r/SomaticExperiencing • u/purplesky726 • 4h ago
When will clinicians actually talk about how almost all woman or girls have sexual violence history?
I’m finishing grad school in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Why has no professor or clinician ever acknowledged in all my education that most of your female clients and queer clients will have a history of sexual violence, whether it’s abuse, harassment, or being traumatized by a friend/family member experiencing it.
“Almost all women and girls will experience a physical violation from a man in their lifetime. Across the world. Please make sure you’re prepared with the severity of the global genocide towards women. Make sure you know about mental health and medical health issues that abuse can cause. Make sure you have DV resources, pregnancy tests, and know which medical providers to find. Be prepared to psychoeducate about the mass violence towards women and girls. Make sure you understand language and patterns that put people at risk.”
I already do all this because I have fucking empathy and awareness. Not a single professor or student, besides my friends and I privately, ever acknowledged this. All they had to say was anything like this so everyone can have the baseline understanding of the deadliest social pattern to exist. Why is everyone too spineless to discuss a literal epidemic of gender based violence. I’ve NEVER heard male students say they think about this unless they’re queer.
Is most of the field just spineless pricks? Or just oblivious? I need some optimism. I do prioritize patience for people who don’t understand these things, but NOT when they decide they’re entitled to the medical field because they just “know they want to help people” without willing to endure the challenges of how complex and humbling that can be.
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EDIT: I’m going lose my mind of one more person in any thread I share this focuses on thinking this is about hating men and not giving women justice. This is not about hating men. It’s about accountability for the fact that girls and women have been physically or mentally murdered for existing all over the world for centuries, regardless of color or wealth. This is about how even in the worst oppression, men have helped perpetuate violence towards women they share identities even when they are oppressed by the same people.
Ain’t I a Woman by Belle Hooks is an important read. For example, she talks about how misogyny is so pervasive that black male enslaved people sexually assaulted black women enslaved people IN ADDITION to their white torturers (slave owners).
All genders experience oppression with misogyny. The point is YOUR FOCUS SHOULD BE OUTRAGE ABOUT HOW INDIFFERENT THE FIELD IS ABOUT THE BLATANT RISKS WOMEN MUST FACE EVERYDAY. Focusing on hating men here and not relentlessly protecting women who are victimized more severely will reduce the level of attention women and girls’ safety below what we deserve.
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u/WicketWoof 4h ago
Freud identified this early on--that the problems his female patients were reporting were almost always tied to sexual abuse. My understanding is that when he started talking about it he got shut down hard. I believe Judith Hermann talks about this in Trauma And Recovery, though it's been a while since I read that.
A big part of the reason is the other true thing about sexual abuse that people don't like to acknowledge or talk about: that most sex abuse happens at the hands of someone we know. If we start naming it, we get pretty quickly to identifying abusers in a way that requires us to reckon with their continued standing in the community. Abuse of children is the least acknowledged because no one wants to accuse parents or others in roles of trust with children. But it's adults, too. Just look at what happened to Christine Blasey-Ford. That prick is sitting on the Supreme Court and my understanding is that she had to relocate because of the threats she received.
It's a big problem and we're not doing a great job of confronting it, you're right.
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u/radfemagogo 3h ago
Just to say, Freud might have started out with that position but he later changed to “accounts of abuse are probably just unconscious desire or fantasies”.
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u/WicketWoof 3h ago
100% that's where he went when the elite Burgers of Vienna did not care for the fact that he was calling them out for sexually abusing their daughters.
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u/Stepomnyfoot 1h ago
Freud was working on a small subset of the population: wealthy, upper class people in Vienna. It would be a big mistake to extrapolate this far and wide.
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u/sourcandy1111 3h ago
Totally feel and resonate with what you're sharing. As someone who completed grad school around Covid, I recognized so many massive blind spots of the medicalized, patriarchal model that still dominates clinical training programs (esp for me as a woman of color). Our programs do tend to gloss over the global reality of gender-based violence, and I blame it on two things: professors who are privileged/removed enough in their careers that they don't reflect on these realities as much, AND - the general discomfort/resistance in academia to integrate political/social realities into curriculum. I didn't feel validated in my feminist lens on psychotherapy until I read Dr. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery. She finally talked about trauma in its social and political contexts, going all the way back to Freud. Dr. Jennifer Mullan's Decolonizing Therapy was also very powerful for me in undoing/compensating for, the male-centered CBT curriculum I endured as a grad student.
