Sarah L. Hastings

Resilience Among Rural Lesbian Youth

Rural lesbian youth are encumbered with a number of obstacles in their development of a positive self-identify and self-worth. Youth may experience implied physical threats, abuse, and mental health concerns as they attempt to define themselves within a context that emphasizes the role of women as heterosexual caretakers of the community. A number of factors can serve to diminish or enhance the young rural lesbians ability to cope with barriers and obstacles that she may face, including having a supportive family network, a larger network of friends, supportive mentors and teachers, and access to gay–straight alliances. The intent of this article is to examine the challenges that rural lesbian youth face in developing a positive self-identity including tools to enhance resilience.

Ethical challenges of practicing in rural areas

Mental health professionals practicing in rural areas face ethical dilemmas different from those experienced by their urban counterparts and may find that the existing ethics literature and American Psychological Association (APA, 2002) ethics code not particularly helpful. We highlight parts of five standards from the APA ethics code to illustrate the dilemmas rural practitioners frequently confront and offer suggestions for how to handle them. We discuss competence, human relations, and confidentiality as specific areas and then examine assessment and therapy as broader situations in which dilemmas may occur. We use case examples to highlight complications that may arise in rural areas.

Effective Support for Lesbians in Rural Communities: The Role of Psychotherapy

Most research involving lesbians has been conducted using urban or suburban samples. However, the challenges lesbians face in their rural communities differ from those encountered by lesbians in urban areas. Lesbians in rural areas face potential isolation due to the lack of a visible gay community, an overall lack of services and resources, and an often heightened experience of stigma. Rural areas tend to have a more conservative political climate with an emphasis on fundamentalist religious beliefs. Due to such strong heteronormist pressures, lesbians who decide to come out to their rural communities often face justifiable fears surrounding possible discrimination from employers, religious organizations, schools, and even their friends and family members. Therapists who work with lesbians in rural areas should be prepared to help their clients face and successfully deal with many unique challenges.

Competing Discourses for Older Women: Agency/Leadership vs. Disengagement/Retirement

Older women are targets of competing discourses. On one hand, they are urged to maintain or even increase their engagement, to translate their experience and seniority into leadership roles finally available to women after many years of struggle. On the other hand, they are reminded that they have earned the right to retire and rest, and are bombarded with messages reminding them to be concerned about the encroaching limitations and problems associated with aging. These competing prescriptions are most evident in the realms of work/career and physical health/activity, where either early disengagement or refusal to disengage can cause problems. Women who exit early from employment may face poverty and deprive society of important contributions; those who resist retirement may face stress, exhaustion, and missed opportunities for fulfillment in other domains. Women who stop physical activity as they age face a variety of health consequences; those who persist run the risk of injury. Thus, womens negotiation of these contradictory prescriptions requires a complex balancing act. Therapists can assist older women in finding the right balance by acknowledging their own biases, helping women both to acknowledge their internalization of ageist stereotypes and to recognize ways in which ageing may increase their empowerment by releasing them from certain constraints. They can encourage their clients to maintain and increase their power through physical activity and support womens resistance to debilitating messages by exposing them to a wide range of older women as role models.

Social Justice Advocacy in Rural Communities Practical Issues and Implications

The professional literature related to social justice has increased, but there has been little discussion of the practical issues and implications associated with social advocacy. However, adding new roles will result in new considerations for counseling psychologists. The need to be attuned to how the practical aspects of advocacy intersect with the context of psychological work may be especially present in rural areas where practitioners may be more involved in the community and thus their actions highly visible. Because the data indicate that rural communities may have few resources, a limited number of mental health professionals, and higher rates of mental illness, psychologists practicing in these areas may feel compelled to engage in advocacy. Yet there is little practical guidance for these psychologists. Therefore, the authors present considerations for social justice advocacy in rural areas, using the American Counseling Association advocacy competencies as an organizing framework.

Special issue: Rural lesbian life: narratives of community, commitment, and coping.

The casual observer of rural life may overlook the complexities and contradictions experienced by residents of rural and frontier areas. Typically, rural people are quite satisfied with their way of life, citing high community cohesion, perceived personal safety, and freedom from the frenzied pace of urban life. Yet, rural settings are troubled by contemporary social problems. Poverty and unemployment are pervasive, and the web of support many rural residents enjoy, comprised of family members (Blank, Fox, Hargrove, & Turner, 1995) and the church (Helbok, Marinelli, & Walls, 2006), may be disaffirming to sexual minorities. In an analysis of the experiences of gay men and women in rural communities, Moses and Buchner (1980) concluded that the rural narrative is religiously oriented, politically conservative, and bound to hetronormative standards. What are the effects on the rural lesbian who does not participate in the hetronormative discourse? How does she negotiate life in a rural setting when her narrative fails to dovetail neatly with the pervasive social narrative of her neighbors? How does she manage living in a place often described as a “fishbowl,” where her activities are inferred from the location of her vehicle? Rural lesbians may find they must chart a new course that creates space for a lesbian narrative. Negotiating a way of being is based on the stories we tell ourselves and the narrative we construct surrounding who we are, what we are, and what we do. The social construction of identity is a way to give meaning to our lives. The examination of identity in rural areas is relatively new. Bell and Valentine in 1995 commented that there was an obvious absence of “serious” study of the experience of gay men and women in the rural setting.