What do the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts (SWA) have in common? These two may seem like odd bedfellows, but a closer look has them appearing as two sides of the same coin.
Through very different approaches, one strikingly conservative operating under the watchful intellectual eye of the Federal government (NIMH), and the other a pink full-bodied “pleasure revolution” and unconventional at best, these two groups are committed to the rigorous research of the human condition: its dis-eases and their solutions or treatments. And, they have both come to the same conclusion: a whole lot of women don’t feel very good and desire ways to feel better.
Social and cultural factors have a huge influence on what NIMH and the School of Womanly Arts say about a woman’s emotional health. They both agree on the causes and, most importantly, the solution: “something different than what is currently offered.” Of course, it may take a Sister Goddess who’s highly skilled in the art of flirtation to get an NIMH clinical researcher to admit that “pleasure” is the antidote for women’s emotional suffering.
Women don’t feel good and traditional methods fall short.
Each year NIMH spends millions of dollars hunting down, measuring, and quantifying the presence of mental illness in the population. Their latest statistics tell us that anxiety and depression among women are the two most reported mental health issues of our times.
They’ve found major depression and dysthymia (or dysthymic disorder), involving long-lasting symptoms that do not seriously disable but keep one from functioning well or feeling good, affect twice as many women as men. This two-to-one ratio exists regardless of racial and ethnic background or economic status. The same ratio has been reported in ten other countries all over the world.
And get this: Women’s symptoms are more resistant to standard treatments like talk therapy and medication. That is why, if you sit down in one of Mama Gena’s courses, you will rub elbows with women from all over the world, from every social, ethnic, and economic class that exists. I mean everyone from doctors to housewives.
So what are we talking about here? Are all women unhappy? Well, no. But even the reported “happy” among us want to feel an even greater sense of well-being. Who wouldn’t?
Depression and anxiety affect the body, moods, and thoughts. They affect the way one eats and sleeps, one’s self-concept, and the way one thinks about things. Symptoms of depression can include: persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” mood; loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities that were once enjoyed, including sex; restlessness, and irritability. There are 12 forms of anxiety in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR, last updated in 2000), all with varying features. Generally speaking, anxiety becomes a concern when our fear goes awry, generating excessive worry more days than not.
For many women, living with depression and/or anxiety has become so normalized that years can pass without any motivation to take action towards change or appealing alternatives to traditional treatments.
Turning towards pleasure is the antidote.
So, what to do? Researchers, of the white coat kind, tell us “we are what we think.” Therefore, in the US, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the treatment of choice (teaches you to identify negative thoughts and replace them with positive thinking). For more severe and chronic symptoms, medication is typically prescribed. But, like NIMH says, women’s symptoms are resistant to these two methods alone. Why?
Current research is now looking at the “conditions” of women’s lives that differ from men, and this could inform the development of different treatment modalities. These conditions include issues such as: adolescence; love relationships and work roles; reproductive events like childbirth and menopause; instances of abuse and violence; poverty, and aging.
The School of Womanly Arts recognizes that women have been socially conditioned to think negatively about themselves and therefore not only require new thinking but a community to reinforce it. Women require a way of communicating that reflects the language of their “psyche,” the latin word for soul. This language is the language of pleasure, in which a woman reveals her desires and celebrates herself as uniquely woman.
Women are made of pleasure right down to their biology. And it is through pleasure-practices that a woman opens to her full potential and emotional health. Whether we’re talking a teenage girl launching into a new sensual identity as a young woman or a single professional mother balancing the demands of her world, each shares a common desire to be witnessed and valued in her essence as a feminine being.
Five Essential Psychological Benefits of Pleasure
1. Pleasure increases mood and vitality.
2. A pleasured woman rates herself as a more attractive woman.
3. Seeking daily pleasures transforms into a lifestyle of positive attitude.
4. Pursuing self-pleasure expands self-esteem.
5. A pleasured woman feels a strong sense of relatedness and community with others.
A community to reinforce pleasure-centered ways of living is necessary.
Remember, central to the diagnosis of depression are “a lack of interest/desire and pleasure” as well as a disturbance in one’s ability to stay connected to others. Women who enter the school gain access to an entire community of sister goddesses who serve as confidantes, friends, and cheerleaders for one another 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The school plays right past psychotherapy’s labels and the isolation of the “consulting room” into the heart of a woman’s complex and multifaceted emotional and spiritual life, leaving the DSM-IV and a clinical setting looking rather naďve.
The eight Womanly Arts, which include practices like inviting abundance, whetting your own appetite, having fun no matter what, owning your beauty, and sensual pleasure, are designed to help a woman remember a forgotten and culturally neglected aspect of the female experience that not only influences the individual but the larger cultural context in which she lives. The SWA broadens the borders of healing to include tending the “culture of woman,”—a move that therapy, by virtue of its design, is unable to make, and that is, frankly, critical to the care of a woman.
I like to send my private psychotherapy clients to the School of Womanly Art’s website www.mamagenas.com for a quick litmus pleasure test. By scrolling through the web pages, most of my clients experience an immediate and tangible boost from peeking into the School’s philosophy and party-like atmosphere alone.
The SWA has traded Freud’s psychoanalysis couch where the talking cure was used to treat women with “hysteria” for the hysterical laughter of each woman’s well-nourished soul. Women come to accept that being more fully themselves is the resolution to a lifetime of angst. And, by participating in a group that interacts and learns together, using a set of practices and tools for pleasure-centered living, close personal connections grow and are sustained over time. A gal walks away with a whole new attitude, a smile from ear to ear, and 200 personal cheerleaders. I have to admit, this makes doing psychotherapy a whole lot more fun and the results for women, a whole lot better.
Anne Davin, Ph.D., has worked for the past 18 years as a licensed psychotherapist specializing in women’s issues, addiction, and post-traumatic stress. She is the past director of alcohol and other drug studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
