The twin impacts of the January 6th hearings and the Supreme Court decisions have flooded our collective consciousness. Meanwhile, there has been no moment of national mourning; no public reckoning with the fact that below the outrage is a well of grief.

As a trauma therapist—and as a human being—I know that moments like this tend to cleave our sense of wholeness. The mind races, darts, gallops forward. The body often slows down, or numbs out, or freezes up.  

I’ve come to learn that as much as my mind might insist I do something, to stop the pain, to get beyond my frustration, that if my body isn’t ready, nothing will happen.  Or, if I insist on overriding its messages, I’ll be repaid with muscle aches, insomnia, fluttering heartbeats, headaches, persistent nausea. The body speaks its distrust of actions taken without its consent.

Today’s post is here to encourage you to reflect on the way you’ve “received” the last three weeks, intellectually and emotionally. When you look over the ways you responded, were you more “in” your mind, or in your body? Were you engaged with your emotions, or were you overriding them with anxious thoughts or important actions? What actions did you take, if any? Who supported you, if anyone? How did you care for your own grief, or did you not feel grief at all?

And if you can’t recall the last few weeks, can’t answer the above questions, not to worry. If you want to better understand your own coping, you can use the questions now, in the coming week, to guide your attention.

The impact of structural violence on the self, and particularly the body, can be very hard to identify. Since these systems are in many ways the unacknowledged foundation upon which so much of the dominant culture rests, they are not often called out as actively creating violence, even as they are thrumming in the background, like the culture’s OS.

If someone came up and punched you in the gut and then stole your wallet, you’d have a story to tell about a violent attack. We’re told it’s normal to have a significant response to a physical assault. We can identify a perpetrator, an intent, an incident with a beginning, middle, and end. 

Not so with structural violence. It’s often ongoing in its effects. It doesn’t have an individual actor as its engineer; it doesn’t have a clear, logical intention; it’s not personal. And due to our individualist culture, the presence of structural violence often eludes public conversation.

So if you aren’t suddenly, directly, personally impacted by a Court decision, or by what you heard in the January 6th hearings, it can be harder to track what it is you are responding to—is it your own empathy for others? Is it your sense of ambiguity, about the presence of power itself? Is it about your feelings of security or insecurity about the status of your relationship, your gender, your sexuality? Is it the feeling that something is coming but you aren’t sure what, yet?

Structural violence is an absent presence, like listening for footsteps in the darkness. And because structures like patriarchy and white supremacy rationalize and normalize violence that does land on the body, when the facts of our identities, our bodies, our cultures put us squarely in opposition to these structures, we can register this conceptual violence as if we had been physically attacked. 

We know that the self’s traumatized nervous system does not differentiate between physical and emotional attack. And we know that certain kinds of violence don’t just cue a threat response in the present; they also awaken intergenerational histories of trauma, and the ways violence has landed on specific cultures.

The mainstream media has contributed to this collective trauma by responding to the hearings and the decisions with a raft of speculative reporting, along with its crucial and necessary factual reporting on the decisions. Much of this speculative reporting is about how much worse things are going to get, and how many more rights are going to be shredded in the next session of the Court. Other articles make pessimistic predictions about climate inaction, about Trump and his associates evading prosecution—as if the further collapse of democracy is assured.

Today, I’m not going to analyze that phenomenon. I’m just going to notice that it has an enormous and powerful physiological impact on its audience. I often speak with my clients about citizenship: what are our responsibilities, in terms of engagement with the news, or social media, or podcast consumption? How much is enough? 

If we devote our time and attention to being as apprised as possible, does that rob us of time to act in a particular arena? Are we more able to engage in sustained, creative work if we disengage or limit our awareness of what is happening outside of our small sphere of influence? Is that an abdication of duty, and of our ability to relate to others? We use these questions as guideposts, to track our values, our time, our hopes.

The Practice

Today’s Action Snack asks you to engage in an action that allows you to attune to your emotional state. And it may be that before you can even engage in that action, you have to notice if you’re numb. You may have to take a look at how you’ve structured your day, and eliminate some things. You might need a bigger blank space, before you can even figure out what you’re feeling.

For some of you, it might be vigorous exercise, or yoga, or walking, that gets your body to start communicating its feelings. For others, it might be a long nap under a tree, and then some cloud watching and drifting, before you can ask yourself if you are feeling anything, at all.

If you find your mind is racing, and you can’t slow down enough to tune in, or you’re afraid to find out what you’re feeling, you might try thanking your mind for trying so hard to protect you.  You might ask if it wants a break, even for fifteen minutes, to rest.  

What can you do, today, to care for your grief, for your anger, for your sense of powerlessness? What can you do for your imagination and creativity? How can you soften the intensity of your thinking? How will you unhinge the kinks in your muscles, massage the soles of your feet, consider the temperature and scent of the air you’re breathing? How can you give yourself room to return to your own self, your own being, your own knowing?

