Melbourne trauma psychotherapy

My psychotherapeutic practice is both feminist, and trauma-informed. Many trauma-informed principles utilised by mental health practitioners today have been borrowed from feminist therapy which pre-dates contemporary trauma practice by several decades, but this lineage is unacknowledged (see Tseris, 2013, for a discussion). As such, feminist therapy and trauma-informed practice have significant overlaps when working with traumatised clients, including the importance of:

• ensuring safety for clients within the counselling space and relationship;
• supporting clients to understand how their current difficulties and behaviours have developed as post-traumatic coping mechanisms;
• supporting the development of new coping strategies;
• creating a collaborative therapeutic relationship, rather than a hierarchical relationship (where the therapist ‘knows best’);
• facilitating client choice and control regarding the therapeutic process (e.g. what topics to discuss, what interventions to use, what goals to set, etc.);
• empowerment of the client.

Although trauma-informed practice and feminist therapy share similar principles in their understanding of how to support trauma-affected individuals, feminist therapy is distinct from trauma-informed practice, as it is its own psychotherapy. As such, feminist psychotherapy has its own theories and philosophies regarding the causes of human distress, and how to support clients towards greater mental health and wellbeing.

Centrally, feminist therapists believe that mental health is significantly affected by the way that society offers certain individuals more, or less, access to social power. Feminist psychotherapy, following on from feminism as a political movement, was one of the first psychotherapies to understand that good mental health is not solely dependent on neurochemicals and genetics, but rather, an individual’s mental health is centrally affected by their access to social power.

My feminism is intersectional, which means that while I acknowledge the harms of a patriarchal society on individuals, I also acknowledge there are oppressive forces operating in society that affect individuals in addition to patriarchy – racism, classism, homophobia, ableism, and ageism are examples of these additional biases that affect individuals, and consequently their distress and wellbeing.

Therefore, a key tenet of feminist therapy is that power and powerlessness within one’s life strongly shape an individual’s experience of health and wellbeing, and that the social issues that create these conditions should be acknowledged within psychotherapy. Doing so, can reduce individual blame and pathologisation which can come from a more medical model of understanding human distress, and open up additional possibilities for individual consciousness raising, and change. An intersectional feminist approach to psychotherapy is therefore a more holistic understanding of what contributes to human distress and wellbeing, than a strictly neurochemical or genetic understanding of mental health.