Intersectional BIPOC Identities

BIPOC refers to Black, Indigenous, & POC populations. I provide therapy primarily to black and brown folx and hold BIPOC identities within an Intersectional framework that describes how our lived experience of any one aspect of our social identity is inexorable, intertwined, and interwoven with our entire constellation of social identities at intersections of race, gender, sexuality, gender expression, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, class, education level, socioeconomic status, documentation status, bodysize, and disability.

Intersectionality describes how these social identities are not merely additive but create unique gestalts that are greater than the sum of their parts. For example, the experiences of being east asian and queer are intertwined in each other, such that one experiences queerness through being east asian and experiences being east asian through queerness, thus creating a new irreducible, experiential gestalt.

Intersectionality reminds us that in our personal and ancestral stories are far more nuanced than the singular reductionistic identities of oppressed vs oppressor, that although some communities face unimaginably more oppression, that our experiences of power, privilege, and oppression are intertwined with each other and woven throughout the net of all our social identities. Intersectionality brings a rich, vivid, fine-tuned, tapestry to the telling of our personal and collective stories and experiences.

Resiliencies & Traumas of Race, Culture, History, Gender, Class, Sexual Orientation, & Ancestry

Our lives are embedded in the tapestries of culture, history, ancestry, & family. These social contexts can be sources and sites of identity, value, worth, meaning, & resiliency. These sites of cultural and social worth have been suppressed by histories of colonization. I invite into therapy an exploration of cultural and multicultural ways of healing, knowing, relating, and connecting.

This can involve an exploration of and reinterpretation of familial, cultural, intergenerational, ancestral healing practices where you get to decide what parts of your history you get to call in, embody, and tap into, and which parts you would like some boundaries around. Therapy can involve talking, movement, mindful awareness, ritual, spoken word, expressive arts, or spiritual practice.

While BIPOC cultural identities & histories are sites of resilience, beauty, art, truth, & meaning, they can also be intergenerational sites of suffering, trauma, oppression, and racism.

Trauma, traumatic stress, & PTSD do not just occur as individual responses to individual events. Many BIPOC communities have been exposed to mass event, collective, cultural, ancestral, structural, historical traumas.

Traumas that occurred in the past influence the present as they are passed down throughout generations, and have impacted the current culture. In addition, systemic trauma is also an active present, as living within the daily realities of an ableist, classist, heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, xenophobic, transphobic society is itself a form of collective trauma.

I offer trauma informed & culturally responsive somatic therapy to help you navigate collective cultural and historical traumas & connect to cultural and historical sources of resilience.

If you feel called to this work, click here to schedule a free consultation and begin your journey of personal and cultural healing.