PERSONAL STATEMENT
Beth A. Firestein, Ph.D.
Initial Fellow Application, November 2003
When Laura Brown, Chair of the Fellows Committee, wrote me in September 2003 encouraging me to apply for Fellow status in Division 44, I felt surprised, honored, and greatly appreciative. Moving through this intricate and thorough process has given me an unprecedented opportunity to step back and really examine the path of my professional journey. It has been interesting to examine the linking of personal history, professional training, and circumstance that have led to the development of this passionate body of work I call my “career.”
My interest in psychology began in high school and continued to develop with greater clarity and intensity as I moved through undergraduate and graduate courses of study. Dr. Mary Alice Gordon, my psychology professor and advisor at Southern Methodist University, played an especially pivotal role in encouraging me to pursue psychology as a career. She supervised my senior year Independent Study on rape myths, provided advice and encouragement to me in applying to graduate programs, and sponsored my first presentation at a regional psychology conference in 1978. I went on to earn my Masters in Educational Psychology and my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, both from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1987. I feel especially fortunate that the past 16 years have allowed me to experience such quality mentoring from psychologist peers and fulfillment in so many different roles as a professional psychologist.
I completed my pre-doctoral internship at the Counseling Center at Colorado State University in 1985-86. Following completion of my internship, I worked for ten years as a staff psychologist in a University Counseling Center with an APA-approved training program (at SIU-Carbondale), where I provided direct service, training, supervision, outreach, and consultation services on a wide variety of topics. I also gained experience in program development and administration as Coordinator of the Office of Women’s Services. This professional role provided a fertile context and great opportunity to develop and creatively expand my professional identity as a feminist psychologist. For the past seven years, I have focused on clinical work and consultation in the context of my private psychotherapy practice, Inner Source Psychotherapy and Consultation Services. Most recently, I began offering consultation to employers encountering the challenge of having employees who are transitioning their gender (from male to female or female to male) while on the job. I have established the consulting firm “Gender Solutions” to provide an entry point for employers seeking assistance with these kinds of issues. Throughout my career, I have remained active with professional organizations and scholarly activities related to my interests in women’s issues, trauma recovery, and my specialty areas in bisexual, gay, lesbian, and more recently, transgender issues in psychology.
When I came out as a bisexual woman in the mid-1970s, there were very few resources to mirror my experiences or my identity. The immense curiosity I felt about my own emerging identity and others I met whose identities did not fit neatly into prescribed categories of “straight” or “gay” propelled me to read all the available literature I could find at that time. Later, my curiosity and passion to learn became the touchstone for my powerful drive to expand the scope of the field of psychology to include broader and more inclusive conceptualizations of sexual orientation, identity, and expression. I also found myself seeking to understand human development in the context of the various “systems” that color our perceptions: the lenses of family, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and culture, to name a few. I found feminism to provide a powerful and transformative perspective that has continuously shaped both my personal and professional life. Over time, my bisexuality, my feminism, and my strong interest in humanistic psychological models converged with my professional training to create the increasingly complex and integrated body of work I continue to develop to this day.
My research interests have continuously reflected my desire to expand the boundaries of psychological inquiry. For example, my dissertation research expanded the focus of the domestic violence literature to include “dating violence” and linked the abuse, social support, and self-esteem literatures in creative ways. The quality of my research was recognized when I was awarded the First Place Student Research Prize for “outstanding research on women and gender” by the Association for Women in Psychology in 1987. Over time, AWP has become my long-term professional “home.” With strong mentoring and encouragement from feminist psychologist peers, I have moved into increasingly substantial roles within the organization, helping to found and eventually Co-Chair the organization’s Caucus on Bisexuality and Sexual Diversity. This Caucus has played an increasingly influential role in shaping the direction, focus, and perspective of feminist psychology with respect to issues of sexual diversity, sexual orientation, gender identity.
My colleagues at AWP have witnessed my journey of personal and professional development over the past 16 years of my involvement with the organization. I have moved though a wide variety of roles: from student presenting dissertation research and poster session, to fledgling psychologist presenting workshops, to becoming a well-respected and recognized author and clinician invited to share my experience and original thinking on sexuality issues in Plenary Session panels in 2000 and 2002. In these plenary sessions, I have been addressed some of the “difficult dialogues” feminist psychologists must have with one another during this new century. I am willing to speak, write and present about difficult “cutting edge” issues facing feminist psychology, particularly in the areas of sexual orientation and gender identity. I have been asked to speak to increasingly larger and more diverse audiences and to share my thinking and my vision in these contexts. This has been a great honor for me. Over time, I have also begun to move into mentoring roles with other young professional women. I have found this new development in my professional life to be particularly meaningful and rewarding.
