My therapist seems politically opposed to my feminist views

[idontknowhowtodreamyourdreams]

I didn't know where else to post this and could do with a sense check/ideas as to how to deal with this.

I've been seeing a therapist for about a year for a range of issues, including substance misuse and recovering from abuse during my childhood and teens (sexual, violence). We've spoken about some really difficult and personal things that I have never discussed before and I have felt that the therapy has been useful. I thought I trusted him and trust is not an easy thing for me.

I'm a GC feminist. I'm also a lawyer and so I tend to have a legal lens on some of the debates around issues of trans rights and the rights of women and girls. I have talked in therapy about how I have found the tone of the debate around trans rights increasingly upsetting and hostile (on one side) and I had been upset over the discussion re the Supreme Court and the Equality Act. I've talked about both this and how hard it can be to feel like there's no space for women to express certain views without being dismissed or labelled.

My error (I totally accept I shouldn't have looked, but he should have locked down his settings) - I looked and saw a pic on SM of him at a protest. I don't want to out myself or him but he was holding a banner basically slagging off the Supreme Court.

And now I feel . . . the trust has gone. Has he been quietly judging me while I shared some frankly painful stuff? Does he respect my perspective? As I don't know if I can work with someone who doesn't. It's not a difference in political views, I feel like my views on these issues are fundamentally part of who I am as a person.

I know I crossed a boundary and shouldn't have looked, but would appreciate any thoughts as to whether I am being overly sensitive and/or whether it's something I should bring up.

Or maybe I am just wrong to care? Thoughts welcome!

I think if the trust has gone it's gone. I don't think you were wrong to look at the picture you did. I think it's inappropriate for a counsellor to put anything online which declares them as for or against any contentious topic. You don't need your counsellor to be GC but someone who is happy to actively protest against women's rights isn't someone who is trustworthy.

@RareGoalsVerge I think I agree. In principle, it may be possible for him to support trans rights and women's rights, but the banner goes further than that.

Looking at your therapists SM was risky,
you aren’t supposed to know your therapist outside of the therapeutic relationship,
the therapist should have sm privacy settings of course,
but it is done now,
you either address this in therapy
leave
continue with an unspoken dynamic in the therapeutic relationship

all tricky options of course

btw therapists will be used to managing working with clients who have values / beliefs etc different to their own, that’s often the case, and they should be skilled at separating that out from the therapy work : transference / counter transference etc ..
but the question now is, can you ?

@PolyVagalNerve yep, I should have known better and not looked.

Different views is one thing, but not respecting the rights of women and girls feels . . . . More.

I think I might potentially want to bring it up with him, but no idea how I can do that without confessing to my snooping! 🙄

I think it depends on how you have found the therapy other than this. I would encourage you to take this into the next session with you and explore it from there. As a therapist myself it’s what I’d do (though for what it’s worth I am also GC in terms of my views, though I never disclose that to clients as it doesn’t change my support or care for them).

PS I’d just confess to the snooping as you’re correct he needs to have clearer boundaries in terms of his privacy settings. Alternatively could it have been a suggested post on Facebook maybe?

Therapy is about them helping you deal with life e.g. interactions with other people.
Now your therapist is a source of those interactions. The dyamic has changed.

If he’s a good/professional therapist he will be able to separate his personal beliefs from your views. It’s an area therapists have to reflect on often and may even be something he talks about in supervision.
imho it’s more to do with whether you can let it go. You’re not obliged to separate these thoughts as you’re the client but he is.
Tbh I’d find it hard too but he also won’t hold it against you if you can’t continue as his client. Again, this sort of thing is in his training.

@imnotaskingforlunchmeat it was very much his own post on social media (the account is totally unprotected, I have no idea why anyone would have an account so open, let alone a therapist).

Overall, I have had a positive experience to date. I have generally felt heard, but looking back with the info I now have I do think he moved the topic along v quickly when I was talking about these issues.

I think it's "on him" not to have been more careful with his SM.

It could be very useful to discuss this issue in therapy, but, like you, I would be wondering whether he was the right therapist for me with such a fundamental difference of beliefs.

I have seen various therapists over the years, sometimes with/for my daughters (who are adopted) but also just for me.

And I was continually astonished by the lack of boundaries around personal opinions which some of them displayed.

One was clearly furious with me for having given up a big career to stay at home and look after the children (I had tried to do both but it was impossible, given the range of additional needs the children had). She was supposed to be adoption aware and know about attachment issues but every week she would make little digs.

I stopped seeing her as a result. A later therapist used to launch into a tirade about Trump (when I hadn't even mentioned him).

One of the therapists my daughter saw kept calling her birth mother "your mum" even when she told him in no uncertain terms not to.

So I'm impressed that your therapist Is able to stay impartial with you. And I guess you might want to ponder why it matters to you if he thinks "badly" of you - the client/ therapist relationship is supposed to bring out stuff like this I think.

I could never confront the therapists - avoiding conflict is one of the reasons for therapy in the first place!! I always just ran away. But really it would have been a breakthrough if I could have said something.

I would feel very tempted to move on to another therapist, because it seems inappropriate for him to be so unprotected in his social media expression of such contentious views (and, tbh, because the views he is supporting seem incompatible with reason and empathy).

However, this will leave you feeling crap and anxious and amputated. So there might be a case for discussing with him the reason that you are considering ending therapy, to get his take on it and to help you process your feelings.

One thing I'm struck by is the fact that you are talking, in therapy, about social/political issues and how they make you feel. Perhaps that in itself is something you need to work through with him. When I was having therapy, both I and my therapist regarded it as something of a distraction, an intellectualising flight from myself, when I talked about myself via the medium of these sorts of wider issues.

