This blog is by a lightly-edited version of a presentation given by Rebecca Esho Greenslade at National Counsellor’s Day: Audacious Solidarity: Courage, Community & Workplace Justice for Therapists, on June 28th 2025
Acknowledgements:
- Thank you to Elizabeth Cotton for the invitation to present today. Maria Albertson’s vision and ethos for creating equitable and supportive environments for therapists is a continued example to all of us committed to social change practices in the psy-disciplines. It is a privilege to be invited to speak at this National Counsellor’s Day.
- To my colleague, comrade and collaborator, LV Penman. Central to organising is having folks who have your back, who call each other in, who take care of each other’s hearts and I am deeply grateful for the feminist ethic of care that is the root practice from which we build our work together.
What is the Feminist Therapy Network?
We are a community for therapeutic practitioners interested in feminist perspectives and practice within the psy-disciplines. The Feminist Therapy Network (FTN) was birthed initially from of my own research into radical therapy movements and the subversive, disruptive organising work undertaken by radical therapists in the late 1960s and 1970’s. This led me to start offering feminist therapy reading-supervision groups and which have been running for about three and half years now. Through the conversations of these groups – which often includes a frustration that the types of feminist texts we discuss together were not part of our trainings (there has been an almost complete erasure of feminist therapy pedagogies and movements on contemporary psychotherapy and counselling programmes) – the idea for The Feminist Therapy Network was born.
I won’t unpack the characteristics of feminist therapy here, but if you are interested in learning more, we do offer a recorded introductory webinar on feminist therapy, which is available in exchange for a donation that goes directly to support humanitarian initiatives and aid in Occupied Palestine.
The FTN’s work is rooted in the following intentions and ethos:
- Feminist understandings are not solely theoretical but are lived.
- Commitment to an intersectional feminist praxis and affinity-based solidarity work.
- Commitment to learning how colonial legacies continue to shape the psy-disciplines whilst also maintaining different forms of oppression, and to unlearning these legacies within our practices.
- Commitment to a feminism that is trans-inclusionary and resists trans-antagonism.
- Recognition of patriarchy’s detrimental impact upon all genders and a commitment to subverting its manifestations within therapeutic practice.
- Challenging hegemonic and adaptive therapeutic orthodoxies.
- Re-conceptualising a liberatory feminist therapeutics.
- Creative inquiry into bridging the ‘personal’ and ‘political’ within therapeutic practice.
- Collective remembering and re-imagining of radical feminist therapeutic praxes.
- Fostering cultures of solidarity and critical consciousness in order to engage with feminist therapeutic work.
- Respectful, accountable dialogue held in an ethic of love that calls each other in, not out.
- Fierce Love.
These principles are fundamental to how we approach organising together and the consciousness-raising spaces we create.
The Challenges of Organising:
Today, I’ve been asked to speak about the challenges of organising beyond the consulting room and how to build grassroot spaces built on collective care practices. I am no expert. I’m learning as I go, with and alongside LV. My experience of creating and growing the FTN has been galvanising, humbling, vital and at times deeply frustrating. So, I’ll share some reflections and thoughts on these first two years of this work.
Feminism is Hard | Feminism Hurts
We are in a golden age of feminisms. The discipline and field of feminist scholarship and praxis is rich, abundant and vital. And, feminism, makes demands of us. Living a feminist life is, I think, to live a life of a heart broken open. It is a commitment to bear witness to, and see clearly, the suffering of others and to our complicity in others’ suffering. This is what feminist therapy brings our attention to. It asks us to examine the colonial and gendered structures our profession has been built upon, it asks us to examine how credibility and validity is afforded to some folks more than others, it asks us to examine our positionalities and privileges and how they shape how we occupy space with another. It asks us to examine the intrinsic relationship between individual and social change. It calls us out of our consulting rooms and into organising spaces, around kitchen tables and onto the streets. A feminist life is not a comfortable life to live. It is disruptive, it problematises our choices and, sometimes, it hurts.
As an example, currently our Book Club is reading bell hooks’ The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. To read such a clear analysis on the psychological terrorism of patriarchy at a time where we are witnessing the legitimised and daily live streaming of violence, is, for me at least, necessary but also painful and intimate, interpersonal work. Feminism makes demands of us.