Perhaps the cornerstone of my work has been my deep engagement in clinical service to both traditional and non-traditional populations. I have served hundreds of psychotherapy clients through individual, couple, family, and group psychotherapy and have gradually established specialty areas within my strong, generalist practice that have attracted regional and national interest. I consider myself to have special expertise in women’s issues, couple counseling, trauma recovery, EMDR therapy, and facilitating the healing and growth of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals, couples and families. I am one of the few psychologists in Colorado specifically addressing the needs of bisexual clients and one of the experienced and respected clinicians in this region serving the transgender and transsexual populations of a multi-state area.
I consider these areas of specialty to be the most innovative aspects of my clinical practice. It is my commitment to create a “safe space” where individuals struggling with delicate and complex issues relating to their sexuality can come and receive truly qualified, sensitive, and professional psychological assistance. Related to this, working with transgendered and transsexual people has become a significant and integral part of my clinical practice, training, and consulting work. As mentioned earlier, I have begun providing consultations to employers who have individuals that are transitioning gender while on the job. I did some very successful work around policy development for a internationally recognized Fortune 100 company. In addition, I have facilitated the Northern Colorado Gender Support Group for the past six years in my small, rather conservative Colorado community.
This aspect of my practice has been an incredibly enriching aspect of my own personal and professional development, challenging me to confront my own internalized “xenophobia.” I have had to develop the ability to make increasingly refined clinical discernment between “difference” and “pathology” without doing my clients the potent disservice of pathologizing their difference simply because that “difference” is poorly understood by our profession. One of my principal goals is to push the boundaries of psychological understanding to account for the complexity of this most delicate flower, our sexual being. At the same time, I remain cognizant of the critical need to contain sexual expression within appropriate boundaries of consensual, adult activity, clearly supporting cultural prohibitions against abusive and non-consensual sexual behavior such as child sexual abuse, rape, or sexual harassment.
Perhaps the most significant professional contribution emerging from the confluence of my theoretical work and clinical experience has been the book I edited, Bisexuality: The psychology and politics of an invisible minority (Sage, 1996), which won a Distinguished Publication Award from APA Division 35 and AWP in 1997. This book begins to fill a significant gap in the professional literature on sexual orientation and sexual identity by shining a clear, strong light on the topic of bisexuality. Bisexuality brings together a number of the leading researchers, writers, and theorists in the field to discuss what is known and what remains to be known about bisexuality.
Perhaps the most important thesis of my book concerns the necessity for a next paradigm shift in sexual orientation theory, research, and practice. The first significant theoretical shift was the shift from the illness model of homosexuality to gay and lesbian affirmative models of identity development and psychotherapy. In Bisexuality, I propose that we move beyond dichotomous models of gay and lesbian identity to a LesBiGay/Transgender affirmative model. A LesBiGay/Transgender affirmative model is necessary to provide a paradigm capable of accounting for non-dichotomous, fluid, and evolving sexual and gender identities, such as those experienced by bisexual, queer-identified, and transgender individuals. I think the book also helps bring about this shift in our paradigms by providing both a theoretical basis and a review of the empirical research that substantiates the necessity for the new paradigm.
Bisexuality has also inspired a number of researchers to pursue “new paradigm” research questions related to sexual orientation and identity. It has been used as a textbook in several GLB studies courses (for example, at the University of Vermont and MIT) and functioned as an important resource in the development of APA’s new Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Clients (APA, 2000). I think the book was also valuable to Division 44 as the Division went through the lengthy and lively multi-year dialogue surrounding whether to expand the name and mission of the Division to include bisexual issues in psychology. I am currently in the process of developing a prospectus for a new handbook of psychotherapy with bisexual clients, which will most likely consist of two volumes—one with a multicultural focus and one with a lifespan focus. I am fortunate to have a publisher who has already expressed interest in this project.