Please share in the comments what you try, what you notice, and how you’re doing right now.  I’d love to know, and to be here, to support you.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Last week, I wrote about the Dobbs decision as an act of psychological warfare. This week, the Court added to the psychological misery by snarling the EPA and alluding to its desire to challenge contraception, same-sex marriage, and other laws. 

With this juggernaut of rulings, we can see evidence of the right’s continued strategy to immobilize resistance by inducing paralysis and despair. It’s hard not to succumb to panic, or a feeling of desperate urgency, when so much is toppling, so quickly. 

In the current situation, it’s tempting to search for a hero, or an expert, to tell us what to do. I wake up and wonder if there’s an inverse strategy to the one playing out in real time. I want one of those Monty Python scrolls to drop from the sky, full of flourishes and calligraphy, telling me how to reverse it, all at once.

But here’s the thing. As much as I plan to fight, along with everyone else, I’m acutely aware that the fights, the rulings, the shootings that are meant to encourage the rulings—they are operating not only at face value, to rob many of us of our rights, but also at a secondary remove. The rulings, and the fight, are a distraction machine, luring us away from addressing the impending crisis of ecological extinction.

The despair and the paralysis of the current moment are heightened, in part, because there are two enormous struggles happening at the same time. In the first, the battle for civil rights is having to be re-fought, when it hadn’t yet achieved its original aims: to move beyond individual rights and into full social transformation.

As exhausting as it is to have to re-fight for civil rights, it’s even more infuriating to witness the ways that conflict is being leveraged to distract the public from the second struggle: the threats of climate change. (Even the phrase “climate change” is a distraction—as if it’s some kind of weather pattern that came from nowhere—when instead it’s a human-made, ecological disaster.)

There is virtually no one in a position of public power who is willing to take the political hit of even naming the fact that to address the climate, we must address capitalism, and the false belief that an economic model that privileges growth can be sustained on a planet that is finite. What a bittersweet relief for politicians and the mainstream press—they can rail at the opposition, rather than question one of the central organizing structures of the social itself.

The rulings, and the fight, are a distraction machine, luring us away from addressing the impending crisis of ecological extinction.

I’ve been mulling over the larger function of the fury, the violence, the ways the Court is lunging for our collective throats. I know the received wisdom is that the Court is finally executing the right’s “long game.” But this moment doesn’t feel like the apotheosis of a careful strategy. It feels like the way people fight when they’re fighting to the death. Or perhaps fighting as if they were fighting to the death, when what they’re fighting is, actually, a kind of ruse. Death isn’t coming for straight people because of trans rights, or gay marriage. Death isn’t coming for white people, if we have to pay reparations for enslavement. But death is coming if we continue to pretend that the biggest threat to our survival is someone else’s freedom.

Since many people reading this newsletter are in the field of mental health, you’ll recognize that the above political analysis is about the function of displacement as a psychological defense. The intensity of the fight—though ostensibly about individual rights—can also be read as a form of denial. 

The greater anxiety about an unknown future—tendrils of which are curling around the present in the form of floods, fires, famine—is generating panic, anxiety, and despair. But that anxiety and panic is being bound up, contained, and compartmentalized, in the U.S. at least, by the focus on the rights-based challenges enacted by the Court.

To be clear, I’m not saying the Court is lurching and swaying around some kind of massive cauldron, like Shakespearean witches, planning a conspiracy. Rather, I’m suggesting that the Court, as one component of the dominant culture, is as ensnared as the rest of us. The justices, bent on enforcing what they call freedom, can’t see the web in which they’re caught.  The strands of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy work like a spider’s web—so finely wrought, so mutually reinforcing, so much “the way things are,” that unless we’re directly impacted by their violence, we might not notice they’re there.

The dominant white culture finds it so impossible to imagine a society that doesn't depend on these structures that it can’t acknowledge its erasure, and silencing, of alternative practices, narratives, and possibilities, many of which are occurring outside of, or in direct confrontation with, this particular mode of being. Often, pundits will declare the climate crisis is too difficult to solve, without having asked themselves about the social location, and practices, of the “experts” upon whose opinions they rely.

We’re fighting a battle inside a crisis, to avoid the changes that have to occur, if we want to truly solve the crisis. It’s no wonder we might want people to tell us what to do. It’s no wonder our clients are expressing fury, grief, terror, powerlessness, and disbelief. It’s no wonder they are sometimes asking us what they should do.

One thing we in mental health do know is how to help people address emotional flooding and cognitive overwhelm, because they are the hallmarks of anxiety and trauma. We also know a lot about how denial works, from our knowledge about substance dependence and other addictive disorders.  

It is virtually impossible to tolerate the emotional impacts of the climate crisis without having the tools to work with both intergenerational trauma and threat responses. We who have so many ways to address these legacies have a crucial role to play in this moment: we are here, in part, to help people recognize and turn towards these threats, rather than escape into numbing, avoidance, or violence.

