Working therapeutically with difference and diversity
As a non-white woman with a mixed-heritage, I have some small personal insight into the way intersectionality, the various social factors which combine and overlap, can be felt in our lives and relationships, I try to work in a way that promotes self-awareness around my own nuanced privileges and biases, so that when I am with my clients, I am more able to welcome and accept them, ready to hear their own, intersectional, lived experience, and to understand the way this has shaped their experience of belonging. Whether they have been socially perceived and impacted through the lens of their class, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual identity, neurodiversity, disability, learning difficulty, mental health diagnosis, or any number of other factors, I seek to deeply listen and validate them and their experience. Neither magnifying nor minimizing their perceptions, but accepting them, as my client's own truth. In working in this way, I hope to form a therapeutic relationship which both acknowledges what separates us, but also what joins us, within the context of our society. To aid our process of openness, authenticity, curiosity and growth.