Feminism Has Harmed
Part of feminisms herstory is the legacy of harm by white feminists. They encouraged women to view their experiences through a homogenous lens of women’s oppression that concealed the differences between women, particularly in relationship to race, class and sexual orientation; what Audre Lorde referred to as “a pretence to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist”.
The FTN is deeply committed to not replicating the harms of white feminism, and yet, we understand some people will be skeptical of the feminist work we are trying to do. We are deeply indebted to Black feminisms and the ethics of care Black feminisms teaches us, that is rooted in survival, necessity and recognition. We try to honour this indebtedness by clear practices of citation, through our pedagogical commitments – both formal and informal – and our practices of care. As example, last month saw the completion of our inaugural Black Feminism and Womanism: therapeutic perspectives course, so beautifully curated and taught by Claudia Coussins. As part of our commitment to course facilitators of colour, we created a Solidarity Team for Claudia; two other feminist therapists of colour held reflective space with Claudia and were a supportive presence whilst teaching a mixed group dynamic. And, we are continuing to build our collaborations with feminists of colour.
There is also the co-optation of feminism by trans exclusionary feminists. Our ethos is wholeheartedly committed to resisting trans antagonism and is unequivocal on the incompatibility of trans exclusionary perspectives with a liberatory feminist project, But, understandably, some trans, non-binary, gender queer folks feel sceptical of feminism. Our work is to keep on building spaces of care and critique, taking up Judith Butlers’s call to reclaim feminism from trans exclusion. (We have an extensive resource list on trans inclusionary feminisms on the website)
But, we consider our work to be part of a lineage of feminist practice that has never existed to make things smoother for us. Feminism’s intention is always to trouble, always to pose questions. The work is, to coin Donna Haraway’s phrase, to stay with the trouble. And, the work of reclaiming a feminist therapeutics for psychotherapy and counselling is our trouble. We’re taking that reclamation on, committed to breaking cycles of harm, to learning anew, alongside learning from the depth of feminist theory and praxis that we are all indebted to.
The Neo-Liberal Psyche
In my experience, the biggest barrier to collective organising has been the neo-liberal psyche and how it limits our imaginative possibilities and prioritises extractivist knowledge. What do I mean by the neo-liberal psyche?
Mark Fisher utilised the term “capitalist realism” to refer to how neo-liberalism has circumscribed our social and political possibilities to a reality entirely dominated by capitalism. Neo-liberalism, has in Fisher’s terms, operated a programme of ‘consciousness deflation’ – a squashing of the expanding collective consciousnesses of 1970’s counterculture and suppression of imagining an otherwise. It is my view, that the psy-disciplines have not escaped this consciousness deflation; by contrast, they have become a site of reproduction of neoliberal capitalist ideology. The dominant practice model of mainstream psychotherapy is entrenched within, and operates from, notions of individualism, commodification, privatization and maintaining the status quo. The neo-liberal psyche deflates our capacities to imagine otherwise ways of conceptualising and practicing psychotherapy and counselling. So often, I am part of invigorating and inspiring conversations, and then comes the moment of deflation: but that’s just the way it this. What other options are there? Part of resisting neo-liberal subjectification is re-ignite our collective imaginations. To allow ourselves to imagine alternatives. We have to learn how to resist and subvert the neo-liberal psyche.
This October in London we are hosting an all-day event on The Feminist Imagination in Therapy in collaboration with Dr. Lola Olufemi and Micha Frazer-Carroll. It will be a day of dreaming, disentangling and disrupting together and I really hope many of you will want to join us.
Recently, we started an initiative to build local affinity groups and are offering stipends to support folks to gather together locally, build solidarities and clarify what local initiatives they might want to support as therapists, again as part of our commitment to support our collective imaginings together. Feminist organizing and coalition-building has a long herstory of taking place in the living room, around the kitchen table or on the street – all are sites of consciousness-raising and conversation where social justice issues are identified and interventions imagined. It is my view that a feminist therapeutics is not limited to working with individuals, but is, to coin Sara Ahmed’s term, a “world-making project” (2023). And, as my great feminist love, Gloria Anzaldúa, says, “we can transform our world by imagining it differently, dreaming it passionately via all our senses, and willing it into creation.” Building local affinity groups are one of our humble attempts to will a transformed world into creation.
