Women's Herstory

As someone who grew up in a country other than my passport country, I know that there are multiple ways to experience truth and assign meaning to life events and circumstances. As a psychotherapist, I am very aware that the lens we use to see a situation and the metaphors we use to tell a story shape our understanding and our experience of our world as well as our own story. In fact, sometimes the retelling of our own story from a different perspective is the beginning of our own profound healing.

As I sit with people listening to their stories, one of the details I am curious to hear is how their family, community, faith group (if they had one) taught them the value of their assigned gender. I also want to know whether that matched their own experiences and desires.

I grew up in a family that gave me double messages about being female.  On the one hand I was told I could do anything I wanted.  On the other hand, I was warned how I needed to behave to survive in the world, particularly the religious world, as it existed.  My family affirmed my calling to ministry.  The faith group they were a loyal part of did not.

I came into my basic unit of ACPE when the requirements for training blocked women from evangelical traditions from participating.  So I pivoted from planned pastoral counseling training through ACPE/AAPC to clinical social work.  That field, with its history of female leadership, has stood me well.  Because my authority and power as a woman was a given, I had nothing to prove due to my gender.  By the time I made my way back to pastoral counseling, I was already licensed which left me in a much different position from other peers, male and female, who had to navigate an old boys’ hierarchy. 

I am grateful that so much has changed in our field and in our world. Simultaneously, I know how important it is that each of us do our part to deal with our own biases if we are to continue to create community that welcomes and values all people.

Tere Canzoneri is an ACPE Psychotherapist based in Decatur, Georgia.