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TL;DR:
If you’re working with an individual client who’s in a fight, or with a couple who are at loggerheads, consider the ways that structures of oppression like patriarchy and white supremacy might be the ultimate source of the conflict.
By talking about the ways structures provide the context for an “individual conflict,” the therapist can help the client develop empathy for both themselves and the other. Understanding structural violence not only facilitates our compassion for other people’s behavior; it can also open up new ways to overcome internalized oppression and work through a conflict.
“I got into a fight with Emily, and I don’t know what to do about it.” My client, Claire, a white woman in her thirties, absentmindedly braids the tassels of the blanket on her lap as she ponders the situation.
“She blew up at me out of nowhere! I’ve done nothing but support her over the last six months. Honestly, I have no clue where she’s coming from.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it,” I say, “And we’ll see if we can figure out what’s going on.”
“Well, Emily sent me a text last week, the night before my summer solstice gathering. She just said she had a lot going on, and couldn’t come. But here’s the thing—she knows I keep the ritual small and intimate on purpose, and now she isn’t coming, it’s going to be all awkward and stupid. I feel like she ruined it, and didn’t even notice.
“So I sent her a text saying that I deserved her support, and that she knew this ritual is a really big deal to me. That’s when she blew up. She said she’d been having a really hard time, and that it was me who wasn’t supporting her.
“Hard time?” Claire fumed. “She has nothing to complain about! She had her big wedding, and since then she’s been completely free. She got laid off and she’s just been chilling out, gardening, doing a few chores. She knows this ritual is important, and she can’t even show up for a few hours to participate? I can’t believe her selfishness.”
Claire was right—she had been showing up for Emily. Emily’s focus in the past year had been on planning her wedding, and Claire had honored their lifelong friendship by crafting designs for the invitations and staying up late the night before, hand-drawing the table place cards.
She’d pitched in during the chaos of the day-of preparations, and then danced and celebrated late into the wedding night. When we’d met, two days afterward, Claire told me she’d had a fantastic time.
But the next day, she confided, she’d had a feeling she couldn’t put words to. The heaviness that accompanied it had made her feel defeated and down. But when we met the following week, she’d moved on to other issues, and let it drop. Now, it seemed, that wordless ‘something’ had returned.
Emily and Claire’s friendship had been enduring and mutually supportive. But this fight seemed to signify its possible end—Claire said Emily didn’t seem to care about the impact of her cancellation. In truth, Claire said, it wasn’t so much that Emily wasn’t interested in the ritual—it was that she didn’t seem interested in Claire at all.
“Do you remember how you felt in the weeks after Emily’s wedding?” I reminded Claire. “You told me you had a great time. But then you felt really down. You told me you might just have to be the ‘ambitious one’ in your friend group, going your way, alone.” Claire nodded as I spoke.
“But what if there’s more going on here than a fight between you and Emily over who is more supportive? What if this fight is about two versions of female ‘success’ and who is ‘winning’—who’s the better woman?
About a year before this fight, Claire had entered a graduate program in architecture and was spending long days, and even some overnights, at the studio. Most of the students were men, and she talked about the pressure she felt to show them she could show up and work as hard as they did. When the professor critiqued the students’ work each month, she prepared for days in advance, so she could take the comments in her stride.
At times in our sessions, she’d tell me how proud she was of her drafting skills and her emerging designs. But at the end of one of our sessions, she’d offhandedly remarked that it seemed like her childhood friends were happier than the grad students. They weren’t so serious and competitive. They knew how to have fun.
There were periods of tension in Claire’s relationship with her boyfriend. At times he was very supportive of her work, showing up late at night with a picnic dinner, and leaving little cards for her, telling her how proud he was.
But other times, he’d sulk. He wasn’t as driven as she was. He liked to go backwoods camping, or to music festivals. He smoked a lot of weed. When they’d first met, she’d loved the way he calmed her down, brought out her silly side.
But lately, she noticed she’d stopped inviting him to the architecture happy hours. She’d come home afterwards to a note saying he was out with friends. They told each other it was healthy to have separate interests, to prevent becoming codependent.
It seemed like there was an internal conversation happening for Claire, quietly in the background, about what kind of future she wanted, and how those choices might make her feel.
“You see Emily as having something you want,” I continued. “You’ve told me you want a relationship that is strong, and publicly recognized with a marriage ceremony. You long for time to ‘be’ and not have to push so hard. And yet you feel shame and self-judgment for wanting something ‘traditional,’ when out in the world, you’re fighting for recognition in a field that is still predominantly male. You’ve worked as hard, or harder, than the other students, to prove your mettle.
“You have an internal contradiction, and it could be that your conflict with Emily is making that internal split more apparent and uncomfortable for you. It sounds like you might feel left behind. Is that right?”
“Yes! I hate to admit it, but my competitive personality is showing up. I feel like she’s beating me. I don’t like to say it out loud, but yeah—I feel left out.
“I feel like my friend group is splitting apart. In the last six months, three of the friends I’ve known since childhood have gotten engaged or married, and one is pregnant. When we have our monthly potlucks, that’s all they talk about. No one even asks me what I’m doing. They just want to know if my boyfriend and I are still together.”
What Claire was describing, in part, was the ways that some women—particularly those of the white middle and upper classes—start to self-select into ‘tracks’ in their late twenties and early thirties. Some choose family and kids; others choose grad school or high-powered careers; others try to do it all at once, sometimes relying on the paid services of other women, to help them manage their desires for a career with status and a family with kids.
I’ve noticed my clients who are making these choices are often troubled by feelings of guilt, or competition, or shame. But what really gets them upset is the feelings about the feelings. It’s as if they’re blindsided by the intensity of their judgment and competition with other women, and then stunned by what these feelings reveal about their definitions of success.
