A Quantum Leap: How Misogyny and the Patriarchy Sabotage Our Clinical Practice and Research

This session is available for 6.00 APA and ASWB credits.

Abstract
There are two main intentions of this pre-conference. The first is to compassionately, and intellectually, assist clinicians to examine how misogyny and the patriarchy infect and incapacitate every single aspect of how we treat traumatized humans. The other intention is to provide definitive and helpful non-misogynistic and non-patriarchal clinical interventions that align with elements of humans that have been erased from our collective consciousness.

Misogyny is more than a dirty word or a political idea. It is a deadly and destructive laceration that all humans, for the last 6000 to 10,000 years, have experienced. Misogyny, fundamentally, is the fear and phobia of neurobiological human-to-human care, and subsequently, the patriarchy is what happens when care is violently removed. Not only is it a wound that has done more traumatic damaged than any war, genocide, natural or unnatural disaster, but it has also removed the main thing required to heal these violent abrasions. Because the injury of misogyny has no real vernacular in a patriarchal world, conceptualizing, in real terms, the impairment that multi-millenniums of attachment trauma have done to our species homo sapiens, sapiens is an arduous task. The complex and dissociated effects that come from misogyny are so pervasive and so grand that it is truly invisible in its normalization. Misogyny affects our clients, how we conceptualize mental illness and trauma, and how we are taught to understand treatment. Misogyny plays a huge role in what “well” is and isn’t and what “care” is and isn’t. Our neurobiology and biomechanics tell an amazingly different story of who we are as a species and how we attach, as our only true defense to the natural world of predation. The science found in the areas of complex trauma, dissociation, attachment, polyvagal theory, mindfulness and so many more prove that misogyny and the patriarchy are symptoms of unfathomable trauma.

Misogyny has been traditionally defined as the dislike, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women. This session will break down this rudimentary and disparaging definition by diving into the evolutionary history of the central nervous system and brain structures and how humans react when care is not available. By highlighting how misogyny and the patriarchy likely first occurred and what is the fuel that continues to sustain these brutally destructive systems, participants will be able to see, quite plainly, an alternative paradigm of human behaviours and healing. There will also be re-examinations of philosophies, psychologies, and medical, understanding of human nature, from a non-patriarchal, non-misogynistic perspective. This session is to educate on what happens when there is no real attachment, how this affects all infants and children, and what happens to a species that does not get its main definitive need met. Misogyny is truly the mother of all traumatic injuries, and this session can and will help you heal this ancient and perpetual wound for yourself and your clients.