Part of the difficulty the mainstream field of mental health is facing right now is that its techniques and treatment modalities have historically been designed to examine cognitive and emotional states within the individual brain or mind. There are many approaches, traditions, and methods that do explore power, context, structural violence, and oppression. But for now, most professional institutions are not yet acknowledging that though there are clients who are struggling with mental health disorders, there are also many struggling with feeling states and defenses generated not by intra-psychic neuroses, or biochemical imbalances, but instead by real, apparent, non-neurotic threats to our collective autonomy and survival. 

What, then, is to be done? If I ended this post by telling you what I thought we should do, I’d be creating a map that depends on the very thinking that got us here. What we need, instead, are tactics to help us move into uncertainty, into unknowing, at the very moment when our psyches are pleading for certainty, and relief.

We’re fighting a battle inside a crisis, to avoid the changes that have to occur, if we want to truly solve the crisis.

This week I started reading the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel’s Less is More. The first section of the book traces the rise of capitalism, arguing that it is not a natural extension of human nature. Instead, it is a system that was constructed and upheld by elites, who for centuries consolidated their wealth and power by forcing the poor to labor and increase their productivity, along with that of the soil.  

In order to make capitalism appear inevitable and timeless, he explains, not only did people have to learn to trade their labor for wages, but they had to shift their entire spiritual and philosophical framework. They had to cease seeing themselves as in a reciprocal relationship to the rest of life and instead see themselves as apart from, and at times superior to, a “nature” that was an object, in the eyes of its subject, man.

Hickel argues that capitalism cannot tolerate animism: the idea that the living world is full of spirit, life, and interconnection, and that humans are just one part of a living whole. He writes:

To exploit nature as a “resource” for the sake of human enrichment is morally reprehensible—similar to slavery or even to cannibalism. Instead, you have to enter into a relationship of reciprocity, in the spirit of the gift. You have to give at least as much as you receive.

In this fraught moment of not knowing, one place to start is with Hickel’s idea that the essence of capitalism, and of exploitation, is taking more than you give. And that the antidote to exploitation is reciprocity.

There’s an opening out, rather than a closed certainty, in noticing where we see taking and where we see reciprocity; where we see power over and where we see interconnectedness.

Hickel’s definition of capitalist growth reminds me of Johan Galtung’s definition of structural violence as the limiting of human potential. Galtung asks us to look for, question, and overcome the structures that ensure human potential is trapped, or thwarted, when it should be liberated, exalted, creative. 

Hickel widens the sphere of the ask. It’s interesting to consider the impact of centering our focus on human potential, if it comes at the expense of the living whole. In many ways, when I put Galtung and Hickel together, I have to ask myself hard questions. Where do I take more than I give—both as an individual, and as a consequence of my social location, in terms of structures of violence and domination? Where do I resist reciprocity with the living world? What am I willing to give up, so the ecosystem can thrive? How do I view my relationship to power—others, over me; mine, over others?

In this fraught moment of not knowing, one place to start is with Hickel’s idea that the essence of capitalism, and of exploitation, is taking more than you give.  And that the antidote to exploitation is reciprocity.

Hickel asks for a gift, as evidence of reciprocity. One place to begin might be to offer the living world the gift of our attention, receiving information from our five senses, and then asking what we can see, what we can learn, from that fullness of our attention. We can think about all the steps, all the natural processes, all the work of the people involved, in growing, transporting, and preparing the food that we eat.  We can thank the living world for allowing us to eat, to drink, to breathe, to survive.

We might consider the mycelium networks that connect the trees in the forest to one another, and to the organisms in the soil, as a model for how giving and receiving often occur simultaneously, and abundantly, in ecosystems.  

We might set aside time each day, or each week, to step away from our ordinary routines and to instead pause and look for elements of the natural world that are present, but that we are conditioned not to notice. (There’s a lovely chapter in How to do Nothing about the author Jenny Odell’s learning the names of the plants, bodies of water, and animals in her urban neighborhood, and how that forever changed her perspective on place.)

As our attunement to the ways in which we are already in a relationship to the natural world increases, we will be more likely to ask questions about the quality of that relationship. And because reciprocity is based on giving as well as receiving, we can start to relinquish things that matter to us for the sake of the health of the living world. We can use our bodies’ terror and alarm as a cry for action, for restoration of balance. We can take a step forward, without yet knowing where we are headed. We can honor the plants, animals, rivers, and mountains, knowing they are as alive as us—and that this is not a demotion, but in fact, a beautiful release.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is an act of psychological warfare. Its immediate impact is on the physical health of those pregnant people who need abortion care. But the decision marks a decisive victory in the Right’s decades’ long fight to influence the courts. The decision is as much symbolic as it is literal.

