‘Complex’ and ‘diverse’: Meaning-making and affirming practices as healing justice

Abstract

abstract This perspective draws from my insights in advocacy and therapeutic practice as an African art therapist in Australia. Along with my own positionalities, I have often been involved specifically producing projects related to LGBTIQA + people, migrant communities, First Nations people and other minoritised people in advocacy work. As a therapist, it is not only necessary to be attentive to the ways intersectionality operates as it relates to people who are frequently framed as ‘complex’ and diverse’, these locations and the often pathologising framework of our positions are amplified by where and how neurodiversity is understood for people in the position of therapeutic work. The national sentiment in Australia often frames engagement with those who are complex and diverse through intentions around social inclusion, so multiculturalism and diversity shape the sociocultural as well therapeutic space precisely because they fail to capture the connected structures of power people are engaging, and a transformative ethical intentionality. That is, that questions related to power, and the force of cis-heteronormativity, neurotypicalness, white supremacy, classism and ableism. More specifically, in therapeutic practice, the onus is often on me to confront what sickness, trauma, pain, or even treatment mean when we decentre the biomedical models of mental health that frame our operations. I reflect on how I moved from state-operated practice to build my own practice intended to intentionally make a safer space for Black, indigenous and people of colour, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent and disabled communities. I engage with the continued complexities of building multiple processes of meaning-making as a form of healing justice. I also explore my practice as it is shaped and informed by a transnational, decolonial and feminist praxis. Finally, I engage with the ways that even in attempting to invent this space of dwelling, coming up and against a broader sentiment of an ‘even’ and inclusive national sentiment, and a denial of the operational and constitutive forms of difference that are echoed in law and policy and have affective and structural effects in how we move and live in the world, is a practice that routinises my own exhaustion.