Pleasure Activism
Brown, A. M. (2019) Pleasure Activism, The Politics of Feeling Good. Edinburgh: AK Press
“As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance to their masters.” (Brown, 2019)
“Trauma is the common experience of most humans on this planet. Love too often perpetuates trauma, repeating the patterns of intimacy and pain so many of us experienced growing up in racist and/or hetero-patriarchal environments. Shame might be the only thing more prevalent, which leads to trauma being hidden, silenced or relegated to a certain body of people. If we can’t carry our trauma and act normal, if we have a breakdown and lose our jobs/homes/children, there is something wrong with us. What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing.” (Brown, 2019)
There are many more gems within this book that critique the traditional ways that western society has been practicing healing and therapy, and offers much insight into alternative ways as well as providing support for the current approaches that are trying to dismantle the status quo.
This book was given to me by a client, which was already powerful enough in and of itself, and then I realized how relevant this book is to my thesis research. The author, Adrienne maree brown writes about her theory of pleasure activism as, “a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work.”(Brown, 2019) Part of what I have been finding in the work that I have been doing is that the way I practice my work and the way that my clients operate in this world heavily depend upon the framework of how we conceptualize what we’re practicing.
Mirroring, doubling, transference, counter-transference and synchronicities are all too real as I’ve seen in just the brief time that I’ve been in practicum, and the spiral that I talk about that my clients can find themselves lost in, mimics a similar pattern of despair that I can also experience and examine. Often though cognitive examination of these looping thoughts lead to more cyclical spiralic meta-cognition, which may or may not feel “helpful” to the one experiencing these thought patterns. I’ve become really attracted to ideas of pattern interruption, and the notion that small action can disrupt cyclical cognition, something that narrative and EXA approaches seem constructed for. In the action of doing something, really anything small, the pattern can adapt and shift into a new shape, one that may give birth to new potential and possibility. Brown quotes Cara Page who makes the point that, “If we’re not imagining where we’re going, then it will constantly just be pushing back outside from inside of cages, as opposed to imagining what’s happening outside of cages.” Whether these cages be societally imposed and/or internally fortified, intention and imagination are essential in how I want to create with clients and community.