This decision lands like the culmination of the last six years’ pummeling of the people. So much of the recent violence that is the product of the intertwining structures of patriarchy and white supremacy has become visible in tortured bodies. We have witnessed immigrant children, hungry, dirty, crying, on cement floors, in cages. We have viewed the bodies of Black men, children, women, murdered and left on the hot tarmac. We have watched  trans people, denied hormones and affirming surgeries, forced to endure their bodies’ physical repudiation of their internal self-knowing. It makes me wonder if this is supposed to be the knockout blow, here to put us on the mat.

The gut punch is the point. This decision is designed to create an embodied impact, even if the body you currently inhabit is not pregnant, nor is going to become pregnant in the near future—or ever. It offers the opportunity in the present to experience, or re-experience, depending on your identities, the ways in which personhood, so often figured in European law as a form of personal property, can itself be owned by the court.  

And in so doing, it reflects not only the present moment, in which the bodies of pregnant people—in both the present and the future tense—are imbued with less personhood than men, but also the national histories of enslavement and genocide, both of which depended on situating some bodies as human and others as less-than-human, or as objects to be traded and owned by another.

On my part, I receive this decision as a literal invasion: it lands first in my enteric nervous system—the network of nerves that crisscrosses my center—and its forceful impact is so rooted, so lodged in my self-conception, that it feels like it knots and swirls there, in my center, in my core self.  

The writer Philip Shepherd’s New Self, New World explores the hypothesis that we have two brains, two minds: the holistic, enteric nervous system, and the analytical, cerebral mind. It’s hard to will my response to move up into my mind, to the place where I have more tools and strategies to defend against emotional and physical attack. My brain feels fuzzy, cloudy, sleep-deprived, unhinged.   

In fact, I think the breathtaking cruelty of the law is designed to overwhelm the psyche. My core self is on high alert. My spinal cord tingles and vibrates with urgency. My low back is arched; my animal self squints through the darkness, watching. The attack is here, but the attack is on-going, still coming at me. I want to stay up all night, scanning. I want to sleep for days, stoned on grief and defeat. 

Almost immediately after the press reported the overturning of Roe, I noticed the articles starting spilling forth, predicting even further violence, even more rights being shattered. My rights as a woman gone, my rights as a gay person soon to be added to the heap.  

In fact, I think the breathtaking cruelty of the law is designed to overwhelm the psyche. The attack is here, but the attack is on-going, still coming at me. I want to stay up all night, scanning. I want to sleep for days, stoned on grief and defeat. 

Journalists have bodies, too. They are tasked with reacting fast; with writing analysis even as an event is unfolding. And in this cascade of nihilistic, speculative reporting, I see the intellectualization of the body’s difficulty metabolizing so much trauma, so much structural violence. Who is helping the journalists address their own trauma, so they can pause their hypervigilance; so they can report this event in a way that helps the people fight back?

A heartbroken, terrified, despairing people are a pacified people. It’s harder to cope when you’re traumatized. Harder still when the trauma you’re experiencing is historical and multigenerational. Therapists and others working in mental health have the tools and the expertise to understand trauma. We are here to help each other, and those who are not in mental health, learn and use the tools necessary to address the trauma and keep going, in order to refuse to become docile, terrified, obedient subjects.

The overturning of Roe is a component of a multi-pronged attack strategy, operating at both the psychological and political registers. In order to counter its impact, it’s important to be able to fight both registers at the same time. In many ways, of course, they are all one—an enormous feedback loop, an ouroboros, impacting flesh and consciousness, possibility and limits, imagination and desecration.  

Nevertheless, as crucial as it is to mobilize the tools to work with the somatic and traumatic impact of the decision, it is also necessary to understand how the decision works, at the level of the political.  

Here, then, in a gross reconfiguration of the poet Wallace Stevens, are 13 ways of looking at the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This is a list of political frames that are evoked by the decision, and that at the same time express the function of the decision, in terms of consolidating the violence produced by the intertwining logics of patriarchy and white supremacy.

* The patriarchal control of women’s bodies

* The ascendency of a Christian theocratic social order

* The forced, nostalgic return to a 1950s white “family,” rooted in binary gender roles said to be an expression of the biological sexual difference between men and women (and thus the erasure of all non-heteronormative, trans, nonbinary people from the realm of the “human” and the “normal”)

* An expression of the Right’s victory over the Left’s political vision

* The reinforcing of whiteness as property; the body as property

* An expression of great replacement theory and a strategy to increase “white births”

* In its consolidation of patriarchal control, the decision expresses what theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Law of the Father

* An illumination of what the author and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem has noted: that the organizing structure of the United States is not the Constitution, but rather the plantation

* A reaffirmation that the white male body is the definition of what counts as human, and the positioning of those who are less-than-human as under his dominion

* A distraction machine, put forth to shift public attention away from the January 6th hearings, which seek to galvanize the public to reject authoritarianism and political violence

* The softening of the separation between church and state

* The forced expulsion of women from the workforce and back into the home

* An act designed to traumatize and emotionally overwhelm much of the populace, and in doing so, to immobilize resistance to patriarchal domination

It is my hope that these frames can be entry points for your own analysis and exploration of the larger function of this decision. To be able to contest this powerful act of violence, I believe we must work at the level of the mind and the body; the somatic and the strategic.  

