What is Intersectional Health Support and Intersectional Mental Health Support, IxFMH?

(this is the fun nerdy stuff in the background)

What is Intersectional Mental Health?

• Simply put, Intersectional Mental Health allows for power to be mapped objectively in trauma recovery, and ensures that actualization flows towards eco-relational liberation rather than a default hegemonic assimilation

• It builds on the work of Gramsci, collaborative Identity Politics, Interlocking Feminism, Intersectionality and various justice movements, particularly principles of liberation and resistance of those oppressed and subjugated by hegemonic dominance; student-directed pedagogies, including Montessori; and client-actualizing-principle directed practices such as IFS and CranioSacral.

• It applies systems thinking to map and understand how harm is enacted in political formations/systems, groups, families, and individuals and how it reverberates laterally, vertically and generationally, for example.

• It requires continued study of interlocking colonial histories, justice and equity principles, staying current with non-hegemonic controlled investigative journalism, and honed critical media literacy skills to parse narratives/messages for hegemonic or other biased obfuscation that may be used to usurp and misuse power

Why is Intersectional Mental Health vital/core to a trauma recovery process?

• Identity work at its core is a highly effective framework for mapping and understanding trauma impact and also trauma recovery

• It allows for coherence of principles of trauma recovery in individuals, relationships, groups…etc. This coherence of logic allows the individual to operate with more clarity in their context and to interweave individual and collective liberation.

• Coherence and inner derived clarity are deeply relieving to a brain that has suffered trauma and disorientation and leaves it less susceptible to gaslighting in the future.

• Coherence! It’s always nice when logic makes sense EVERYWHERE! Quite likely, it eases the brain by not having to navigate convoluted reality and allows for more allocation of effort to go towards healing in other ways.

• When power abuse is named clearly and confronted with others who witness it honestly and without agenda to usurp or manipulate, it allows for multi-level attunement at levels of Self, Relationships, Context, Eco-sustainability…even cosmic levels to simultaneously begin to re-establish. This allows for broader recovery anchoring for the individual and the collective.

What could this look like in practice?

• Sometimes it may look like compassionate curiosity to parse power and accountability in a traumatic event or ongoing experience to help someone find that restful place of clarity for the orienting part of the brain

• It may involve application of trauma and shock protocol to unwind the experience of trauma physiologically as it is unwound mentally and/or energetically

• Support to integrate sense of baseline human worth and/or cultural traditions that stabilize a sense of self and affirm dignity after surviving trauma/power-abuse impact

• Help to track awareness of and exploration of the origin and utility of existential mental walls at a Prefrontal Cortex level

• It could support debunking propaganda/grooming with counter-point observed logic and mourning when exceptionalist or supremacist thoughts interfered with moral coherence

• Encouraging moral injury repair that goes beyond a flat apology and builds actual sense of self esteem and relational good-will, even possibly interrupting personality disordered behavior

Consultation & Mentorship for Integrative Health Professionals

- Intersectional Mental Health, Decolonizing Oriented Naturopathic/Non Traditional Praxis, IxFMH in-house program

- Integrative, Functional and Holistic Approach to Mental Health Care

- 14+ years of experience working with complex dissociation and complex health client needs

- 14+ years experience working with parts work, inner child work, and somatic modalities

- Consultation offered as one off on request or weekly for a period of time

- Ongoing weekly Mentorship is available *it is steeped in IxFMH praxis

- Special Topic Presentations available for Conferences, etc.

- Group or Multi Clinician Case Consultation available on request

Schedule a call to learn more about Case Consultation or Mentorship Support

photo credit Henry Be via Unsplash