What A Shrink Thinks: Blogs You Should Read

by Relando Thompkins-Jones · October 13, 2013

From what lenses do you gain perspective?

Through this series of notes, I will share links of Blog posts and/or websites I’ve found that I see as being too great to keep to myself.

These resources will come from a variety of areas of service and interests, with the common theme being a focus on issues related to diversity, inclusion, equity, and social justice.

Some of them will be websites that I regularly look to for information and inspiration for my own personal growth, advocacy, and professional development, while others will be resources that I may have just discovered and want to get the word out.

Today’s Note highlights the blog What a Shrink Thinks, which has also been featured in my note about 13 Compelling Social Work Blogs.

The Link

whatashrinkthinks.com

Why I like it

Written by Martha Crawford, LCSW, this psychotherapist’s journal digs deep, offering readers a realistic perspective of days in the life of a practitioner. Her writing encourages me to continue to be intentional about increasing my self-awareness and my awareness of others.

A sample post (or posts) from the site that I’ve read, and think you should too.

Title: “Queries Concerning Psychotherapy and Privilege“.

“Does psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a profession make sufficient assessments of conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit racism, sexism, heteronormativity and bias in all its forms in ourselves and others, and the destructive consequences to all parties?

Do we believe that healthy relatedness demands well-developed empathy, mutuality, and parity? Do we recognize bias in all forms, personal and institutional, implicit and explicit, acknowledged and unacknowledged as a failure of empathy, an objectification of others and as an obstacle to healthy relatedness and psychological well-being?

Do we accept that the conscious and unconscious empathic failures surrounding bias and oppression are certainly a more profound loss for the oppressed, but a loss to all parties nonetheless?”

Easily applicable to help us think about approaching our work through a Social Justice Lens.

I found the questions Martha posed in that post to be really powerful, and although the post was written with her profession in mind, I believe each of us can ask ourselves these questions regardless of what profession we might be in.

You can try it out when you go through the post yourself. As an example, I’ll use a few other questions Martha posed, and you can fill in a response for your work or passion:

“Do (I/we) advocate for inclusivity in (my/our work) and training institutions? Do (I/we) feel an institutional environment, or our own (caseloads/clients/customers, etc) are sufficiently diverse when in actuality very few of people of color, differently abled, or LGBT people are represented?”

“Do we recognize that we speak through our inaction as well as our action?”

“Do we, as (insert your work here) ever place ourselves in professional, or social circumstances where we are not in the majority? How might such experiences help us to better empathize with those who carry narrative burdens, who are regularly challenged to explain, defend, or advocate for themselves within the dominant culture, and those who are on the receiving end of bias and oppressive circumstances more often than we are ourselves?”

“Do we allow ourselves and our worldview to be changed by hearing stories of other people’s discomfort, anger, grief and pain from experiences of oppression, exclusion, bias, and prejudice?”

“Do we monitor ourselves for defensiveness, minimizing over-identification, excessive or non-generative forms of guilt, hopelessness and indifference?”