I welcome discussion of these ideas in the comments section. As well, I’d love for you to use the comments as a space to gather strategies and practices—both emotional and political—you are using in this emergent and fraught moment.

I send you all love, and power.

And, please—if you know someone who might find this analysis and support useful, please share this post. If you are new here, please subscribe. Thank you so much for reading.

Photo by Amir Arabshahi on Unsplash

The practice of asking who, truly, is included in a “we” can make our assumptions visible to ourselves.  

Try this:

Spend the next 24 hours noticing every time you hear/read/watch a person use the word “we.”  

Or, ask yourself: “Who is being addressed, but not explicitly named, as the audience, viewer, or receiver of this information, or kind of art, or cultural product?”

Take a few moments to register the information about the addressed or implied “we” that you have identified. Pay attention to the emotions that arise in you, as you consider the identified or implied “we.”  

Notice if there are any contractions, expansions, or tightness arising in your body, as you allow the information to register.  Notice if there are parts of yourself that are trying to close off, shut down, or shame you for asking the above questions. Ask yourself if you are rushing, or if you have slowed down, as you do this work.

After you have taken a moment to register what you noticed, answer the following questions:

* Who, specifically, is being addressed in the “we”?  

* Whose experiences, histories, identities, or cultures are being left out of that “we”? (Choose one or two examples.)

* In what ways do you see yourself as included in the “we”?  In what ways are you excluded?

* Now, return to the content of the material you are thinking through. How would the approach to the subject change if the “we” that was addressed included not only human beings, but also other species, or aspects of the natural world that might be impacted by the subject (rivers, forests, etc.)?

Today’s Action Snack makes the word “we” as unfamiliar and strange as possible, to heighten our awareness of what we take for granted as “just the way things are.”

This exercise asks: “How do I come to expect certain people, or groups, or identities, to be represented as a “norm” and how do I notice—or not notice—the exclusion of perspectives that dissent from that norm?”

The purpose is not so much to notice that people and perspectives are “left out” of the dominant cultural consensus. 

Instead, the process outlined above asks us to explore how the word “we” can refer not only to a group of individuals, but also to a “national consensus”—a thing in itself; a structure—that is said to be representative of the “will of the people,” functioning independently of, and not biased toward or against, any particular group.

Imagine for a moment if every headline in a mainstream media outlet, such as the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, or NBC News, specified the audience to which it was addressed.

What would it be like to pick up a “general audience” publication, and read this: 

The Dow Jones returns were up 40% today for affluent white men!

Or,

New cardiovascular treatment makes heart attacks less severe for white men!

The first headline draws attention to the fact that the majority of the investors who benefit from Wall Street are holders of generational wealth or positions of corporate power—people who are, statistically, most likely to be white men. In its specificity, it raises the question of how our economic infrastructure is designed, and who benefits from it.

The second alerts the reader to the fact that the vast majority of medical procedures are designed for, and tested on, white male subjects. It asks us to consider whose health, and which bodies, are seen as valuable, and the target of financial investment and exploratory research.

The high mortality rate for Black women from cardiovascular events, for example, is a direct effect of the fact that medical researchers do not account for differences in the ways heart attacks present in different patient populations. 

Nor do they account for the impact of white supremacy on cardiovascular health, or examine the ways in which Black women’s physical experience of pain is often minimized by providers in medical settings, leading to delays in care, or the misdiagnosis of medical conditions as instead incidents of psychological distress.  

But when I, as a white woman, read a headline alerting me to a “new cardiovascular treatment,” I don’t expect the article will include a discussion of the impact of white supremacy or systemic racism on cardiovascular research.  

What makes the work of thinking about who is “we” so hard is that there is a “we” that is a group of individuals.  And there is the “we” that is the idea of consensus, of “the way things are.”

I know very well that the impact of these intertwining structures is of immense consequence to the prevention of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and heart attacks. I also know, and care about, the impact of patriarchy and white supremacy on physical health. I want to know what the medical establishment is doing to address these stressors.  

I wonder if people in medicine assume that because patriarchy and white supremacy are structural in nature, that it is the responsibility of those in “public health” to address these topics, and therefore outside physicians’ scope of practice.

Despite my interest and research in these subjects, I have internalized the idea that the true subject of a “general news story” is white people, and more narrowly, the interests of middle and upper-class white men.  

I have done a mind trick, even on myself.  I don’t expect my own interests to be represented back to me. I expect that any story about cardiovascular disease that focuses on populations that are non-white, or that includes the impact of sex or gender identity on heart disease, will require a headline that flags its content as “special interest.” It will be marked as “not the norm,” even though the content may apply to a statistically greater number of people.

What makes the work of thinking about who is “we” so hard is that there is a “we” that is a group of individuals.  And there is the “we” that is the idea of consensus, of “the way things are.”