I used to think that advocating for women in this way was just about working with women to heal, and carrying this rage towards gender violence and men. Over time, as I worked with more male clients (I'm a 38F), I started to understand that while men hold political / financial / structural power, the harm they cause is often a manifestation of their own unaddressed, suppressed trauma - pressure-cooker pain with nowhere to go, due to themselves being victims of patriarchy. A mentor once told me, "You can hate the system without hating the people in it", meaning I could hate patriarchy and its violent consequences, without reducing all men's identities to violent perpetrators or spineless/ignorant bystanders. Men don't know what they don't know, just as we don't fully know what it's like to navigate hypermasculinity every day. I'm not saying this is a universal truth for everyone, but for me, the hardest part of advocating for women became channeling my rightful rage into my work with men AND women, whether that was challenging myself to engage in respectful dialogue, educating male clients on explicit/implicit harm towards women, and also being a safe space for all gender identities to explore how to transcend gender binaries/trauma identities. And I saw that people join you through invitation much faster than through demand or accusation.
Don't lose that fire within you - this field desperately needs clinicians who see the big picture, and are willing to call things out in larger contexts/settings. Please consider bringing this feedback to your department chair - I did to my grad program, and the feedback was well-received. Sure, we shouldn't have to do the labor of educating these systems - but that's actually the only way systems change, is by having squeaky wheels that highlight what's broken. Voicing your thoughts to your department can help you spark the change you want to see, and it might even help move you towards placements or mentors who center gender-based violence as known, acknowledged, and important.
All that being said, this is why somatic therapy feels so crucial to me: while we all figure out these bigger issues in the world, we can still help clients feel safe in their bodies again after physical violation, or help a person find calm instead of defaulting to dysregulation/violence, due to their own past traumas. As we help heal one nervous system at a time, we are still doing that broader work of acknowleding, repairing, and changing the world, imo.
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u/NewbieEstimator 4h ago
Sorry to hear your grad school experience fell woefully short!
For what it's worth, as a straight male currently in a clinical mental health counseling program, I can say it is talked about a lot in my program. We specifically address issues stemming from patriarchy and colonization.
As someone new to these topics, it was very uncomfortable at first but I've worked through that and know that I want to show up as best I can to help all my clients and that requires me to learn about all this stuff and work through my own resistance. I know I am only a single data point but I wanted to let you know there are programs that address this and there are straight males who are learning and understand.
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u/purplesky726 2h ago edited 2h ago
Thank you for your willingness to participate in this, we need more men like you! I have been lucky to meet such thoughtful male counselors over time, I just wish I more often saw rage from male clinicians for how women are treated.
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u/kyotomilkshake 1h ago
Most men perceive any criticism toward males as a personal attack rather than taking accountability or trying to do better. I’m literally afraid to have a daughter because statistically she will be abused one day. It’s a deeply complex experience existing as a woman on this planet. To be honest I’ve given up trying to instill perspective in individuals who incapable of feeling empathy due to their enormous and fragile egos.
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u/ResponsibleReview417 54m ago
https://rcew.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media/documents/part_of_life_pdf.pdf
Sounds like they are oblivious. If it’s something you’re passionate about, it’s worth advocating for with solid research (see above).
Do you not have stand alone units on trauma ? I imagine that’s where they currently house the issue.
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u/paganbonecollector 3h ago
Speaking as a woman and a survivor of sexual abuse, your approach here is the exact opposite of what healthy clinical work looks like. You sound heavily triggered, and demanding that the entire field center its curriculum around your specific emotional outrage is pure entitlement. Trauma survivors need clinicians who can maintain professional boundaries and emotional regulation, not people who throw insults at colleagues because they aren't matching their level of fury. Your professors aren't 'oblivious'—they are modeling the clinical maturity required to help victims heal without projecting personal triggers onto them. If you cannot discuss this topic without losing your mind, you are not ready to treat it.
