Therapy and Social Change

Therapy and Social Change

There is nothing more important in therapy than our partnership.

But of course you might say, “You’re a Therapist. Of course you have to believe in this partnership!” Let me tell you how I got there.

I used to be a community organizer before I entering graduate school to study therapy. I organized because I saw systemic problems that needed to change in the world of work, with teens/adolescents, within my graduate school therapy program, and within social construct of families and relationships. I was an advocate for policy change and organizational change but when I started graduate school and my focus changed. I always kept the systemic problems within eyesight but moved onto partnership with individuals instead of in policy.

I met a man named Sam as part of a graduate school assignment. We would have coffee on a sunny stoop in Harlem and talk about how Harlem used to be in the 90’s. We talked about how he missed it, how he missed his granddaughter coming by daily and how things were changing. This was the start of our partnership. Sam eventually invited me up to his apartment and told me he was going blind. I was his therapeutic partner through the process of understanding his loss of his eyesight. Though the relationship we built  we made changes for him. We got him an aid to help him learn how to walk down the street and use the train. We talked about what he missed seeing and what he missed about his life of sight. We eased him into the life without vision. It was our partnership that helped him accepts this loss, wrestle with the pain and re-claim his world.

I found out through my early work with Sam and others I met that I could create social change one-on-one and that is as grassroots as it gets. We retaliated and we fought pain and didn’t let it take him down or isolate him. We created out of it.

What does social change mean for one person in a therapeutic partnership? It means that we look at how the world created our relational standards and we decide what/that this needs to change for our individual and larger world. As Saul Alensky, the radical pioneer of community organizing writes, we keep the pressure on; never let up. He insists trying new things to keep the opposition (our old emotional thinking, in the case of therapy) off balance. I sit down with patents and we decide how and what we want to change. Partnership, getting to know each other, and trust is step one of that process. Then we identify the individual systemic problem, find out what has been dragging on and address it, overthrow emotional pain and isolation, disrupt conformity and the way it holds back our emotions, organize revolutionary emotional growth, protest negative thinking, organize alternative solutions that impact the individual who can be changed much quicker than the institution and we keep on working and working until we get the change that we want.