A group of individuals can come together and decide to take action on something.  But when we are talking about a structural “we”—an idea of consensus—we are not talking about a group of individuals.

It is not that people in Wall Street are getting together to avowedly exclude people from participating in the market. After all, it is in the financial interest of firms like Schwab and Fidelity to have as many folks participate in the market as possible.  

Why are some needs taken to be more pressing, or more “normal” for the culture to address, and others “too big” or “too difficult” to solve?

Articles on generational wealth almost uniformly begin by hailing the fact that children as young as 18 with “even less than $500” can open brokerage accounts and start learning about the market, as if opening an account is the only barrier to entry.

Similarly, it is not that researchers desire to discriminate in their heart research.  

So if there isn’t a conscious plot or intent by individuals or groups to exclude—or, conversely, to take actions that benefit a certain group of people—how is it that the needs of some people are prioritized by the culture at large, and the needs of others are invisible, unrecognized, or unmet?

Why are some needs taken to be more pressing, or more “normal” for the culture to address, and others “too big” or “too difficult” to solve?

If “we” are told daily that “our needs” are actually “human” needs, then we may be more likely to assume that meeting those needs is a shared, universally held, value. It is this idea of consensus reality, in fact, that makes so many people freeze up, when they are asked to imagine a future in which ecological extinction, or police brutality, is no longer thought to be our guaranteed future, but instead a challenge to be collectively faced, felt, and addressed.  

Much of the grief, frustration, and rage that is currently being funneled into therapy is sourced in structural violence. We live in a paradoxical moment; one in which many issues that the dominant culture previously framed as “radical,” or “special interest,” or “fringe,” are now being understood as global, and widespread in scope and impact. But even as this former framing is cracking and imploding, there remains the drumbeat repetition of the idea that “consensus reality” cannot fathom what it will take to solve these problems. So there is grief, despair, and mourning. There is rage and violence. But there is no national narrative of hope.

I believe the narratives of despair and failure that are being recirculated in the mass media, and in places of institutional and governmental power, are a direct reflection of the limitations of this national consensus, and of the continued erasing, sidelining, and punishing of the peoples, knowledges, practices, and perspectives that it cannot incorporate, or believe. To ask “Who is ‘we’?” is a first step towards undermining this narrative of consensus, and of breaking free.

I hope you’ll not only try this exercise, but write about it in the comments. I’d love to know if you saw something in a new light. I’m curious about how it felt in your body when you were answering the questions. If you talked to someone in your life about these ideas, I’d love to hear how the conversation went.  

And as always, thank you so much for reading and sharing this post!

Picture this:

A young child, dreaming of her future. She screws up her face, clutching her pencil as she writes in her composition book. She isn’t the type to write fairy tales, or futuristic fiction.  She’s practical, like her aunts, who scratch the top of her head, pat her back as they walk by. She’s envisioning herself at a lectern, addressing a large crowd. They’re clapping, rising spontaneously to their feet, electrified by what she’s said.  

Picture her at school in what is often labeled an “underserved neighborhood.” Notice the way she looks out the window, not really listening to the teacher’s lecture. She’s already understood the assignment, and now the teacher is painstakingly repeating it for the kids who weren’t paying attention. She’s watching the crows peck at the crack in the cement playground. She’s listening to the sound of the van backing up in the street.  

See her at dinner that night, with not quite enough food on the table. She bends toward her sister, helping her wrap her fingers around the fork. See the sister thrash and howl and throw the food  on the floor. See the sister’s rage, peaking and vibrating, consuming the small room. The sister runs to the corner, curls up, rocking. 

When they went to the social services agency to ask for help, the woman behind the desk said fill out these forms, wait for the call and that was months ago. When the young girl wakes in the morning her mother is already gone. She finds the note on the kitchen counter—buy bread and milk with this ten dollars; your sister’s medications need to be refilled, call the number on the bottle and tell the person who answers you need more; there is macaroni and cheese in the box for dinner; your lunch bag is in the fridge love you.

Her mother was up at four, hunched in the cold at the bus stop by 4:30. The bus rocks and sighs every time the front pressure is released and the steps bow down to the next group of riders. She’ll be at her first job by 6:30; her second by 3. 

She’s had coffee and a sandwich, and now it’s 6 p.m. and she is trudging down the street to the bus stop and stopping by the bodega to get the sweet treat that signals she’s almost done for the day, almost back to the couch and the not enough dinner but at least this simple five minute ritual of soothing sweetness is coming.

Structural violence does not have an “agent.” There cannot be redress for structural violence under the law, because there is no “actor” and there is no “intention” to harm. 

She’s trying not to think of the letter that came in the mail last week: we need to let you know your A1C levels have confirmed your diabetes; please come to this support group next week and schedule a follow-up so we can go over the tests you will need to administer to yourself. 

