A Working-Class Look at Therapy and the Movement
By Caryatis Cardea
From Lesbian Ethics, Vol 1 No 3, 1985)
…liberty loses its meaning when women are not in fact free to change their situation or when they participate in limiting others’ freedom… --Kathleen Barry
In the early Spring of 1980, I sat down to my typewriter to compose an essay about the classism I felt subject to within the lesbian movement.
As I developed the examples which came to mind, I found it all boiling down to three main categories: The rigid rules of feminist process in politics, the humanist dilution of radical feminism, and the distortion of personal relationships between lesbians. When the paper was completed in draft form, I discovered that each of my analyses of classism reveals the power of therapy in lesbian life.
Feminist process, with its emphasis on courtesy, and on a firm separation of thought and feeling, exists for the comfort, benefit and continued power of middle-class lesbians. And it is to therapy that they go to acquire and maintain this mind-spirit divorce.
The me-first attitude of humanism coupled with its obsessive inclusion of everyone and everything under the formerly womyn’s banner of feminism (See, there’s really no one to be angry with!) is reinforced by, and had its origins in, therapy’s insistence that we each move beyond our anger and create our own reality. And we were to create this reality in our own space, one of individual prosperity and individual happiness.
Lesbian relationships have been newly defined as the place to get one’s needs met, and to enter on a never-ending struggle to process honest political and personal differences. Here therapy has provided perhaps its most popular justification for the imposition of middle-class manners and values under which lesbians like myself, from working-class backgrounds, have been suffocating.
In the intervening years, I’ve tried several times to finish this paper.
Each time I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the issue, by the destruction already wrought in the movement, and most of all, by the inescapable fact that no matter when I pulled the article out, my premises still applied. Clearly, the situation was getting no better; in fact, it seemed to degenerate daily.
Everywhere I looked, lesbians were going to therapists, becoming therapists, changing therapists, discussing their therapists, being abused by their therapists.
If any other topic of conversation was introduced, it was phrased in the language of therapy. The heart of fire which our movement once contained was gone, replaced by what Mary Daly has termed “plastic passions.” Womyn no longer had opinions, they had “energy around some issues”; they didn’t even get mad any more, they only “experienced some anger.” I have no doubt, as a matter of fact, that I will receive several suggestions when this article is published that I enter therapy to deal with my excessive hostility.
It seems only yesterday that we were yelling in the face of the world which had mislabeled our feelings for centuries, “We’re not crazy, we’re angry.” But anger is passé nowadays. The status quo of misogyny and oppression simply doesn’t exist; we each create our own reality.
Well, in the hope that some semblance of sisterhood still survives, this article is a plea. Let’s try to reverse the tide of “valueless individualism”(2) which stems from therapy. Therapy is not politics; it is not feminism. It is dangerous.
The attitudes and actions which I will describe as middle-class are exhibited in greater or lesser degrees within all strata of the economically privileged in this society. I plan to attack the values and challenge the lesbians who hold to them.
The Drift from Radical Feminism
In the early years of my feminist activism – 1972 and 1973 – the world seemed to be expanding out in front of me as a womon. By early 1975, I had come out as a lesbian and a separatist, and I thought it awesome and beautiful that our horizons, already incredibly broad from the boundaries we had pushed out, moved apace with us, at lightning speed. Radicalism was present even in what would now be seen as the least likely places. Concepts of world feminism, separatism, visions of lesbian nation, and a firm grasp of sexual politics could be found everywhere. We were full steam ahead, no end in sight.
After some time, we realized that the results of our efforts were not to be seen in our lifetimes. Across the country, in the coffeehouses, buildings and centers we had braved everything to establish, the movement sat back to take a breath. Besides the needed rest, challenges were coming from within and without the movement: race, class and other issues were being raised to challenge what we had finally acknowledged to be the white, middle-class domination of the movement.
This breather may be the biggest mistake ever made by a revolutionary movement. For, while some lesbians wanted to rest and move forward again, and others wanted to make the movement inclusive of and responsive to all lesbians and move forward again, many were resting for good.
They had sought only reform, and this being achieved, they were through. Like the rest of us, though, they drew energy from lesbians together. So although they retired from the battle, they did not leave our ranks. They remained where their domination was already established, their influence powerful. The lesbian/feminist movement had, often unawares, taken its lead in tone and style from white middle-class womyn. Now their inactivity prevailed, as had most of their other choices, and the Movement became a Community.
The opportunity to challenge our movement’s goals and methods was soon perverted. Few real challenges, and fewer changes, occurred. Political self-examination of ourselves as a group was readily abandoned because it would have required movement, and those dominating the community wished to remain where they were. They met the challenge in a way palatable to them: self-examination on a private level. Therapy. Thus was one of the most dangerous elements of the patriarchy introduced into our midst.
