This month, the latest edition of The Sage Handbook for Counselling and Psychotherapy, in which I was invited to write the chapter on gender, has been published. (Please see flyer below for a discount code).Writing the chapter ended up being the culmination of work I began when I studied a trauma Masters a decade ago, focussing on the gendered aspects of trauma and violence and going far deeper into feminist academia than I had been before. Coming from a background working for services for women that had later branched into creating men’s services, I had many questions about how we could understand the inequality of gendered violence, while still recognising that there are other ways than being a woman that make someone the target for violence and other ways than being a man that give someone the structural power to be able to commit abuse.

At the time, my feminist understanding was enhanced by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of Intersectionality and I discovered, perhaps a little late in life, that Black feminists had most of the answers to these questions because they understood the complexity of how we navigate overlaying identities and a multiplicity of oppressive structures.

What I was not expecting, then, was for writing this chapter to shake up my thinking once again, and make me face some of the foundational oppressive myths my profession relies upon.

What we think we know – the example of eye contact

When I train, I tell each cohort something I hope they will take to heart: unlearning is as important as learning. It’s what we think we already know that gets in the way of us meeting our clients and offering an authentic, therapeutic relationship. One of my skills as a therapist is to notice these assumptions and overturn them – instead of leaning into the structures that might render me a “knowledgeable expert” I try to approach the existing body of learning with caution and look at clients with fresh eyes.

What if, for example, a client’s lack of eye contact is not due to shame and trauma, as I was taught, but simply a natural difference in how they process the world around them, e.g. neurodivergence? What might that difference mean in a world that treats such a difference negatively, rather than neutrally? What would it do to their relationships with others if they were seen as less trustworthy, or less interested, for no good reason, but just because that’s a story society tells about people who make less eye contact? What would a different world look like that understood some people just can’t make eye contact and that’s okay?

What happens if we introduce the idea of shame to a client who doesn’t make eye contact and may have been made to feel shame for that? We might snarl them up in feelings of shame rather than alleviate them. What extra emotional burden might we be attaching to a neutral behaviour?

What if their decreased social acceptance did in fact lead them to be abused, making our assumptions that eye contact is connected to trauma sort of correct, only from the wrong way round – lack of eye contact causes marginalisation, marginalisation makes someone more likely to be targeted for abuse and less likely to be believed, and protected.

Focussing on upbringing ignores social inequalities

This is just one small example, of course. Our profession draws heavily on the idea that something is individually wrong with clients who come to therapy, and very often something “went wrong”, probably in relation to their caregivers. Historically, natural differences have been treated as pathology, and much of that thinking remains in place in our theories. I’m not new in noticing how this individualises systemic problems, but until I wrote this chapter, I had perhaps not realised how big the problem was.

My person who doesn’t make eye contact is likely to experience substantially poorer quality relationships throughout life due to the way others react to them, but if they wind up in the therapy room, just how likely are we to notice that people are treating them differently than they treat others, based on this natural difference? That the deficit is in other people’s ability to treat the client fairly and offer them the same relational conditions they might offer others?

The problem this client has is pervasive ableism, one of the many oppressive structures that weave their way into systems that ensure some of our clients are supported less well within the societal web. But as a trainee therapist I was given a head full of far too many theories that talk about things like maternal attachment, appropriate development, and the clincher, that a person who finds people to be less trustworthy has a problem within them that needs addressing. The most likely suspect for that problem is the family of origin, and traditionally the focus would be on the mother, which is where gender underpins this story.

The truth: people are less fair and trustworthy to you if you don’t make good eye contact. Therapy traditionally would be heavily biased towards seeing this as a client’s misperception of the world and likely find the source of the problem in childhood and the family. Therapy can gaslight you into believing a wider social issue outside of your control is something you have agency over, which might be a relief, but is not actually true.

Mythologising about mothers

And this is where gender comes in, because the therapy profession is also built upon a myth of women’s superior empathy and caregiving abilities and idealises and aggrandizes the importance of the maternal bond. If something has gone wrong, we like to trace that problem not to wider social structures in which we all can play a part, but individual family circumstances, and particularly mothers.

Even though your postcode on the day you were born has far greater impact on your chances in life than what your mum was like, and even though the evidence for attachment theory is (I discovered) surprisingly weak,  our profession and society at large still scapegoats marginalised parents for broad social issues. Health problems? Ignorant mums not feeding kids right, never unequal access to healthcare, systemic stressors, less safe environments, and exposure to environmental toxins. Behavioural problems? Bad parenting, not the underdiagnosis of neurodiversity in working class, particularly Black, kids, and the lack of accommodation of diversity within underfunded schools, or the systemic contributors to poorer mental health outcomes, i.e. minority stress.

It takes a village

What can we do, then, to be better therapists? Learn to notice how our theories direct our attention away from unequal structures and pervasive injustice. This may mean unlearning things we thought we knew. Gender inequality, as I explain further in the chapter, is deeply tied to class and colonialism – it underpins a story of the centrality of family in our outcomes and life chances – convenient in perpetuating inequality and individualising social issues, but ultimately, just a story, and often one that scapegoats mothers.

There’s a reason Igbo and Yoruba cultures say “it takes a village to raise a child”– we’re all responsible for how we all turn out, and our wider social structures, not our family bonds in isolation, largely determine these outcomes.

Writing the chapter on gender crystallised these ideas for me and made me notice in a new way just how many tricks I had been taught to evade looking at the bigger social picture and focus on the centrality of family and “upbringing”. It has changed my view of the work I do, I believe for the better.