The purpose of my clinical and scholarly work has been twofold: 1) to promote the scientist-practitioner model in the realms of sexual orientation and gender identity, and 2) to cultivate a climate of permission, safety, and education to enhance the healing and growth work we offer for an increasingly complex, multicultural, and evolving population. Homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia take a tremendous toll on GLBT individuals and families. As psychologists, we have a strong ethical imperative to help in qualified, informed ways without adding to our clients’ suffering with our own ignorance. Graduate programs are only now beginning to offer training to psychologists and doctoral students around GLBT issues in psychology and such training is still minimal and uneven across most clinical graduate training programs, with perhaps a few exceptions. I intend to continue developing resources for the profession and providing education, training, and strong, affirmative clinical assistance to racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse populations on both national and international levels.
I have been fortunate to have the opportunity on several occasions to present on a variety of psychological topics to international audiences. I was part of an AWP-sponsored symposium, “Feminist Perspectives on Trauma,” presented at the NGO Forum held in conjunction with the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995. I also did a presentation on “American Perspectives on Psychology” at the American Center in Moscow, Russia in 2001. Most recently, I was an invited participant on the Bisexual Mental Health panel held during the Bisexual Health Summit Pre-conference Institute offered as part of the North American Bisexual Conference in San Diego in August 2003. Currently, I am working on a proposal dealing with issues of sexual orientation that I intend to submit for consideration and possible presentation at the International Psychology Congress to be held in Beijing, China in August 2004. We live in a global community. Cross-cultural dialogue and the exchange of theoretical perspectives and ideas about clinical practice are essential to an ethical, comprehensive, and culturally sensitive approach to psychology in the 21st century.
I think the body of my work, taken as a whole, has as its purpose to articulate the needs and complex issues around sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender identity that are the inevitable product of our increasingly complex and global society. Additional forces come into play as we move from one generation to another. This is further complicated by the fact that multiple generations co-exist simultaneously in our culture. I am interested in organizing intergenerational dialogues to facilitate learning and building alliances across generations with culturally distinct perspectives. Another major thrust of my work is to increase the awareness, quality of research, and clinical competence of psychologists and educators seeking to serve sexual and multicultural minority populations. I also like to get people thinking about cutting edge ideas around human sexuality and human relationships in gentle, yet provocative ways.
There is no doubt in my mind that the personal is political and that the way we live our individual lives shapes the culture. Coming out about diverse and stigmatized identities is a risky and courageous act in this culture. Every time I have taken the risk to be more authentically myself, I have been rewarded with an unanticipated degree of support, an enhanced sense of community, and the gratitude of others who have felt silenced around these same issues. Ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice exist within our diverse sexual orientation communities as well as between our communities and the larger heteronormative society. Sexism, racism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and other afflictions of the human spirit manifest in both internalized and externalized forms.
I enjoy participating in multiple communities and building bridges of understanding and acceptance between those communities. I have written, published, and presented about bisexual, lesbian, gay and transgender issues in psychology for a variety of professional, student, and lay audiences. I believe my work has had a cumulative impact in raising consciousness and enhancing practice in academic, corporate, and community settings. Some of the most challenging, rewarding, and innovative work I have done has been within the LGBT community. I have facilitated a number of “Lesbian/Bisexual Women’s Dialogues,” that have been powerful in building alliances and healing long-standing wounds between lesbian and bisexual women.
There is certainly other work to be done. My hope is that I can embody the best of the scientist/practitioner model, developing theory that influences clinical practice and allowing my clinical experience to inform the development of my ideas, my writing, and my teaching. The contributions I have been able to offer so far have emerged out of the organic interaction of multiple elements or threads of my own life and identity. When I began this journey years ago, I never imagined that my unique, individual process of self-discovery would link me in such profound ways with whole communities of kindred spirits. Working to create a space for myself in the culture has had a synergistic and beneficial interaction with the efforts of others in creating a larger cultural recognition for bisexual and other sexual minority individuals.
It is work that I would have had to do anyway, just to find my own place to belong in this world. Little did I guess that I would find so much company and so much community along the path. It is a tremendous gift to feel like part of something larger than I am and even more meaningful to feel that I have a role to play in shaping the larger culture in some small way. I have developed a deep love for my profession and I have felt richly rewarded for doing something that I would have needed to do for myself anyway. I intend to be a long-term contributor and hope to continue to create a positive and broadening impact on the field in areas of theory and practice related to sexual orientation, identity, and expression. I am grateful for this opportunity to give and for the opportunity this application process has provided me to reflect on the content and meaning of my journey.