Intersectionality in Therapy: Seeing the Whole Person
This concept didn’t just re-frame my personal perspective, it changed my professional practice.
Katherine is a school psychologist by day, counselor by night, who enjoys untangling life’s questions one conversation at a time.
When I first learned the term intersectionality, it felt like an answer to all the times in my life I felt unfairly treated but had trouble explaining exactly why. Like most people I grew up with, I experienced moments where I was on the receiving end of treatment that made me question my place in the world and my overall perspective on privilege.
The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights activist, critical race theory scholar and professor, as a framework to describe how social identities can overlap in ways that create unique experiences of oppression or privilege. The foundational example most often used to illustrate this is how Black women face discrimination for both their gender and race. Their lived experiences can’t be boiled down to one trait or another because the crossing of both is what matters.
Many of us have had moments when we assumed that if we shared a trait with an individual, it would automatically lead to a connection. Intersectionality reminds us that we can have similarities in education, economic status, sexuality, body size, ethnicity, language, and race, but still have vastly different experiences in life that ultimately shape our worldview and identity.
The term intersectionality provided language for me to describe the experience of having privilege in one room, and being at the bottom of an arbitrary hierarchy in another.
This concept didn’t just reframe my personal perspective, it changed my professional practice. In my field of work, I often use assessment tools and treatment modalities that compare clients to a reference sample group. The goal is to determine how far from the “norm” someone is. But because no sample group can account for every human variation, standardized data often misses unique circumstances. When working with people who do life differently than the expected “norm,” we might find that their deviations from the average are the most important parts of their story.
I often try to put myself in the shoes of my clients. I think about my experiences growing up in a low-income household with a mother who immigrated to the United States. It was incredibly difficult, and at times traumatizing, being forced to acclimate to American culture. I can only imagine all the challenges my mother faced alone. Now, at my age, I have found ways to make peace with all that our family endured.
My story is not unique, but I used to wonder: How could a therapist listen to my story and recognize the fine line between sacrifice and neglect when borders are crossed for a better life?
If I had a client like me, how would I conceptualize their story in a way that honors all their identities and traits? How could I ensure I don’t minimize their identity solely to the ways they face oppression, while acknowledging that this oppression also fundamentally shaped them?
When systems like patriarchy and white supremacy loom over daily life, acting as if this isn’t a fact, as if all the pain just lives in our heads, is exactly how oppressive systems persist.
I think about past clients who were facing food or housing insecurity at different points in their life. There are strategies or approaches that are tried and true, but potentially inappropriate on their own for this type of client. For example, teaching short-term coping skills such as box breathing (inhaling, holding your breath, exhaling, and holding your breath for four counts each) can be helpful for stress relief. However…
You can’t box breathe your way out of poverty.
A more holistic approach starts with recognizing and naming the factors actively contributing to the client’s symptoms. How are chronic stress, anxiety, and difficulties with emotional regulation direct results of systemic oppression? Symptoms that are the result of environmental factors beyond the control of the client can be normalized as manifestations of existing within a broken system, rather than personal failures. Techniques can then be adjusted to meet the client’s current capacity for growth given the circumstances preventing immediate change.
We have to move with the knowledge that we exist in a world that is unkind, unfair, and oftentimes dangerous, for marginalized people. The fact that we don’t have total control over these circumstances must be acknowledged and handled with care.
So, how much space is there for nuance in therapy?
Like most meaningful questions, the answer to how we incorporate intersectionality into therapy isn’t black and white. It is discovered through an ongoing, dynamic collaboration between client and therapist. I am all for being solution-oriented, but there is no race to the finish line if you are going the wrong way.
Intersectionality work can help therapists see the shades of their client so that together they work towards a therapeutic plan that makes sense. In other words, reaching the “norm” isn’t the goal here, it’s about getting to a place where one human truly sees another.
To learn more about therapy, ask questions, or find the support that's right for you, start here.