Part of why Claire turned away so quickly from that wordless ‘something’ was shame: she couldn’t tolerate being a person who was jealous that a friend got married before she did. Part of why Emily lashed out at Claire’s request for support was rage: she was rootless and lost in the wake of her wedding, unemployed and drifting, not the picture of success she’d imagined. She didn’t want to celebrate. She wanted to be left alone. It was clear to me that each felt disloyal for their resentment of the other. It felt taboo to acknowledge, but then festered, in the silence.
What’s also at play here, for women like Claire and Emily, is the sense that they’re playing out a struggle that shouldn’t still exist. Part of their discomfort is about how retrograde this whole conversation feels: women of privilege—mostly white, but not always—eyeing each other’s strollers, tsk tsking about who took enough time off work. These battles can feel so trivial and petty they often don’t even make it into the therapy room, because the client fears appearing so out of touch with the real problems of the world.
It’s embarrassing to care; it’s embarrassing to admit; it’s embarrassing to still be fighting about work and home, the care economy or economic success, kids or careers. Shouldn’t these issues just be matters of individual choice? Shouldn’t we roll our eyes at the drama of people who have the luxury to even choose, when so many women are suffering from the burden of having few resources, having to work, having to be away from their children, whether they want to or not?
One thing I think about, when my clients who have this choice dismiss their feelings because of their acute awareness of their privilege, is how the trivializing of this pain works in patriarchy’s favor. It’s sneaky. An entire class of women, who are shouldering unpaid care work, who are working, who want to make a difference in the world, and who yes, certainly, are insulated from the bulk of the oppressive forces in today’s social order, are nevertheless still upholding the patriarchal work of what it ‘means’ to be a woman.
They are still performing their social function, which is to make up for the fact that there is no universal healthcare, no universal childcare, no universal pre-K, no comprehensive eldercare and dementia services, no remote learning support during pandemics or natural disasters—that, in short, our social order is so patriarchal, so reliant on unpaid or barely paid feminized labor, that even those women at the top can’t seem to make it work. And they’re embarrassed that they can’t, because if anyone can, or could, it’s them.
In dismissing their own pain, or in being dismissed by others, because of their privilege, these women often behave as if they are not impacted by patriarchy, because of the ways they benefit from white supremacy and capitalism. They’re looking around, wondering why things are still so hard, when they have so much.
So when they dismiss their pain, and others agree that they have nothing to be upset about, we miss the ways this dynamic makes the ‘softer’ patriarchy appear more palatable, more ‘ok’ than its more virulent and violent forms. We miss an entire arena in which patriarchy is taken for granted as ‘the way things are,’ or as a ‘trade off’ between men and women in ‘traditional’ heteronormative relationships. We miss the ways that in this particular context, patriarchy is represented as immutable, natural, and outside the real arena of struggle, which is taking place elsewhere.
One thing therapists are almost universally taught is that it’s the trivial, the mundane, the embarrassing and shameful content that’s the most revealing. A fight about a party can reveal an explosive internal conflict about decisions that could determine an entire life’s trajectory. Hatred of other women’s freedoms can tell us a lot about how women police their own identities, and how their expectations for success can not only blind them to other possibilities for their own lives, but worse, distract them from noticing the ways their choices impact other women, as a class.
There’s often plenty to work with, in a session, just exploring the ways a client is evading confronting her own desires, if they reveal a conflict between her avowed politics and her emotional wants, or a tension between what she was told in her family of origin and what she craves, and what it might cost her, in terms of belonging.
But if we stay only with the internal psychological conflict, or with the individual and family, we can miss an entire, additional framework of analysis. One that can not only help the client refute their shame and self-blame, but that can help them enter into a space of understanding about the beliefs and choices of the people they resent.
To introduce the impact of larger structures, such as patriarchy, into the therapy room, is to introduce questions about power. It enables a conversation about an individual’s ability to act, to make a difference, in their private and larger worlds. Examining patriarchy as a structure introduces questions of agency—how an individual is situated, in terms of identities, class, ability, and region; and how these variables constrain a person’s capacity to impact her (or their) own life, regardless of what the dominant culture may insist about their individual freedom to choose.
I have found that when a client and I place ‘trivial’ and explosive conflicts between friends, or between different members of a family system, within the context of a structure like patriarchy, we often end up talking about fractures in the dominant culture. When the dominant culture cannot resolve an ideological question, such as: “What is a woman, and what should a woman do?,” these conflicts are often displaced onto individual women, or subgroups of women, to resolve. But when we examine a larger structure like patriarchy, we can see how it is that a conflict that vexes the dominant culture cannot be resolved by an individual, no matter how much we might try.
One way to ‘see’ a structure like patriarchy is to move away from the present moment, and into the past. With historical distance, we can look at how a structure like patriarchy creates terms like womanhood, feminine, domestic, nurturing, competitive, and then circulates them through the dominant culture—often while other subcultures fight against them—as a way to limit and narrow the personal and political imagination of an entire class of people. In Part II of this case, we’ll put the conflict between Claire and Emily in this historical context, to better understand why this conflict was so intense, and how working with history and patriarchy helped Claire and Emily heal.
Part II of this case will put this conflict between Emily and Claire in the historical context of the nineteenth century, as America tried to remake itself as a functioning economy in the wake of the Civil War. And it will look at how Claire and I used this information as a way to help her understand her own choices, and then to approach Emily and work through their conflict.
Please write back!
If you’ve used an analysis of a structure like patriarchy or white supremacy to help a client work through an interpersonal conflict, please tell us about it in the comments. And if you haven’t, from reading this case so far, what kinds of questions might you ask Claire?
*Please note: This case is not based on any particular client. It is a generic case study, exemplifying patterns in conflict that can benefit from an approach that includes attention to structural violence.
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