Diversity conscious therapy
Diversity conscious therapy recognizes that oppression-induced stress results from persistent political strife in the context of intergenerational traumas. These social traumas include the psychological impact of slavery, Jim Crow laws, institutionalized racism, menacing policies toward immigrants, denial of indigenous American rights and history, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, LGBTQ community targeting, ceaseless violence against women, epidemic homelessness, and the threat of our shared imperiled eco-system. All of this point to a collective life out of balance that may touch each of us in different ways.
Some may cope by feeling helpless, checking out, going numb, overeating, leaning into addiction, feeling depressed, or being on edge. Social distress often defines the backdrop against which psychological symptoms develop. Systemic forms of oppression, such as racism are often minimized, or worse, through blaming the victim strategies.
However, the mental health field is rapidly changing. For example, look to the revolutionary work of groundbreaking psychologists, Dr. Joy DeGruy and Resmaa Menakem who describe a post-traumatic slave syndrome and its ongoing soul wounds. These views do bring refreshing awareness to the psychological hardship experienced by many African Americans as well as European Americans bearing this unhealed intergenerational legacy. We also find an effective therapeutic road map for recovery and resilience.
Also Dr. Samuel Kimbles has identified the helpful concept of a cultural complex and Dr. Fanny Brewster further defines a racial complex, a set of cultural beliefs about race often rooted in traumatic cultural history, that underlies social problems like racism and targeting of African Americans, indigenous, and immigrant populations. Significantly, this brings the focus on symptoms rooted in culturally-based stress on cultural conditions, where it belongs, rather than on perceived individual shortcomings.
Healing from oppression-based trauma
We honor the histories of social activism, of civil rights, Black Power, Chicano Power, Indigenous rights, Women’s Liberation, Gay Power, LGBTQ rights, Trans Power, AIDS activism, the power of a million Angelenos marching together in the 2017 Women’s March as well as the rapidly forming coalitions post the 2024 US elections.
Amidst a backlash of alarming anti-LGTBQ+ and racist rhetoric a new level of civic solidarity across communities and around the globe is forming, helping to resist a binary world view in which social oppression is a given while collectively envisioning a healing, ecologically sustainable, equitable, common sense, co-existence.
The historic energizing of civil rights movements erupting out of the 2020 community outrage is once again being evoked in the face of renewed institutionalized racism, erasure of histories and cultures, and its lethal impact within the legal and law enforcement systems. Resisting the tendency to fragment and polarize, communities are joining across the racial, cultural, gender and intergenerational spectrum. Many are calling for a renewed need for a paradigm shift societally in which persistent systemic racism, class, and gender inequity gives way to persistent systemic reparation both materially and spiritually.
Diversity conscious therapy provides an arena for activism and healing within oneself often where oppression can hit hardest. It includes a meaningful recognition of socio-political realities and how they may inform well-being. It offers a space and process for working through traumatic loss associated with one’s ancestral, cultural, and social legacies, as well as identifying and building on cultural and community-based strengths and pride. As a result, constructive action may be mobilized, whether in the form of renewed self-care, professional initiative, or exercising leadership capacity to advocate for prosocial change.