Therapy as a Tool of Soft Coercion: How the Psychological Industry Reinforces Patriarchal Norms

Monday, March 24, 2025

In the contemporary West, therapy is often marketed as a neutral, empowering space—one where individuals, especially women, can heal from trauma, reclaim autonomy, and find clarity. But under closer scrutiny, therapy as an institution often functions not as a liberating practice, but as a mechanism that repackages submission to patriarchal norms under the guise of resilience, personal growth, and “self-work."

Particularly when practiced by therapists—often women themselves—entrenched in normative systems, therapy becomes a site where women are subtly, but powerfully, redirected away from structural analysis and toward self-blame, “healing,” and reintegration into toxic relational environments.

Therapists frequently trace women’s suffering back to dysfunctional childhoods, unstable attachments, or distorted perceptions shaped by trauma. While these are valid dimensions of the psyche, they become problematic when used to pathologize the woman’s lucid rejection of normative scripts. A woman who says all men are misogynistic is not seen as someone with political clarity, but as someone projecting past pain. Her refusal to participate in romantic entanglements becomes suspect—evidence of fear, of “avoidant attachment,” of “trust issues.” Her radical insight is not interpreted as wisdom, but as a block to overcome.

This dynamic is especially insidious because it cloaks itself in care. The therapist might never say “submit,” but her entire framework is built around reintegration—into the couple form, into forgiveness, into compromise. The idea that a woman’s rage might be righteous, that her withdrawal might be an act of resistance, is rarely entertained. The woman is expected to continue engaging with men, to “learn better tools,” to make “healthier choices.” But what if no man is truly a healthy choice within a system built on female subjugation? That question is never asked—because it would require indicting the entire relational structure, not just the woman’s past.

Female therapists in particular often reproduce this logic, not out of malice, but because they themselves have been trained to believe that compromise is maturity, that heterosexuality is inevitable, that emotional intelligence means softening one’s stance. They project their own limits—limits shaped by centuries of internalized patriarchal survival strategies—onto their patients. They are not equipped to validate radical lucidity. They want coherence, not rupture. They want the woman to become digestible, not sovereign.

What therapy often offers, then, is a form of psychological pacification: “Yes, you’ve been hurt, but your perception is distorted. Let’s work on that, so you can trust again, try again, love again.” This is nothing but a reintegration into the cycle of emotional labor, self-doubt, and relational submission. Rather than arming women with the clarity to see the world as it is—a system where men’s humanity is underdeveloped and their violence systemic—it trains them to doubt that very clarity. It calls dissociation a disorder, but never questions why so many women must dissociate to survive.

In this light, therapy becomes not a path toward liberation, but a form of soft coercion—a way of folding the unruly woman back into systems that devour her. What is needed is not more self-work, but the permission to stop working. Not more emotional regulation, but sacred rage. Not “healthier” men, but a new paradigm entirely—one in which a woman’s clarity is not pathologized, but honored.