A Sense of Doubt blog post #3818 - THEORIES CLASS - Counseling - Feminist Therapy
The next post in this series and the last one, for now.
Week Seven - Main Discussion - COUN6722
Feminist Theory
Case
Conceptualization
Theory: - Feminist - Case of Olivia
Presenting Problem: Olivia has been referred to
counseling for failing grades in school and attendance issues. She is a
15-year-old Honduran-Irish American living with her father (Honduran) and three
younger siblings. Olivia has not seen her mother in six years since she (the
mother, Sinéad) left the family to work as a travel nurse and pursue a
relationship with another man. Olivia’s father Luis works two jobs, filling his
time seven days a week, and still struggles to make ends meet; though Sinéad
makes a good income, she sends neither child nor spousal support to Luis (the
father) or their family. Luis depends on Olivia to maintain the household and
care for the family as he is at work most of the time; he has praised her for
filling the her “future” role of a wife and mother. Olivia takes the
responsibility of her family very seriously and as such has sacrificed school
to help out at home. Olivia would like to be a veterinarian, but without the
grades, she has little hope of fulfilling this dream. Olivia confesses to being
very sad about disappointing her teachers with her repeated failures.
Hypothesis: Olivia’s sadness and failures at
school are rooted in how her father has reinforced the patriarchal hegemony’s
gender role for women as home-makers and mothers. Olivia lacks empowerment to
pursue her dreams of being a veterinarian and find a way to reframe her role in
caring for her siblings, her father, and her household. Further complicating
Olivia’s powerlessness is the lack of a female role model, given that her
mother left her father years ago. Olivia faces a difficult problem; however,
the counselor can use Feminist Theory to best address it. According to Herlihy
and Cruz (2022), “the client is an equal participant” in choosing goals for
change (pg. 327). Feminist theory can help Olivia to be empowered to change her
circumstances.
Goals: Through the lens of Feminist theory,
the primary goal for Olivia is empowerment to reframe traditional gender roles
and discover that she can be a home-maker, a mother, and a veterinarian.
Herlihy and Cruz (2022) define empowerment as a way for clients to have
“control over themselves” and recognize that “powerlessness is a learned
behavior” (pg. 318). Olivia can be aided to see how her powerlessness is
learned behavior because of cultural hegemony and not a fixed role or a
biological destiny. Integral to Olivia’s discovery of empowerment will be
finding strong female role models. Despite the family abandonment, her mother’s
independence and breaking of cultural gender roles could be reframed in a
positive light. Through empowerment and role models, feminist counseling can
help Olivia find motivation and success at school, alleviate her feelings of
failure, and yet affirm her choice to continue to shoulder the necessary
responsibility of caring for her family.
Interventions:
Reframing: The counselor will guide Olivia to
reframe her perceived failures at school and her gender role in her family
unit. Herlihy and Cruz (2022) illustrate this intervention as changing the
“frame of reference” in regards to the cultural and sociopolitical constructs
of Olivia’s situation (pg. 320) about the expected future gender role as a
“wife and mother” asher father Luis described it. In seeing the ways in which
the hegemonic patriarchal culture prescribes confining gender roles for women
as a biological destiny of motherhood and housework, Olivia can be helped to
dispense with negative labeling causing her to feel like a “disappointment” to her
teachers and relabeling her chosen responsibility to help her father and family
as “a positive coping strategy” in her current situation (Herlihy & Cruz,
2022, pg.320). This intervention should help Olivia to pursue her dreams of
having a career as a veterinarian and continue to fill a vital role in caring
for her family.
Bibliotherapy and Self-Disclosure: The counselor’s self-disclosure
about using bibliotherapy as an intervention for change can influence Olivia to
invest in the same process for her own change. Given that Olivia has explained
that she likes to read (though mostly about animals and veterinary science),
the counselor could use carefully chosen literature to further empower Olivia
to reframe her situation and find a new way of living that will allow her to
succeed at school and at home. The counselor’s own self-disclosure of following
a similar path and of the readings that had the most influence may inspire
Olivia to pursue a similar path. As Herlihy and Cruz (2022) describe in sidebar
14.4 a counselor’s self-disclosure can “illuminate the commonalities among
women and decrease the client’s feelings of isolation” (pg. 320), which given
Olivia’s situation is a much needed benefit to help her through a process of
change.
Though the counselor may make connections through
self-disclosure, given Olivia’s multi-cultural heritage (Honduran father and
Irish-American mother), feminist scholars of color with similar cultural
backgrounds could provide role models that Olivia lacks in her life. Many Feminist
writers could be influential to Olivia, such as bell hooks (lower case
intentional as was her way of writing her name and oddly missing from the
Herlihy & Cruz chapter), Excilia Saldaña, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa as well as
primarily fiction writers such as Julia Alvarez and Carmen Maria Machado:
Machado’s memoir – In the Dream House – could prove particularly
influential for Olivia as it focuses on how culture may affect psychological
abuse (Machado, 2019).
Expected Outcome: Because of the difficulties of
gender norms and patriarchal hegemony towards all women – women of color in
particular – Feminist therapists work to change those inequities and roles with
individual clients (Lopez, 2017, 0:52) as well as inspiring women to work for
social justice and advocacy for social change as well as their own personal
change (Herlihy & Cruz, 2022, pg.309). Through an emphasis on the “central
place of relationship and connections ... in women’s lives” (Meniru, 2024) and
through reframing and bibliotherapy/counselor-disclosure, Olivia will find
empowerment and strong role models to achieve her career dreams while still
caring for her family, which will provide her with focus and motivation in
school and alleviate her sadness and feelings of exhaustion and failure.
References
Herlihy, D., & Cruz, T. (2022). Feminist theory. In D.
Capuzzi & M. D. Stauffer (Eds.), Counseling and psychotherapy: Theories
and interventions (7th ed., pp. 309-334). American Counseling Association.
Lopez, Nastassia. (2017). An Overview of Feminist Therapy.
YouTube. https://youtu.be/H3Bx6cWXZBY?si=Ttea7ta4ur0C_qsJ
Machado, Carmen Maria (2019). In the Dream House.
Greywolf Press.
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- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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