Читать книгу Counseling the Contemporary Woman - Suzanne Degges-White - Страница 26

Empowerment is the most essential goal for clients, but Worell and Remer (2003) outlined eight additional related goals of feminist therapy:

 Become aware of your own experience of gender role socialization.

 Recognize the internalized messages you’ve been taught and replace these with self-enhancing, positive messages.

 Gain awareness of the ways sexist and oppressive societal beliefs and practices negatively influence you.

 Develop a set of skills that will allow you to make changes to the environment in which you function.

 Restructure existing institutions to eliminate any discriminatory practices they support.

 Acknowledge and evaluate the impact that social factors have on your life.

 Establish a sense of personal and social power.

 Acknowledge and value the power of relationships and connection to others.

 Trust your own experience and intuition.

As you reflect on these practices, it is clear that they are as applicable to men as they are to women. In fact, these may be especially relevant for men who are employed in positions that are strongly associated with masculinity, such as law enforcement or the armed forces (Carr & McKernan, 2015). When forced to abide by stringent gender role expectations, some men may suffer psychological distress brought on by the hyper-masculine environment. Feminist-oriented clinicians can provide a space where men can explore contradictory or ambiguous feelings about their actions. Examples of populations that might benefit from feminist-centered work include veterans dealing with PTSD (Carr & McKernan, 2015) or men who feel constrained or overwhelmed by the culturally enforced gender role expectations (Silver, Levant, & Gonzalez, 2018). The use of this theory has more applications than counselors may realize, and depending on the client, the therapist selects appropriate techniques that may be pulled from a variety of other therapeutic orientations.