Intersectional-based Trauma Therapy 101

What is Intersectionality?

The term "intersectionality" is a Black feminist concept, coined in 1989 by American civil rights advocate and critical race theory and legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. She defines intersectionality "[as] a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking."

Life is rife with myriad personal, professional, environmental, and geopolitical
challenges, and while many theorists have sought to demystify human development and resolve our complex challenges with unilateral resolutions, history is predicated on the fact that complex problems require multifaceted solutions. 

Integrating a transdisciplinary approach into any healing practice helps to reveal the complexity of each individual by taking every dimension of the human experience into account, like race and ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, ability, geographic location, immigration status and education. Intersectional-based trauma therapy assesses the interconnection of oppressive institutions and an individuals identity factors. When we assess others through a lens that includes the subjective, objective, intersubjective, and interobjective perspectives of each individual, complex challenges are more likely to be understood, metabolized, and resolved.

JASS, a intersectional feminist organization anchored in the global south has created a intersecting identities wheel that depicts “how different aspects of people’s identities interact and converge to shave very different experiences of life and power.”

We, at Neuro and Me, help individuals to perceive their unique reality as it is and further deepen the dimensions of human perception and awareness. Overall, we believe that an understanding of systems of power and oppression and an incorporation of not one intervention, but several help support people on their developmental journeys toward wholeness.