Feminist to a Fault
By: Audrey Batterham
Tags: Empowerment, Social Change, Mental Health, Feminism, Self Improvement

Feminist to a Fault

How I used my feminism as an excuse to avoid personal change

Image of me, Summer 2020

As a social worker, my feminism has helped me help people. But I have also let my feminism get in the way of helping myself.

In feminism, the story we have about individual suffering is that it often relates to the person’s social environment and trauma history. It’s usually not a problem with behaviour or choices or brains, but a problem with social inequity. We analyze the pressure of gender roles, the gendered violence women and trans people experience across their lifespan, and the ways that sexism creates barriers to health, career growth, and equity in heterosexual relationships. We also look at how race, class, ability, sexual orientation and other social locations interact with gender to create additional burdens in oppressive contexts.

As a social worker, if a client relapsed, I would express concern about her stressors rather than blaming her for her “failure” to self-care. If a young person became aggressive, I would ask what had happened to them leading up to the challenging behaviour. When I was working in a shelter, a young woman struggled to get up in the morning and was rude to the staff trying to wake her. My colleagues said she’s just a teenager, that she was choosing not to follow the rules. They were fed up and ready to kick her out. I asked if anyone had actually asked her what the issue was, knowing that abused women often have a hard time sleeping. No one had asked. When they did, sure enough, not only did she have flashbacks, but she was sex working at night.

I don’t know how many times in my career I have had to remind folks to ask what’s going on for someone rather than going straight to controlling and punishing the behaviour. I wouldn’t take back any of that. The problem is that I worked so hard to get people to move their lens from the individual to the social context, that I ended up using the social context as an excuse not to look at myself as an individual. I ended up ignoring the things I was doing to contribute to my own suffering. I was so hypervigilant to oppression that resistance and opposition became embodied habits.

I wasn’t pathologically depressed, I told myself, I was just unhappy with my situation. I had wonderful support and strong self insight and no problems, really. It was just a hard job. If I just got a new job, then I would have energy for all the rest — I would start working out more and eating better and go on dates and pick up a hobby and socialize more. If I did all that, I would be fine. Totally fine. I’m a strong woman living in patriarchy, I thought — that’s the real problem.

I didn’t do therapy for a long time because of that story.

Because of that story, once I started searching for a therapist, I clicked past any therapist’s bio that didn’t mention feminism or social justice. I thought, “If they’re only looking at me and not my situation, I will feel pathologized.” I thought a non-feminist therapist wouldn’t get me, as if my feminism was the only thing to know about me.

I didn’t take medication for a long time. Rather than quitting, I hurtled through each week to get to the weekend, when all I did was sleep and mainline Netflix. I kept applying to jobs I didn’t even really want. There were years that I could have been doing different things to foster my growth and well-being. But I didn’t.

I prolonged my own suffering because of that story.

I also allowed my feminist identity to create resistance to anything I labelled as either “mainstream” or “woo-woo.” For a long time, I realize now, I judged things at my own expense. I judged Cognitive Behaviour Therapy because it didn’t seem right to “logic” myself out of feelings that were perfectly valid. (CBT teaches people to control their thoughts in order to manage feelings and change behaviour.) I needed to leave the reality I was in, not adjust to it via mind tricks, I thought. I resisted “radical acceptance” because what I was experiencing in a toxic workplace was unacceptable. I resisted meditative therapies such as tapping because they felt like trying to access some sort of magic when what I wanted was justice for myself.

I’ve learned that to get well, I had to be open-minded to things that are unfamiliar or that don’t fit into some rigid idea of what kind of person I am. I had to re-examine my cognitive distortions about how feminism should translate into how I live my life. Instead of constantly critiquing the world around me, I needed to tap into my creative energy.

To be clear, I am not criticizing feminism. People who are afraid of change will use any GD excuse not to change, even feminism. We hunker down in an identity and become very difficult to move.

Turns out I like tapping. I know now that I don’t need my therapist to be some smarter version of me to be helpful. I wasn’t as self-compassionate as I thought I was (whoops). I’ve discovered that CBT can be really frickin’ useful. I’ve ended up self-coaching myself with CBT, which has been repackaged as “thoughtwork” in the coaching world. I landed on podcasts from feminist coaches Victoria Albina and Kara Loewentheil and applied their lessons into my own life. I even like podcasts that aren’t about social justice!

It’s not so much that my perspective was entirely wrong. I was right that I’m a strong woman with a lot of insight. I was right that CBT has some limitations. I do need to feel my feelings. I did need to leave my workplace. I do resonate better with coaching and therapy techniques that are integrated with a feminist or social justice lens.