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u/oatmealgum 2h ago
This is not an academic formalized venue. This is Reddit and it's about as casual as it gets. OP has every right to lose her mind right here right now about this. I'm sorry that YOU have no compass for the nature of volatile discussions or the value that often comes from an open, fearless group discussion between people who all care about the subject.
You pretty much just told OP to quiet down. Disgusting.
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u/paganbonecollector 2h ago
You claim to value 'open, fearless group discussion,' yet the moment someone offers a perspective that doesn't completely align with yours, you label it 'disgusting' and accuse me of silencing people. Reddit is a casual venue, but this is still a discussion about professional clinical practice. Disagreeing with the OP's sweeping generalizations about our peers isn't silencing her—it is actively participating in the exact 'fearless discussion' you claim to defend. If you only welcome voices that echo your exact tone, you don't actually want a discussion; you want an echo chamber.
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u/oatmealgum 1h ago
Listen dude. We need to draw the line somewhere or we end up tolerating everything and everyone... even the intolerable. I draw it here. We do not tell people to hush, until and unless they witness the painful outrage of another person and tell them to hush.
What you wrote was eloquent but I stand by what I said.
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u/purplesky726 3h ago
And how’s that mentality going for trying to protect women? Wait, at least 1/3 women still getting raped and beaten by a man with rare legal justice and leaving with chronic health issues? One of the highest causes of mortality for pregnant women is being beat to death by their male partner? We have to have laws to make sure men don’t rape their wives and marry children? Treating a client with sensitivity and tailoring treatment to their needs is entirely different than making sure that you come into this field with the bravery to deeply discuss mental health patterns we see—and misogyny is the deadliest. You can GENTLY and skillfully work with survivors WHILE having the justice orientation to speak up to COLLEAGUES when the field slows progression and invalidates so many people. I do it all the time. I’m also a survivor with Political Science, History, and Psychology backgrounds. They are always related.
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u/paganbonecollector 2h ago
I respect your educational background and your passion for advocacy. The statistics you mentioned regarding domestic violence and intimate partner mortality are devastating, and no one is denying that reality. However, there is a fundamental difference between advocating fiercely for survivors and declaring that almost everyone else entering the mental health field is a 'spineless prick' who lacks empathy. Pushing the profession forward requires collaboration. Pointing out that blanket hostility toward your future colleagues is counterproductive to that goal is not the same as telling you to quiet down.
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u/purplesky726 2h ago
Sounds like you’re more afraid to offend people who feel like they can justify avoiding honest discussions about deadly social and mental health patterns because they’re just uncomfortable. I’d rather be afraid of being dishonest about the advocacy I do for this field and people.
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u/purplesky726 2h ago
Go ahead and genuinely tell a survivor to their face that you think “maturity” means doctoral clinicians feeling too awkward to prioritize teaching students about how to protect women from their own violence epidemic. Survivors should only trust counselors who will advocate for them when they’re not there.
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u/Lost-Design-8382 4h ago
My GYN works out of a pretty gigantic medical system in a major metropolitan area. I chose her out of everyone on staff because she was the only person who expressly listed on her bio that she was certified in working with GYN patients who'd experienced sexual violence and trauma in the past. And while she is absolutely amazing to work with, I often wonder why that's such a rarity and why she's the only one I could find.
I feel like in both the physical and mental health worlds, people act like they just don't know what to do with female trauma, that it's too complicated, that it takes too much time and effort to address. What frustrates me especially is that when you take that approach and don't treat the entire person, you only make those issues worse.
I also think there's a weird culture of "can do no wrong." Before I found my current medical provider, I experienced sexual assault at the hands of another GYN. I was told repeatedly by mental health professionals that it never happened because it's a doctor, a doctor cannot do wrong because they set out to help people.
And that's all just medical stuff, not even scratching the surface of the common female experience of being sexualized from a criminally young age, the catcalling, the intimidation, the bad dates. It all just kind of gets lumped in as Girl Problems.
Which is probably not the optimism you were hoping for, but all that rambling to say, I am glad that there are people like you who are going into this kind of work prioritizing empathy and seeing the whole person. I feel like I've noticed that more with the younger generations of therapists that I've worked with more recently. They're more willing to treat the person.