@NebulouslyContemporaneous your final para is really interesting! And yes, I wonder if it is some kind of mental flight from myself.

I do worry about him thinking badly of me and that might be a good thing to bring up. But I also have huge doubts as to whether I can trust and respect someone with the views I now know that he has. If I can't do so then the relationship is dead. As someone else said, he doesn't need to be GC but I would settle for not an unthinking moron and/or misogynist at this point!

Attempting to intimidate the judiciary is disgraceful behaviour. He is bringing dishonour upon his profession.

I feel a bit uncomfortable with you discussing childhood sexual abuse with a male therapist who feels this way about women's boundaries

If his social media are public, it’s fair to assume they are meant to share information about therapy or mental health. I’ve looked up all my children’s therapists, that's normal. Keeping private accounts private is everyone's responsibility. You have done nothing wrong.

I would try to bring it up, but I don’t think I could continue with him. He either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care about, how this conflict affects women and girls, especially the most vulnerable. That alone would make me question his grasp of trauma and its impacts. Or he prioritises trans people over women.

I know therapists who are the "be kind" type, but they just don't know much about the issue and follow the crowd. He on the other hand is actively lobbying against women's rights and safety. It is like a therapist who goes to far right demonstrations while treating ethnic minority clients. The two are incompatible in my view.

Some therapists now do social media and it's becoming a lot more relaxed in terms of having public profiles as long as you are happy for your clients to potentially see and nothing inappropriate is on your account. This is with the caveat that many will say you can block me, restrict me and you cannot contact me about sessions on social media. It's a great way for many to market themselves and share content on their specialisms and regulation boards have loosened restrictions on it. That being said many therapists will answer questions about politics and general views because it does matter to the relationship and many will be fine if you ask in intake or further on. Many therapists will have small followings and share content on their views, therapy in general etc to market themesleves.

The affirmation only model in therapy is one of the reasons why we got to such a ridiculous place with gender identity beliefs being socially and culturally enforced as the "correct" view. This, as well current therapy training often being taught through an explicit "social justice" lens with what are essentially political aims is damaging the integrity of the therapy space.

If your therapist has been practising for a while and was trained before the newer models became fashionable then he should be better at keeping his own political views out of the therapy space, and it might be his lack of understanding of how public his social media is that's the problem.

That said, I'm being generous with that assessment, and really I don't think that therapists should be going to protests in the first place because it compromises their neutrality, for want of a better word. I'm a therapist myself and I wouldn't go to a gender critical protest (I specifically mean a placard waiving demonstration rather than an event/conference) even though it aligns with my views, partly because it would be too exposing and professionally calamitous for me, but also because by demonstrating for (or against) something I am prioritising making my own views public and that compromises my ability to be a good therapist to a range of clients who may not share my opinions.

Gender and therapy has become a very fraught and complicated area, and for therapists who work specifically in the gender field coming out on the sex realist side has been necessary because harm has been done to clients (especially children and youth) because of "gender affirming care". And many of those therapists have suffered professionally for being whistleblowers. However, if a therapist is not working in that field they have to think much more carefully about whether it's a responsible act to prioritise activism of any kind above the ethical responsibilities they have to their clients.

The problem really is that therapy as a profession has lost sight of its purpose and has become expressly activist, in much the same way as contemporary journalism, and neither of these professions seem willing to engage with the consequences of going down this route.

It's a very challenging moment to be a therapist right now.

Anyway, OP, taking my professional hat off and thinking from the client side, I completely understand you not feeling comfortable with this therapist anymore. Normally sitting with the uncomfortable dynamic of different views or discomfort for whatever reason is part of the therapeutic relationship, but the gender issue is so reality disturbing, and also has resulted in so many people losing their livelihoods and reputations, that I can see how it's hard to come back from knowing this about your therapist.

He sounds very unprofessional, both for going on a demonstration like that and for posting the pic on social media without privacy settings.

@onlytherain that's the thing - it's v obviously not a business/professional social media account. There is nothing about therapy on there. It is personal, some of it . . . very personal. I don't care at all about the rest of it, but it's definitely not for sharing info about therapy etc. I do follow other therapists on platforms who make good use of social media for professional purposes, in a boundaried way. This is not that!

Op, I thought at first you'd been snooping on his phone or something.

Doesn't the responsibility for maintaining a professional image on social media lie with your therapist? I don't see why you should feel guilty because he's been careless with his privacy settings.

It sounds like the trust has gone and I don't see any way back from that so, for me, the only issue is whether or not you tell him why you're now looking for another therapist. I don't think you owe him anything. Good luck.

I agree with this 100%.

If you are relying on someone to guide you, you are not wrong to know where they stand on a pertinent political matter.

He should have declared a conflict of interests long before you looked him up.

@Cassandrasuncapturedcastle thanks, this is a useful perspective.

He has been qualified and registered for 7 years, so reasonably recently.

Thinking about it more while walking the dog just now, it's not so much that I worry that he is judging me, though that remains a small element. It's more about whether I can trust, respect and be really vulnerable with a man who holds these views about women's boundaries and spaces, especially in light of my own past history.

That is the real crux of it. And I think that I will need to bring it up with him, somehow.

Employers look at candidates social media as part of background checks these days, so why wouldn't you check out your therapist's publicly available social media account? I think it's one for him & his therapist "did you want to be found out?" ??

@Rhaidimiddim it feels like a much more fundamental issue that extends beyond "just" the political, but perhaps that is in part because of various things that happened when I was younger. It's interesting that you think he should have declared a conflict of interest.