The Price of Privilege

It has been several months since I posted to my blog. I did warn in my first post that I wasn't a prolific writer!

I want to recommend a book I've started reading, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine. In a day and age when parents often feel enormous pressure to set their children up for success in life, and children often feel enormous pressure to succeed, hers is a perspective well worth considering.

Therapy and the "victim mentality"

In discussions with others about how one decides if one needs therapy, a remark I hear from time to time is that therapy is a "crutch," or that it promotes a "victim mentality." We sometimes hear critics in the media suggest that therapy promotes a "culture of victimization."

These comments are interesting to me, because I think of therapy as promoting the opposite. There is a saying often attributed to Freud (although he likely never said it) that mental health means the ability to love well and to work well. The implication is that mental health affords us the power and freedom to live our lives fully, without being encumbered by fear, anger, depression, and the like. I see therapy as a way of restoring that power and freedom to us when things go awry.

It is a commonplace of victimization — whether we are talking about war, rape, child abuse, or anything else — that victims are expected to take the blame for what their victimizers do to them. I suspect that some who decry therapy as promoting a "culture of victimization" are people who align themselves with victimizers — and who don't like to see victims empowering themselves and placing responsibility for their victimization back where it belongs.

Still, there can be a seductive danger in labeling oneself a "victim." For if victims are not responsible for what happens to them, then by taking on the label of "victim," one can avoid taking responsibility for one's own actions and one's own life generally. This, I think, is where people can unwittingly wander off course in trying to work through difficult or traumatic experiences, and where some therapists can hinder rather than help their clients.

While it is important not to blame ourselves for events we have no part in, if we don't take responsibility for the things in our lives we can control, such as our actions toward others, then paradoxically we can never feel truly powerful or free — we can never truly love well or work well. The reality is that, much as we might like to think otherwise, there is no neat, clean division between "victim" and "victimizer." We are all capable, given the right set of circumstances, of being both. Power, freedom, and responsibility all go hand in hand.

With this in mind, one idea to consider if you are thinking about therapy is whether you feel "stuck" in some area of your life — whether the efforts you are making under your own power to solve or work through a problem just aren't getting you anywhere. Therapy can be one way of moving out of that "stuck" place and back toward living your life as freely, powerfully, and responsibly as possible.

Welcome

Welcome to my very first blog. I am a marriage and family therapist in San Francisco, California, and this blog is an adjunct to my professional website.

The idea for this blog came in part from talking with friends, colleagues, and clients over time about therapy and therapists. Many people are fascinated by the ritual of therapy, even if they have never gone to a therapist themselves. I am asked the same questions about therapy over and over. Why would someone want to go to therapy and talk about their problems for an hour? Why would someone want to become a therapist and spend their days listening to other people? And what's up with therapists and their strange behaviors — their blank stares, their cryptic comments ("Hmmm, how do you feel about that?"), and their long silences?

The Internet has given us new ways to express our ideas to a wide audience, so I decided it would be a fun and interesting experiment to put down some of my thoughts about questions like these in a blog. It also gives me a chance to write, something I don't always have an opportunity to do these days.

One interesting thing about blogging is that it encourages self-revelation, and self-revelation is not something that therapists are generally known for. In fact, therapists can often be private people, loath to show the world too much of who they really are. Sometimes — for example, to foster appropriate boundaries and a good therapeutic frame with clients — there are very good reasons for therapists to maintain a zone of privacy. But too often, privacy becomes a way for therapists to deny their own imperfections and, by extension, their own humanness. I won't make any promises about what I will or won't share about myself in this blog, but I do hope to convey a sense that therapists are ordinary human beings, just like everyone else, and that we're all on this journey called life together.

I'm not a prolific writer, but I will post my thoughts and feelings from time to time on a variety of topics related to the world of therapy. I hope you find this blog enjoyable and educational, and if you have any comments or any questions you'd like to see addressed, please E-mail them to me (you can do this via my profile).

The name of this blog, Making Our Way, is inspired by the song Wonder by Natalie Merchant. Over the years, it has become a sort of anthem for disabled and chronically ill children, and others facing adversity in life with courage and dignity. Here's part of it:

people see me
I'm a challenge to your balance
I'm over your heads
how I confound you and astound you
to know I must be one of the wonders
of god's own creation
and as far as you can see you can offer me
no explanation

o, I believe
fate smiled and destiny
laughed as she came to my cradle
know this child will be able
laughed as she came to my mother
know this child will not suffer
laughed as my body she lifted
know this child will be gifted
with love, with patience and with faith
she'll make her way