Abstract
Love in a f*cked-up world: How to build relationships, hook up, and raise hell together by Dean Spade provides critical insights and practical guidance for navigating romantic, sexual, and platonic relationships in ways that align with radical leftist political values. Though the idea of incorporating principles of progressive social movements into psychotherapy and other personal wellness projects is not new (e.g. The radical therapist produced by Jerome Agel and the Radical Therapist Collective in 1971), Spade does a particularly artful job of situating the book’s mental health and relationship guidance in the current sociopolitical moment. As a social worker committed to anti-oppressive clinical practice, I found Spade to provide valuable verbiage for communicating the interconnections between the traditional cognitive therapy practices of shifting our internal narratives and efforts to fight for social justice: There are real, awful conditions we live under, and the way out of them is collective action to destroy racial capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. At the same time, it’s true that this stuff gets in our heads. We are raised to act out its designs, to become people who could abuse, dominate, and cage others. We are brainwashed to become complacent with our own or others’ subjugation. As a result, we need to do work simultaneously both inside ourselves and against our oppressors. (p. 23)
Many of the principles and exercises included in the book closely mirror common cognitive-behavioral practices that therapists have been incorporating into their work for decades (for example, Mind over mood by Dennis Greenberger and Christine A. Padesky (2016), which builds off much older work, such as that of Padesky (1994)). For example, Spade discusses in detail concepts that closely resemble core beliefs (i.e. all-or nothing statements about yourself, others, or the world, such as “I am worthless”; Greenberger & Padesky, 2016, p. 153). Spade writes: “We are often drawn into polarized thinking. We lose nuance and complexity, thinking in extremes like ‘I’m the worst’” (p. 20). As antidotes to this polarized thinking, Spade encourages the reader to employ a couple of simple options. One option that Spade suggests is: “Remembering a phrase like, ‘I’m not the best; I’m not the worst’ while sorting through an emotionally charged situation can help us to find counterevidence to our most reactive self-narratives and move toward a more solid basis for taking action” (p. 22). Spade also presents this option: “Sometimes when we get stuck in distorted, binary thoughts and feelings—spiraling about how we are terrible, or someone else is terrible …—we need to get some perspective. A very simple tool is asking ourselves, ‘What else is true?’” (p. 47).
Though Spade references the work of some psychologists (such as Sue Johnson and John Gottman), he doesn’t reference the large body of research that informs therapists’ work with unhelpful cognitions, including core beliefs. While this is concerning from the perspective of ethical attribution of ideas, my greater concern with failing to connect these ideas to larger bodies of evidence-based practices is that it precludes readers from connecting to exercises that could be beneficial to their mental health and relationships. While it is certainly possible that the exercises described in this book may help chip away at the emotional power of an all-or-nothing belief, such as “I am the worst,” it is often necessary to engage in longer-term, multi-faceted strategies to reduce the powerful influence that core beliefs can have over our emotions and behaviors. In Mind over mood, Greenberger and Padesky (2016) thoroughly describe a process of identifying two opposing core beliefs, looking for evidence, often over the course of weeks or months, that supports the new core belief, and then evaluating the impact of the exercise. Greenberger and Padesky (2016) also describe the value of “behavioral experiments” (i.e. active tests to see if our beliefs are true; p. 134) for strengthening new core beliefs: “Usually our confidence in a new core belief increases only after we experiment with new behaviors that are linked to the new core belief” (p. 172). While Spade describes a pendulum that serves to visualize opposing ends of polarized beliefs and notes the value of experimenting with new behaviors in order to shift our ways of thinking, the exercises described in Love in a f*cked-up world are considerably less developed in terms of how to implement them and evaluate their effectiveness than the analogous exercises in Mind over mood and other mental health workbooks. While in-depth workbook-style exercises are likely beyond the intended scope of this more conceptual book, explicitly linking the principles and exercises in this book to more directive and actionable versions of this content contained in the mental health literature would support readers in enacting these principles in their own lives and reaping the full mental health and relational benefits.
In conclusion, Love in a f*cked-up world by Dean Spade was a compelling and enjoyable read that did an excellent job positioning mental health and relationship challenges within a broader sociopolitical context. The book centers queer, trans, and poly perspectives, which are all too often neglected or stigmatized in contemporary self-help literature, making the book an important contribution to the genre. The book appears to draw from a rich body of mental health intervention research, and failing to connect the content of this book to the broader mental health literature prevents readers from accessing and benefiting from the full power of these valuable tools.
