This professional association is happy to publish an article that makes a case for imposing the therapist’s agenda on the client. The author argues that white therapists should bring the topic of race and racism into therapy with their white clients. Whatever happened to the idea that therapists worked with the issues their clients brought?
Note the deliberate use of the lower-case in the title.
Well this makes me physically ill to see. How common is this kind of thing? I know the panic is really big about this and justifiably so but knowing what I know about the internet, everything skews pessimistic. Are we fooling ourselves that this problem is, say, greater than 80% of therapists and/or therapy training programs? Is it actually more like 25%? Or 10% or even 5%, but the loudest most awful voices get the most attention? It is our human nature to focus on the negative as a survival strategy — noticing the good thing might feel good, but noticing the bad thing could save your life, etc.
I’m only harping on this because if such a thing posted above is actually super widespread…not a minority…then this is a worldwide crisis — at least a crisis in the parts of the world that have therapy. We should be screaming from every rooftop.
I have a really strong tendency to try to save the world and so this stuff definitely gets me riled up. It’s a bad habit for me — comes from growing up hyper liberal.
Has anyone actually tried to study the scale and spread of this kind of thing, formally, quantitatively? Or are we just panicking because it’s on the internet?
This boggles the mind…Yes! Where has the idea of working with what our clients bring into the room gone? It is unethical to impose values and conversations upon our clients. I find these kinds of articles so self centred in that the authors always believe that race is the central issue in everything and that there is no possibility that their viewpoint is not the “one truth” and so they should impose this “truth” on anyone and everyone. Imagine a client coming to you, grieving and distraught, to process the loss of their spouse to cancer and you decide that this is an ideal time to have a little chat about race and our ‘whiteness’. Ffs – how disrespectful and entitled!