Susan Gesmer,  M.A.
Feminist Therapy Online

Online feminist counseling for women; girls and/or lesbian teens (with permission of parent or adult mentor if a young teen); and pro-feminist men, gay and straight.

I offer a counseling method which I believe has enormous potential and numerous advantages. Clients utilize email correspondence, journaling, dream-work, autobiography, free form, and other personal writings which they send to me before a follow-up chat sessions. In the succeeding chat session we meet together online to discuss, dive into, extend, analyze and further work with weekly session writings. This combination of writing and chat is a fantastic combination of solitary self-motivated depth work and relational therapeutic process.

In exceptional circumstances, I offer email work exclusively.

How frequently we schedule sessions (biweekly, weekly, bimonthly, monthly) depends on your needs.

Explore my web site for more details. I look forward to hearing from you!

Susan Gesmer
M.A. Counseling Psychology

Although infants are born with individual predispositions, proclivities and inclinations, women's psychologies are not shaped by obscure internal processes separated from the world in which we live. Women do not exist, each alone, in existential angst and isolation within a balloon of our own psychological making, each girl and woman inventing her own pain, struggle and despair.

Women's psychologies are formed, complexly, by social, psychological and historic specificities of  class, race, religion, ethnicity, family, gender, and culture.

Women's psychologies are the embodiment of our daily  psychological experiences in patriarchal cultures. Women's psychologies reflect the patriarchal world: childhood abuses, neglect and inequities; constricting female socialization; rigid behavioral directives; and the historic and culturally reflexive methods each woman uses to survive within these imposed parameters.

There is no running away from this problem. In the last century, doctors called it housewife neurasthenia and recommended lots of bed rest. Sheila Rowbotham has called it the problem of being "oppressed by an overwhelming sense of not being there." Betty Friedan saw it in the tired, empty women of the Feminine Mystique - and called it "the problem that has no name." It is the problem of Woman as Body: of suffering from an overexposure of physical visibility as a body combined with an impoverishment of genuine recognition as a person… Whatever one calls this problem of feminine identity, it is the stuff of which female symptomatology, nervous breakdowns, and madness are made.
       -- Miriam Greenspan

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