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A review by verolaruiz
Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women's Happiness and Fulfillment by Valerie Rein
2.0
What happens when a white middle aged woman goes to yoga and learns about colonialism? This book. In a word, disappointing.
Most of the ideas in this book aren't wrong but they aren't new either. She extrapolated years of theories that come from working with minorities and marginalized communities and realizes, hey, women have trauma too. She does in this book exactly what patriarchy has always done, a variet of cultural appropriation, congratulations, you learned that CBT isn't the be all end all of therapy, so you come and give a new lable to therapeutic approaches we have been using for years but have never been integrated into psychology because they don't fix in the white overly intellectual box. She talks about breaking out of prison and yet, most of the "happy endings" in the examples are about getting man or succeeding in their career, while doing yoga.
There are other parts of the book that are frankly concerning, the judgementalness towards the prison guards, the idea of digging "deep" into trauma. Even the idea that someone is afraid of talking the train because their grandparents lived throw the Holocaust and her dna is afraid of trains. Really? Much better chances of it being a learned fear.
If you are a client, you are better of reading Brenee Brown, if you are a therapist read some Yalom. Don't waste your time here.
Most of the ideas in this book aren't wrong but they aren't new either. She extrapolated years of theories that come from working with minorities and marginalized communities and realizes, hey, women have trauma too. She does in this book exactly what patriarchy has always done, a variet of cultural appropriation, congratulations, you learned that CBT isn't the be all end all of therapy, so you come and give a new lable to therapeutic approaches we have been using for years but have never been integrated into psychology because they don't fix in the white overly intellectual box. She talks about breaking out of prison and yet, most of the "happy endings" in the examples are about getting man or succeeding in their career, while doing yoga.
There are other parts of the book that are frankly concerning, the judgementalness towards the prison guards, the idea of digging "deep" into trauma. Even the idea that someone is afraid of talking the train because their grandparents lived throw the Holocaust and her dna is afraid of trains. Really? Much better chances of it being a learned fear.
If you are a client, you are better of reading Brenee Brown, if you are a therapist read some Yalom. Don't waste your time here.