How Can Challenging Gender Roles in Therapeutic Spaces Lead to Healthier Relationships?
Author: Sarah Murray
Take a moment and think about this. How many roles do women have today? A sister, a daughter, a mother, a friend, a homemaker, a child bearer, a partner, a teacher, a colleague, a caretaker, a therapist for many. In addition to all of these roles, women also have to show up for themselves. Oh, you thought I meant to show up for themselves in a healthy way like “self-care?” Women have to show up for themselves so they aren't rejected by society. They have to be skinny, pretty, kind, patient, assertive but not too assertive that it threatens a man's ego. Women have to do all of these things for others? Sacrificing all aspects of themselves, even the parts of them that belong to them?
It isn’t a secret - these scenarios are historically true. The feminist movement and many women have paved a path in giving women more autonomy and choice in certain spaces. With this, there are new challenges we face in balancing the many roles women still carry. Women working nine-to-five jobs while maintaining all of their other roles leaves little to no room for true self-compassion or self-healing which can impact the way we work within the family system as a whole. Male partners or fathers sometimes wonder how they can be a support for their wife or partner while they too are upholding their societal expectations. There are greater systems at work that influence these challenges and ultimately we want to get to this question of how can we support one another in ensuring we all have more spaces for healing and challenging these norms?
In supporting one another, we must be inclusive of all truths to history. These challenges are historically true for women of color. Women of color may often feel white feminists, while their work is important, leave out their experience or may not understand intersectional identity. Women of color have historically carried many more roles; today, they still do in their enclaves of masculine-dominated cultures and wider social oppression and racism. This makes it even more important that we are inclusive of all experiences when discussing these kinds of social issues.
The complexities of women are misunderstood by men and this does not mean we should shame women for being powerful, complex and deeply compassionate. To silence a woman could be your silencing of the potential they see in you to look deeper within yourself. To silence anyone could be a denial of your own opportunity for growth as you are denying the way in which we learn from one another in conflict and in care.
Women should have the choice to hold as many roles as they wish without men feeling threatened by it and without men controlling it. How can we accomplish this? How can we honor the freedom for all genders to instill healthy, balanced compatibility? How can we honor the many roles we all take on while holding space for rest, care and concern of one another?
Every pack or group of animals has a unique way of surviving in their ecosystem. Humans have a much more complex social ability and an array of many everchanging ecosystems. There is a complexity in distinguishing what is biological and what is socially constructed. Women have a natural ability to be caretakers as they are biologically the child bearer. Men have typically been the protector and provider as biologically shown in stature and strength. However, we can’t deny that men can feel emotions and be a caretaker and women can provide financial stability and have physical strength and endurance.
In naming the complexities of our species, is this enough to accept the grace we should give one another and the acceptance work to move away from gendered thinking and move toward believing our ability to be many things despite our gender? There are biological truths as there are also ways we have oppressed or controlled through gender and race.
It is important to name that one can still be privileged and oppressed at the same time. A white man is privileged and has many doors open for them in this society but they may not have ever had spaces for understanding themselves in a deeper, more authentic sense due to social pressures and a system built to ignore a system that benefits them. Men are taught to not show emotion and fight the most human parts of themselves. This is still oppressive and continues to create cycles of oppression. Again, naming the oppression gendered thinking can create for all. In other words, how can someone understand another's experience in life if they haven’t done the work to understand their own?
It is no secret that there is a need for men to have more space for self expression or self exploration and women don’t have enough space or sometimes patience for mens delay or hesitation. In other words, men need to go to therapy too not just for themselves, their own stressors or traumas and societal pressures but also, out of respect and alleviation of the many caretaking roles women take on. The internal processing needs to be done both in separate spaces and together. There needs to be an understanding of each other's traumas, triggers, healthier ways to communicate and an ongoing awareness of one another's commitment to fairly or equitably challenge and distribute care within the home or towards one another. Individuals working to understand where they come from and how it has influenced the roles they have tried to uphold can become a partnership that works to deconstruct these norms and recreate a space together with more compassion and love.