She had stood in the kitchen reading the letter thinking I can’t afford those tests; how am I supposed to come to your support group when I’m working two jobs; how can I get through my days if I can’t have any sugar and as she shifted her weight she tried not to notice the way her feet have been feeling a little numb these last six months, how twice at night she’s fallen on her way to the bathroom but told herself it was just because she’s so tired. Plus, the last time she went to the doctor the staff scolded her for “not complying” with her care and treated her like she was stupid, so why would she want to go back there, just to hear how stupid and wrong and bad she is?

The term “structural violence” was introduced in 1969 by the scholar Johan Galtung, of the Oslo International Peace Research Institute. To better define peace, Galtung wrote, it was necessary to first investigate forms of violence. He began by noticing that it is common to think of violence as either physical or mental/emotional in form, and that violence most often occurs as a result of conflict between people. The cause of violence, then, whether physical or mental, is the action taken by another person.

To witness structural violence, we have to look for a gap—often, we have to see what isn’t happening, when we are accustomed, instead, to look for what is.

But there is another form of violence, he noted, one that is the product of systems. It is harder to apprehend violence when we can’t see a person committing it. To witness structural violence, we have to look for a gap—often, we have to see what isn’t happening, when we are accustomed, instead, to look for what is.

Galtung states that we can teach ourselves to see structural violence by looking for, and then noticing, situations in which the actual potential of people is being limited, or fully taken away from them.  He writes: 

“Violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.”

Galtung’s definition allows us to talk about violence not only as something that is present—the person in front of us, robbed, raped, ravaged—but also as something that is not happening, something beautiful that is prevented from being expressed and made real in the world.

If we return to the above scenario, walk it out, imagine what’s going to happen to that mother, and that sister, and that little girl, over the next thirty years—then we can see the extraordinary violence of the gap between the actual life and the potential life of those three people.  

And then we can do the math, and start to picture all the other people in similar circumstances. At that point, we have a picture of structural violence. This definition allows us to ask new questions:

Who is harming that little girl, and her sister, and her mother? Could we prove an intent to harm them? Could we stand before a court of law and say: “This is the law that is being broken, here, that is causing this violence? This is the person who we need to lock up, to keep this family safe?”

Structural violence does not have an “agent.” There cannot be redress for structural violence under the law, because there is no “actor” and there is no “intention” to harm. There is no one to exhort, no one to shame, no one to punish, for the series of interlocking oppressions that land, daily, monthly, inexorably, on individuals, families, communities, towns, and regions of the country. 

And yet, when we consider the above scenario, and Galtung’s definition of violence as the limiting of human potential, we can see that structural violence is rampant, causes physical and mental distress, and must be addressed, not only in the realm of therapy and public health, but at the level of the political. 

It must be addressed not only for moral reasons, but because we cannot suffer the indignity of the loss of human potential, the loss of the creativity and flourishing that is so urgently needed, at this time of human and ecological crisis.

We who work in the field of mental health are often told there is a mental health crisis in this country. We are told there are not enough of us, there are not enough resources, not enough substance use treatment facilities, that we are too expensive, that our treatments take too long, that the country is at once desperate for us and at the same time unwilling to do much to change the circumstances and the approach to “solving” this crisis of mental health.

What remains undefined, taken for granted, is what “mental health” means, in this current moment, and how we know we’re in a crisis..

When my clients come to session, they are ready to talk about themselves, or about their relationships to other people. When they share the traumatic events they have experienced, they tell me stories about other people, doing violent things.  

They want to know what the person was thinking, that day when they did that thing.  They want to understand why they participated in something, when the voice in their head kept saying no no no no no.  

They ask me why a family member could be so heartless and cruel; why the partner left so suddenly, or switched, seemingly overnight, from loving to contemptuous. 

It is already so much work to figure out our own motivations, and to try to show up for those we love, that it can seem just too overwhelming to take on systems, too. 

Embedded in a devastating definition of violence is a doorway out.  

We live in a culture that is relentlessly individualist. A culture that tells us if we just try hard enough, get up after we’re knocked down, we’ll make it. And that if something has gone sideways, it’s because it’s our fault, or another person’s fault. We aren’t encouraged to see systems, or talk about how they create and reinforce barriers to opportunity and growth, or ask how we can come together to use our creativity and collective power to dismantle them.

One thing I love about Galtung’s definition of structural violence is that it gives us an extraordinary way to think about change. Instead of focusing solely on the vast interlocking networks of oppression, we can also focus on that gap between human potential and human suffering. We can ask what it will take to make that human potential actual, concrete energy in the world.

Embedded in a devastating definition of violence is a doorway out.  

When I think about oppression, I also picture its elimination—not as some enormous upheaval, uprooting structural violence all at once—but rather as a gradual unwinding. Just as rock cannot withstand water, so our collective mind cannot tolerate for much longer the pain and suffering of others, whether human, animal, or ecological.  

One thing that’s fascinating about Galtung’s definition is that it includes a space without words: a gap between human potential and human suffering. He makes us look at that gap.

