Some parts of your life don’t translate.
You’ve learned to leave pieces of yourself at the door.
You edit your words or the way that you say things to different people.
You can tell when someone is curious or when they're digging for an answer.
Maybe you feel:
- invisible or exposed
- on guard
- split between worlds
- too much to explain
Your body learned to read the room because belonging was never guaranteed.
Multicultural therapy makes room for all of you.
What is Multicultural Therapy?
Multicultural therapy is an approach that sees your culture and identity as central to your health.
It’s built on the idea that no therapy is neutral. Race, culture and faith shape the struggle and the healing.
It works by bringing your context into the room, including the parts your therapist doesn’t share.
Your therapist learns your world in your words and adapts the therapy process to you.
It’s especially helpful for family, self-esteem and shame, when the struggle sits between two worlds.
Multicultural therapists work to understand you inside your culture and your history.
What is a Multicultural Therapist?
A multicultural therapist is a registered therapist trained to work across identity differences, starting with their own.
They examine their own assumptions and biases so they can practice with cultural humility and care.
There is no single certification, and multicultural therapy is both a lens and a set of practices, so the depth varies widely.
Some therapists complete graduate courses and supervised practice focused on culture, race or identity.
Some therapists train in specific frameworks, like cultural humility or anti-oppressive practice.
Some therapists bring in their own unique traditions, like Indigenous therapists who work alongside Elders, knowledge keepers and healers.
You can work with a therapist who shares your language, culture or background, or one who doesn't. Both work for different purposes.
What matters most is that the therapist is a good fit for you.
The Process of Multicultural Therapy
Multicultural therapy is collaborative and relational, shaped around your cultural context.
It often begins with your therapist asking what you want them to understand about your background.
You might reflect on how your identities are unique sources of strength and resilience.
As trust builds, you might explore how experiences of bias or oppression shape what you carry and the cost.
There’s no set length, and the goal is to be understood whole, without leaving parts of yourself outside.
Trauma-sensitive multicultural therapy considers what happened to you and your people.
The origin story starts with a walkout.
For most of its first century, psychology studied one kind of person and called the results human.
In September 1968, the American Psychological Association (APA) held its convention in San Francisco. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed that April, and the profession had said almost nothing.
A few hundred Black psychologists, out of tens of thousands of members, met on their own. They wrote a petition of concerns and carried it to the APA’s governing council: the association had no plan for Black communities, Black students or the biased tests being used to sort Black children into slow classes.
When the council wouldn’t commit, the Black psychologists walked out and founded their own association that same week, the Association of Black Psychologists, with Charles Thomas as its first chair.
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One of the founders, Robert Williams, argued that standardized intelligence test scores fluctuate based on cultural context rather than actual cognitive ability. He built a test of his own written in Black vernacular called the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity, or BITCH-100. Black test-takers scored far higher than white ones, and the point landed.
Others followed. The Asian American Psychological Association formed in 1972, with a young psychologist named Derald Wing Sue among its founders.
In 1973, at a training conference in Vail, Colorado, the profession conceded the point: treating people from cultures you hadn’t been trained to understand was declared unethical.
In 1976, a Black psychologist named Robert Guthrie published a history of the field with a title that named racism: Even the Rat Was White.
In 1982, Sue and six colleagues published a position paper naming three things a counselor needed in order to work across cultures:
- awareness of your own assumptions and biases
- knowledge of the client’s world
- the skills to adapt
They called it cross-cultural counseling competence. In 1992 the list grew to 31 competencies and was adopted by the counseling profession, and multiculturalism was named the fourth force in psychology, after psychodynamic, behavioral and humanistic.
But something got lost between the petition and the checklist.
Competence became a list. Knowledge about groups turned into facts about groups, and a therapist could learn what clients of color supposedly need and stop seeing the person in front of them.
The framework also kept the power where it was. The therapist became competent and the client stayed the subject. But therapy itself was a cultural practice with its own assumptions.
In 1998, two physicians in California, Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-García, argued that competence was the wrong word. You can’t finish learning a culture, and the belief you could was dangerous. They proposed cultural humility instead: lifelong self-examination, attention to the power in the room and accountability for the institutions therapists work inside.
In Canada, much of the harm came from institutions of care. Residential schools were run by churches. Indian hospitals were run by the health system. The Sixties Scoop was run by child welfare. The harm didn't end with the people who lived it. The intergenerational trauma passed through families. Offering culturally sensitive care from inside the same systems asks for a trust those systems broke.
The last federally run residential school didn't close until 1996. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent six years hearing from survivors and in 2015 issued 94 Calls to Action. Number 22 asks the health system to recognize Indigenous healing practices and to work with Elders and traditional healers. In 2004, Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall had already given health care a phrase for it: Two-Eyed Seeing, the strengths of Indigenous knowledge in one eye and Western knowledge in the other.
Trauma-sensitive multicultural therapy works inside the gaps. It treats racism, colonization and displacement as traumas. It holds the institution accountable along with the person in it. It starts from humility, with you as the expert on your culture and your experiences. And it treats safety as structural, so your own ways of healing are welcome in the room.
Trauma-sensitive therapy starts by asking what you need to feel safe here.
Trauma-Sensitive Multicultural Therapy
What if the systems offering help are part of what hurt you?
When harm came from schools, hospitals, churches or the state, a health professional carries that history.
Trauma-sensitive therapy names harm out loud and builds a safe environment.
5 phrases you might hear in Trauma-Sensitive Multicultural Therapy:
- What would you like me to know about your culture?
- What you're describing sounds like racism.
- How do you make sense of this experience?
- If I get something wrong, you can tell me however feels comfortable.
- Would you like to include any traditional practices or supports in our work?
Trauma-sensitive multicultural therapy invites your whole self into the room.
Principles of Trauma-Sensitive Multicultural Therapy
In your words
You define your culture and history in your words, and you get to name what it means to you.
Anti-racism
Trauma-sensitive therapists actively identify, challenge and dismantle racism in sessions and in themselves.
Many ways to heal
Ceremony, prayer, family, community and other practices can sit beside or in therapy with you.
Therapy adapts to you
Individual talk therapy is one way of doing things. Trauma-sensitive therapy adapts to what you need.
Trauma-Sensitive Care
Multicultural therapy was built to make your culture part of the room, not left at the door.
With trauma, your culture might be part of the harm.
Your connection to your culture, or your distance from it, can be part of your protection.
Trauma-sensitive care is a way of practicing multicultural therapy that doesn’t make assumptions about your harm or healing.
It begins with humility, so you share what you choose without having to educate your therapist.
A trauma-sensitive multicultural therapist names what they don’t know and follows your lead.
Trauma-sensitive care honors your whole self, including your own ways of healing.
Questions About Multicultural Therapy
What is cultural competence?
What is cultural humility?
What is anti-racism?
What is Two-Eyed Seeing?
What is intergenerational trauma?
Should my therapist share my background?
Where would you like to go next?
Related Topics in This Library
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