Course Description

A Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) lens is critical to effectively engaging with clients, facilitating culturally relevant interventions and effectively addressing trauma. A JEDI approach to clinical practice includes critical consciousness, cultural humility, and courage by practitioners to name, unpack and deconstruct racialized memories, narratives and traumas that may be linked to other trauma experiences. Clients of color may disclose experiences of trauma coupled with individual, interpersonal, systemic, and vicarious encounters of racial trauma, creating a complex, nuanced trauma presentation. Effective adaptations for clients of color necessitates consideration and acknowledgement of historical trauma, intersectional identities, stigma, power, privilege, and shame in clinical spaces. This presentation—led by Wendy Ashley, Psy.D., LCSW—will provide a framework for clinicians to enhance their EMDR practices, highlight the significance of anti-racist positionality, and provide strategic recommendations for implementation of a JEDI lens and approach in EMDR treatment.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to critique practice approaches and interventions that do not include consideration of intersectional identities, power and privilege.
2. Participants will be able to describe racial trauma and its impact on marginalized, oppressed clients seeking EMDR.
3. Participants will be able to explain anti-racist positionality as it relates to clinical practice.

Presenter(s)

Wendy Ashley, Psy.D., LCSW

Wendy Ashley, Psy.D., LCSW is a Professor and Associate Chair of the California State University Northridge’s MSW program. Dr. Ashley maintains certifications in Diversity and Inclusion Practices from Cornell University and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has over 25 years of clinical practice experience. Dr. Ashley is the author of multiple publications, speaks at conferences nationwide and internationally, maintains a private practice and provides training for multiple organizations. Her research interests emphasize the promotion of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion in practice, pedagogy and organizational culture.