What he does not do is prescribe: “Do this to stop structural oppression.” For if he said do this, he would be engaging in a kind of dominance, a kind of certainty, a kind of saviorism.  

Instead, Galtung invites us to “just look.” Look for the loss of potential, and ask yourself: what will it take for that potential to be unleashed? What has to change, what network of ideas, structures, institutions, inequalities must be transformed, to unleash that human potential, that beauty and creativity and possibility? What will that incredible unleashing of energy produce, and how quickly can we get there? 

I want to see that tidal wave of possibility arcing, cresting, thundering down. I suspect that the solutions to structural violence will simultaneously solve many of the other crises we face. I believe that in this unleashing of frozen possibility there is a kind of freedom of Being we have yet to know.

Tell me your ideas about how we get there.

About a year ago, I started working on the idea for this newsletter.  I noticed there was a lot of talk about a “new” nationwide mental health crisis, said to be caused by the pandemic.  But to my mind, the root cause of this distress was not the pandemic.  It was structural violence, particularly the mutually reinforcing structures of patriarchy and white supremacy.  The pandemic’s scourge reflected and depended upon these pre-existing structures; its impacts might have been radically different, had we tackled not only the virus but also its operating conditions. 

My plan, initially, was to profile the researchers, therapists, academics, activists, artists, and healers who are already experts in combating and understanding structural violence.  I wanted to share their knowledge with clinicians who are  transitioning their practices away from individual pathology and towards a framework that incorporates systemic violence as a source of trauma and distress.

Why is this so important to me?  I'm a trauma therapist in private practice.  I’ve worked in community mental health, and with veterans at the VA.  I’ve spent over ten years supporting people from all walks to life, most of whom are being crushed by the weight of the systems they live in.  

Before I was a therapist, I was an academic.  I’ve taught critical theory—understanding how systems work, and how they create violence and oppression—to undergraduates, social workers, doctoral students, advocates, and educators.  I’ve found teaching this kind of theory helps people understand why it’s so difficult to challenge dominant power structures, and how to develop strategies to better transform them. 

Lately, I've been training therapists how to identify and address the impact of structural violence on their own lives and those of their clients.  This newsletter will share these practices more widely, adding to the expertise shared by those who are profiled here.

In many ways, my plan for Therapy for Social Change is the same as it was a year ago.  But interestingly, today, which is the day I marked on my calendar to write my introductory post, is the day after Supreme Court Justice Alito’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press. 

So I'm writing to you with an acute awareness of how it feels in my body when structural violence lands on me, and what it feels like to be palpably overcome with rage, and fear, and the felt sense of my powerlessness to protect everyone I love—and everyone I can envision but don’t yet know—from this kind of violence.  

So much of mainstream therapy focuses on the self, with little attention to the health of the collective.  So many of the treatments said to be “evidence-based” focus on cognition, as if trauma lands only on the mind, and not the muscles, the flesh, and the soul. 

I want a therapy that supports people who are claiming their power, not only as individuals, but as members of a collective, capable of undermining the larger structures that are bearing down upon almost all of us.

There's the knowing I have every day that patriarchy and white supremacy are landing on the bodies and minds of people like me and the people I work with, people who the dominant culture labels “marginalized.”   When I absorb the violence, I want to cower and shrink, or leave my body and take flight in my mind.  But then I remember that it’s not all on me; that when the collective takes a stand, we have the possibility for change.  

I’m writing to say that working at the level of the individual, as so much of therapy does, can be dangerous.  It can implicitly encourage people to believe their only power is to focus on their own pain, or their small arena of impact.  

Or, worse, in its silence about structural violence and oppression, it can lead people to believe their feelings of despair, failure, terror, and self loathing are solely the consequence of their neural pathways; their poor choices; their lack of discipline and organization.  

So much of mainstream therapy focuses on the self, with little attention to the health of the collective.  So many of the treatments said to be “evidence-based” focus on cognition, as if trauma lands only on the mind, and not the muscles, the flesh, and the soul.  I want a therapy that supports people who are claiming their power, not only as individuals, but as members of a collective, capable of undermining the larger structures that are bearing down upon almost all of us.

So: I still hope to use this newsletter to collect resources, guidance, research, and ideas for therapists and other practitioners who are interested in the relationship between structural violence and mental health.  And beyond that, I dream of creating, here in this space, a community of expert and novice practitioners; of activists and advocates; of artists and visionaries; all of whom are creating a world in which the liberation of the earth, the sky, and the marginalized are one cause.  

I hope the people who convene here will teach one another how they’ve learned to work at the level of the individual and the collective.  I hope they’ll share the methods that have moved them—and others—out of shame and despair and into their own creative power and purpose.  

I hope you’ll send this announcement to people you know.  I hope you’ll write a comment, telling us how you do the work, and what you’d like to receive from this community.  

I hope you’ll subscribe to this newsletter, so that I can know you’re here, and gather steam and energy, writing to you.