We acknowledge, as feminists, that we live in a patriarchy, but we have failed to recognize that the patriarchy lives in each of us. Had we faced this, we might have taken each political challenge as an opportunity to add more lesbians to our ranks and stretch our horizons further yet. Instead, everything being done by lesbian/feminists was explained, denied, responded to in the terms of therapy, an element of white middle-class life.
Those of us not involved in—or even familiar with—therapy felt as though the earth were shifting beneath our feet. Most of us were working-class and poor. The change was not exactly overnight, it only seemed to be. Attending meetings became an ordeal, conducted according to alien rules. Lesbians who had been by our sides for years grew scornful at our lack of familiarity with the territory into which they were dragging us. Language and vocabulary skidded away from us; words skirted around the edges of clear meaning.
Womyn’s centers (and bookstores and restaurants and buildings) were effectively closed to separatist and other radical lesbians by their switch from revolutionary forums to social reform, and later still to a focus on personal growth. Relationships between lesbians were similarly undermined as privileged womyn, bolstered by their therapists, sought not love and mutual respect, but a place to have their needs met. The key word was process; its concepts, goals, and vocabulary were drawn from therapy.
It is claimed by those who employ it that feminist process was devised to correct inequities in our political meetings. Domination by a minority of the lesbians present (those most verbal and assertive), infighting, a lack of structure, certain womyn not being heard. Each of us knew who we believed responsible for these problems; each of us thought all the others meant the same ones.
Throughout the decade of feminist process’s hold on the lesbian movement, I have watched the growing perplexity of working-class dykes as the proffered solution to our problems—feminist process—has proved not only to exclude us further, but to oppress us. (I have shared the ideas contained in this paper with many lesbians who feel excluded and oppressed by these same things, but on the basis of their race or ethnicity.
I am aware that process is more than classist, but it is classist. And as a white working-class womon, I will approach it from my personal perspective in this paper.) Process was so highly lauded and so loudly touted, and in terms so foreign to us, that we were, quite literally, powerless to oppose it. The reason is that feminist process is based on middle-class values and experience, and justified by the middle-class phenomenon of therapy.
First, there is the issue of who gets to talk at meetings. I was among those who complained loud and long about some lesbians controlling all meetings. Like other outsiders (non-WASP, non-middle-class), I meant the middle-class WASPs, whose long-winded, abstract discourses bored and irritated me, in addition to taking up entire evenings, often on personal topics. It took me years to truly understand that while I wished to stop the discourses, they wished to stop my loud complaints.
What are the elements of feminist process which so differed from the lives of nonprivileged womyn that we could not understand their enormous attractiveness to other lesbians? One was the practice, ostensibly to put everyone at ease, of going around in a circle at the beginning of each meeting. This may not have been offensive in ongoing groups where the members wished to keep up with one another’s lives between meetings.
But I am referring to the request (read: demand), at the opening of a one-time group (forum, support group, work group, etc.) that we go around the circle and have each lesbian relate her feelings, memories, fears and so forth on the topic of discussion. (The voice of the therapist is saying, So, how have you been this week?) This practice, which may seem very simple and straightforward to some of you, can be very disturbing to working-class lesbians. Opening ourselves to this sort of vulnerability and emotional exposure is a strange experience to be asked of us: encounter groups, after all, are not a working-class phenomenon.
How the classes differ in this respect is really rather simple. Working-class people tend to express our ideas with feeling, but we do not necessarily express our feelings. This would be considered poor taste in our cultures.
Middle-class people maintain a level of coolness about ideas which baffles us (and is designed to make us feel vulgar), while displaying a willingness to reveal personal feelings which seems positively uncouth to many of us. It is a difference in style. But since the middle class rules, working-class lesbians are continually reprimanded for our “excitability” in meetings, while also being reproached for our failure to “open up” personally. This we generally prefer to do privately, or with good friends, or in meetings designed to handle personal reactions.
Furthermore, in my world, trust (which is what is being asked in these check-ins) was to be earned, not granted at first sight. Even within the confines of feminism, all we have in common is our existence as womyn and lesbians. Trust on a personal, emotional level, that which implies a shared understanding of these experiences as lesbians in the patriarchy, is something I do not accept as a given.
The womyn comfortable with these circumstances therefore do most of the talking, setting the stage for their continued starring role in the meeting as it progresses. If you think this is all a voluntary procedure, try passing your turn some time, and watch the fur fly. You get suspicious glances, everyone feels affronted; you are presumed to be aloof, snobbish, superior. If our meetings are such safe, supportive environments, why is it so threatening for anyone to decline to “share feelings”?
Lesbians have, in fact, countless experiences which are not shared. I once tried to relate a story about one of my little sisters which included, on the way to the point of the story, the fact that there had not been enough food for dinner that night. This was important to the story, but it was not the story, and not important by itself. Yet, a middle-class womon who was listening began to weep at the very thought of such a state of affairs and became so distraught with pity for me that I never could get to the end of the anecdote.