In terms of extractivist knowledge, the neo-liberal psyche operates through entitlement to labour, for example by paying the bare minimum for an event – or nothing at all – extracting knowledge without acknowledging the amount of unpaid labour that goes into the production and sharing of knowledge. This is so impactful to grassroots initiatives and fundamentally counter to a feminist ethic of reciprocity and co-created, participatory knowledge. We frequently experience folks signing up to events, or conversations, and not show up. We live in a time when it is so easy to opt out, to slip away and to not show up to each other. Fifteen people signing up and only five turning up impacts everyone. But, the neo-liberal psyche removes our sense of interconnectedness from us. It keeps us away from each other.
The FTN is also resisting being a membership body. To be a membership body would make things easier for us, particularly in terms of generating some reliable income to sustain the work. Sometimes we are contacted with requests to join the FTN. I reply by saying, great, and thank you, but you can’t actually join the FTN, but you can be part of the community we are building together. And then we don’t hear back. Yet, we are not interested in folks becoming a ‘member’, in putting the FTN logo on their website, and never actually showing up to the community. At this stage at least, we are still patiently persisting in encouraging and inviting folks to be involved, building slowly but sustainably. And, it can feel demoralising when we witness the extractive neo-liberal psyche that is seeking personal gain not reciprocity, And, it is beautiful, nourishing and galvanising when folks do come together, collaborating, sharing intimately and generously with each other.
Imperfect Allyship
Sometimes folks watch from afar, waiting for an organising space to become exactly what they want it to be, before signing up. I have done this. I have wondered whether a space is for me or wondered how I might fit in or contribute. I am reminded of Vikki Reynold’s notion of the “imperfect ally” which acknowledges that solidarity building and allyship will at times be messy, limited and mistakes will be made. She calls allyship “the imperfection project”. Allyship is not a fixed identity, but a responsive, fluid and context-dependent practice. The FTN has sometimes experienced miscommunications and misunderstandings, the urges towards withdrawal, rather than staying in relationship and undertaking the labour of repair. We are learning how to practice grace and accountability, we are learning to be imperfect allies. And, of course it can feel difficult to receive criticism which does not know, or has not imagined, the hours of conversations and agonising that often go into making imperfect decisions. adrienne maree brown writes beautifully on how she has learned to receive and respond to criticism in organising spaces. Firstly, she asks herself, has that criticism come from the peripheries or from a place of participation? Secondly, she asks, has this critique been offered in service of collective liberation? I am learning to lean towards – and be appreciative of – the generative possibilities of the latter.
Our Future
The longer-term vision and longevity of the FTN really does depend on folks not sitting on the peripheries but stepping into this community and becoming a part of eachothers’ lives. The other day, LV and I were reflecting on how we might better, or more persistently, repeat and express this invitation. We are trying to build a community of folks deeply committed to feminist therapeutic pedagogies and social justice practices. Currently, we offer formal opportunities for learning – for example: a ten-week Perspectives in Feminist Therapy course and the Black Feminisms and Womanism: therapeutic perspectives course as well as more informal spaces, for example, our Community Conversations which are peer-led conversations on a particular themes, for example, feminism, capitalism and therapy, mutual care practices and taking care of trans folks. We host regular Book Clubs and also have twice yearly Community Assemblies for folks to come together, both to learn about the FTN and to contribute to its work. We encourage writing for our blog and are offering a Writing as Coalition Building group to support and nurture writing of feminism and therapy. And, we are trying to support local FTN affinity groups forming.
But, for a renewed and reclaimed feminist therapeutics to be both impactful and disruptive to the status quo practices of the psy-disciplines, we need folks to commit to ongoing consciousness-raising work together, to learning about our therapeutic lineage’s radical herstories, in order to collectively re-imagine a feminist therapy for our present times. Feminism is hard and it hurts. There’s no way around that. But, when we do come together, it is joyful, broken open hearted work, rooted in loving comradeship and audacious solidarities.