A Body Psychotherapy Perspective on Social Justice

There is currently a revolution in our approach to human variation, potentially transforming the social and political landscape, sweeping away walls and fences that shut out so many people. Psychotherapy should be in the vanguard of this revolution; but so far I don’t think it is.

As a body psychotherapist, I want my modality in particular to join the revolution; because so many differences that are socially coded for status, privilege and power – differences that make a difference to how people are treated – are bodily differences. These very obviously include sex, skin colour, ‘able-bodiedness’, size and age, plus other charged differences like class, sexual orientation and neurological make-up that we tend to ‘read’ (or misread) through bodily presentation.

So there is a major crack in the theory and practice of body psychotherapy – not a new crack, but one that has always been there, almost unrecognised, and like so many cracks, capable of letting the light in. It’s about normativity: the explicit or implicit presentation of a normal, ordinary, ‘proper’ body against which actual bodies may be found wanting.

Like so many people who can readily pass as normal, I was content for 40 years to take passive advantage of my privilege as a normal-identified body psychotherapist without letting myself really think about it. I even discovered my ridiculous assumption, unable to withstand a minute’s actual thought, that a wheelchair user could not practise body psychotherapy. As if in some way they didn’t have a body?

The intensely political problem of a ‘normal’ yardstick exists right across the range of psychotherapy modalities; after all, it runs right through our society and culture. In body psychotherapy it is amplified in ways that, helpfully, make it more immediately visible, just as a body is inherently more visible than a mind (though no less subject to misperception). I suggest that we – ‘we’ meaning the large majority of practitioners at least partially identifying as normal – need to question our assumptions about the role of ‘normality’, and therefore of ‘not-normality’, in our work with clients, and even in our views about who is capable of becoming a therapist or body psychotherapist.

Going deeper into the issues, what struck me was how each justice issue leads onto another connected one. For example, as the slogan says, ‘climate justice is social justice’ – those who are already suffering most from global heating and environmental collapse are generally poor, women, people of colour, in the global South, disabled, or all the above. Conversely, zero carbon cannot be achieved without massive transfers of wealth from the rich North to the South to fund the necessary adjustments.

But can we even have justice for humans alone, without changing the way we treat other-than-human people? Disabled, neurodivergent and trans activists are all addressing issues of animal rights and environmentalism in ways that can transform our understanding of them.

Normal-identified therapists urgently need to open ourselves up to these issues. They affect many of our clients directly and indirectly; and if we act as unconscious agents and monitors of normality – as many forces in society and our own institutions, and indeed some of our clients, want us to do – I believe we are betraying our calling, and our duty of care to our clients, our society and the planet. Justice is indivisible: as Alice Walker wrote, ‘Everything has equal rights because existence itself is equal. In other words, we are all here.’