Privilege and otherness are core concepts in the world today. My work often explores the fact that we all have an experience of privilege and that we all have an experience of being the outsider. Because our identity is so intersectional, meaning that we have multiple identities at any one moment in time, these identities may well carry aspects of privilege or otherness at any one moment and influence our interactions with other people around us.
In conjunction we are often taught that we are either of privilege and we over-identify with that, or that we are an outsider and we over-identify with that. This can lead us either to feel that we have no power as the other or that we are ashamed of our sense of privilege, if that is what we hold.
Counselling and psychotherapy therefore works to realign and recognise that these are both parts of who we are and that there is nothing wrong with having privilege, it is how it is used that is important. And there is nothing wrong with being an outsider, but that to over-identify with that distances ourselves from our own power and authority.