We just don’t always speak the same language.
The next practice instituted at political meetings was that of having—always—a facilitator. This snowballed from the initial custom of designating one womon to generally oversee, stepping in only when the group threatened to drift irretrievably from the agenda, or when any one or more lesbians took too much attention or became abusive of any other, to a rigid observance wherein one or two lesbians control all aspects of the meeting.
They keep time, limiting how long each individual may speak; as each issue is raised, they take names of those who have raised their hands and call them in order—the order in which they saw them, or perhaps in clockwise order around the inevitable circle in which we sit—but with no weight given to the import of what any particular womon has to say. (The voice of the therapist is saying, I think we’ve dwelled on this enough. I’m sorry, our time is up.)
This is true even if one womon was just directly accused of something by the previous speaker, or has a direct response to her, while the others have new topics to introduce. If, by luck, the next speaker is the one with the most direct response to make, what is now considered a good facilitator would rescind the responder’s right to speak: such personal dialogues are nearly always deemed best left until after the meeting. (The voice of the therapist is saying, It seems you have some unresolved feelings with this person.)
Throughout feminist meetings the language has changed also. Slowly the concepts and jargon of therapy have replaced political language.
Everything I had watched middle-class lesbians struggling to learn about assertiveness vanished as they settled into the more comfortable—to them—stance of apparent chronic uncertainty, self-effacement. Assertiveness taught middle-class womyn to leave behind ladylike manners (and who, else, I ask you, ever had them?) which interfered with the possibility of tackling head-on the multifaceted monster of patriarchy. Assertiveness teaches that if your roommate borrows your clothes and leaves them in a heap, you should tell her to knock it off. Middle-class womyn never really got comfortable with this approach.
Therapy worked much better for them. Therapy teaches that if your roommate repeatedly borrows your clothes and leaves them in a heap, you should tell her that this feels like a violation of trust to you, that you are flattered that she enjoys your taste in clothes enough to want to be seen in them, you are more than happy to allow her to share in the use of them, but she really must show more respect, so that your feelings for her can remain clean and uncluttered by your resentment.
I can recall attending a meeting of a newly formed group at which volunteers were asked to facilitate. There was a short silence; then, a lesbian I knew slightly said (I am paraphrasing), “Well, although I don’t consider myself any more qualified than anyone else, if no one has any objection, I will volunteer to facilitate. If I offend anyone by my choice of methods, please let me know. I could be wrong about how I think this should be done.
When the meeting is over, I will offer my criticism of myself as a facilitator, and I will welcome criticism from the rest of you.” She went on in this vein for some time, wielding the power which therapy bestows: for several minutes she kept all attention focused on herself, yet she used words which sounded a note of humility, self-disparagement. She was, in fact, rather authoritarian in her manner of facilitation. I later found out she was a therapist.
This lesbian also inadvertently made evident to me what makes this distinctly courteous-sounding mode of behavior so desirable to some womyn. She was the first in my experience to forbid direct confrontation between any two lesbians at a meeting. At first, I thought it was only more of the fear often evinced by middle-class womyn at any sign of anger. (They sometimes act as though we’re all about to pull knives.)
When I saw that she also stopped all humor, I realized that it was simply emotion of all kinds that made her uncomfortable, out of control of the meeting. She wished to conduct a calm, objective meeting.
Therapy, of course, is the training ground for the separation of intellect and emotion. I will not belabor the differences in kinds of therapy. The basic premise, stated or unstated, is that emotions need to be examined with the intellect.
Instead of seeing our emotions as expressive of our thoughts, therapy teaches that they actually obscure our thoughts and our thought processes. Therapy is the definitive manifestation of middle-class alienation. Therapy institutionalized one of the essential dichotomies of the patriarchy, one to which womyn are very susceptible: the split between intellect and emotion. Mary Daly notes the dangers of therapy to revolutionary dykes in a very few, very pertinent, pages in Gyn/Ecology.(3) Her observations helped me to begin seeing the link between therapy and lesbian/feminist classism, for her complaints about the former were ultimately the same as mine about the latter. She notes, among other things, that therapy “…fixes women’s attention in the wrong direction, fragmenting and privatizing perceptions of problems…”(4)
The advantage for lesbians who find open emotion distasteful is that they can declare emotion off limits when working-class dykes express themselves with feeling, and still give vent to their more circumspect sentiments by saying that they are just putting out their personal needs, to which, of course, no one dares object. The personal has superseded the political. Whereas womyn like myself, not being possessed of objectified emotions, try to obey the rules and speak objectively. Ironically, we are then accused by middle-class dykes of being “too much in our heads.”
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