On Silence... (27.10.25)
On Silence... (27.10.25)
On 8th October I wrote: “Therapy ought to be responsive to the needs of the individual in front of us, rather than been treated as a sort of moral ‘framework’ into which we squeeze our clients because we know best and are thoroughly enlightened. This may well lead to poor therapeutic experiences for clients.”
Therapists may unintentionally assume that a client's background, culture, ethnicity, or sexuality inherently leads to difficult or unfair experiences, and the role of the therapist is more akin to an investigator - to identify systemic inequities and draw them out of the client.
I also wrote that... "to attach any of this worldview to the individual before you in therapy (victim or villain) may be deeply unhelpful and, dare I say it, patronising and racist."
I warned of the risks of making assumptions about clients based on immutable traits like ethnicity, a practice rooted in activist-driven social justice and critical race theories.
When therapists, steeped in 'anti-oppressive' training, decide for themselves that power structures and tyrannical hierarchies are the cause of their client's issues, they risk getting well ahead of their client…. This could mean that the client feels unheard and unhelped as an individual, as their therapists own politicized ideas overshadow the whole process.
A good example came my way, interesting because it makes my point for me while I think (in part) intending to make the opposite! Let’s consider the impact on clients of activist ideas in the therapy room. The article is from the Guardian, written early 2020, and I link it here.
Titled “I thought I was a lost cause: How therapy is failing people of colour”, the article describes how a 20 year old lady called Sana was referred to a psychotherapist following a depression that seems linked to the death of her father.
This was her first experience in therapy, and she was assigned a therapist who was white. Sana says that she assumed.. “[my therapist] hadn’t had much exposure to minority people because of the way that she spoke to me.” Sana goes on… “out of the blue” the therapist started to question her about forced marriage. Sana tried to pull this back, telling her therapist that she was there for depression, anxiety and to handle the loss of her father, but the therapist seemed to seize upon one detail – her Pakistani heritage - to venture other suggestions as to why she might be upset.
Here’s Sana..: “She was so unaware of how what she was asking would make me feel. It felt like she was putting me in a box”. Sana didn’t feel she could say anything about this as the sessions were through the NHS and she didn’t want to be ungrateful, but found… “I couldn’t open up to this woman. I was holding back every time she'd try to get deeper. I think she sensed it because after a few sessions she said ‘I don’t think we’re getting very far. I think you’d be better suited to somebody else.’”.
Props to the journalist for a good article. The article goes on to make various points about the need for more diversity in the pool of therapists, many of which I find myself in agreement with (it can only be good for clients to have more choices), but veers just a little into dogmatic territory in places. The suggestion seems to be that more training on minority experiences - such as a deeper understanding of Pakistani culture - would have benefitted Sana in therapy. However, Sana's bad experience might instead highlight a different issue: the need for therapists to prioritize individual needs over generalized cultural assumptions....
What do you think went wrong for Sana, dear reader? Either Sana's impression is correct (she would be forgiven for arriving at her conclusion either way) and her therapist had zero exposure to 'minority people'. Or alternatively, this therapist, in her headlong rush to talk about 'cultural' and systemic factors that she has decided are important (as she has been taught), forgot to actually listen to her client...
My guess would be the latter. I think the issues stemmed here from a therapist, probably with good intentions, with a head crammed full of social justice content from her training course - all encouraging her to actively ‘work with difference’ and consider, at once and with urgency, cultural factors – without the experience or instinct to know when to shut the hell up and listen.
In a bid to categorize her client’s experience according to her own training framework and ‘do the right things’, this therapist provided little support for Sana at a dreadful moment in her young life. I was sorry to see it.
There is no requirement to be an expert on other cultures to offer good therapy, and individual clients are free to pick therapists that they feel will suit them and understand their own experiences. Some men prefer to see a man, some women a woman. And I know some from minority ethnic backgrounds would rather chat through issues with someone who will at least have some frame of personal experience that helps with context.
Sana might have benefitted more from a therapist who approached her with non-judgemental curiosity and openness, setting aside the activist-driven urge to generate a preconceived 'line up' of cultural factors (none of which Sana raised) in order to be sufficiently 'anti-oppressive'.
If we drop out the politics we can attend to what our clients are actually saying, and they in turn may well feel comfortable talking about ‘issues of cultural difference’. If we stop ourselves from talking for long enough, we might actually learn something about the person in the room with us.
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