Intersectionality in EMDR: Complexity, Curiosity, and Clinical Humility with Anastasia Soroka cover art

Intersectionality in EMDR: Complexity, Curiosity, and Clinical Humility with Anastasia Soroka

Intersectionality in EMDR: Complexity, Curiosity, and Clinical Humility with Anastasia Soroka

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Summary

 In this episode, Bridger welcomes Anastasia Soroka to Notice That for a one-on-one conversation about intersectionality, invisible identities, power, and complexity in the therapy room. Anastasia introduces herself as a trauma therapist specializing in complex trauma, relational dynamics, and interpersonal systems. She is also the host of the Insights with Us podcast and an author whose work explores stigma, sexuality, communication, and the human experience.The conversation begins with Anastasia’s metaphor for intersectionality: each identity as a street or intersection that adds complexity to the road of a person’s life. Rather than viewing identity as a single category, Anastasia describes intersectionality as the layered interaction of race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, culture, disability, chronic pain, geography, and lived experience. Bridger and Anastasia explore how this matters clinically because simplified assumptions about identity can prevent therapists from truly meeting the client in front of them.Anastasia shares about growing up across multiple countries, including Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates, and how her early life shaped her understanding of culture, belonging, and difference. Having spent much of her childhood outside the United States, she reflects on the question “Where are you from?” and how difficult it can be to answer when identity is shaped by movement, cultural immersion, and many overlapping homes.The conversation then turns toward invisible identities and the difference between what is chosen, what is given, and what is allowed to be. Anastasia reflects on queerness, sexuality, chronic pain, perfectionism, and the ways some identities become difficult to name when the surrounding environment does not make enough room for them. Bridger and Anastasia discuss how therapy can become a space where clients begin to recognize, name, and reclaim parts of themselves that may have been minimized, hidden, or disallowed.Anastasia also shares the story of becoming a therapist, beginning with her original desire to pursue research and academia, her work in crisis services, and her eventual movement into trauma therapy and EMDR. She describes her crisis work as a place where she learned the power of slowing down, sitting with another human being, and offering safety without rushing toward solutions.A major portion of the episode explores EMDR therapy with complex trauma. Anastasia reflects on her experience of EMDR basic training, the usefulness of the Adaptive Information Processing model, and the realization that standard protocol alone is often insufficient for clients with developmental trauma, dissociation, chronic shame, and complex relational histories. Bridger and Anastasia discuss the importance of extended resourcing, building adaptive networks, and honoring the pace required for complex trauma work.Anastasia describes how she integrates parts work into EMDR, especially by attending to protectors and allowing those parts to help shape the pace and sequence of trauma processing. Rather than forcing the client into a rigid treatment structure, she emphasizes the need to “go with” the client’s system — honoring imagery, sensation, color, thought, dissociation, and the unique ways trauma communicates through the body and imagination.The episode also includes a powerful reflection on chronic pain as an invisible identity. Anastasia shares her experience of living for over a decade with debilitating headaches and migraines before finally being believed by a provider who recognized the source of her pain. She and Bridger discuss how chronic pain shapes identity, self-understanding, relational life, and the ability to show up authentically. This leads into a broader reflection on the clinical importance of believing clients when they describe their own experience.Toward the end of the conversation, Bridger and Anastasia explore how therapists can begin practicing intersectional humility. Anastasia suggests that trauma-informed care means entering the room with awareness that something important may be present even when it has not yet been named. This includes trauma, but it also includes invisible identities, minority identities, shame, pain, and meanings the client may not yet feel safe enough to disclose.The conversation closes with a discussion of meaning-making, assumptions, monogamy, polyamory, relational expectations, diversity education, and the need for therapists to deconstruct their own definitions. Anastasia invites clinicians to ask clients what their words, values, identities, and relationships mean to them rather than assuming shared definitions. Bridger connects this with the therapeutic need to create an authentic meeting place where client and therapist can build meaning together.Key ThemesIntersectionality in therapyIdentity is not singular. Each client and therapist enters the room with overlapping experiences of culture, privilege, ...
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