The Difference Between Being Heard and Being Held
Culturally Responsive Care Is an Ethical Stance, Not a Niche
If trauma is something we continue to live with, not just live through, then how we’re met in our healing makes all the difference.
Therapy is never just about what we say—it’s about who’s listening, how they’re listening, and what they’re capable of holding. That’s why culturally responsive care isn’t just a clinical orientation—it’s an ethical stance. One that recognizes trauma doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does healing.
I’ve been an advocate for this kind of approach throughout my entire career—long before it was widely acknowledged or celebrated. My work has always been grounded in the belief that we cannot untangle mental health from the sociopolitical realities people are navigating every day. It’s encouraging to witness a new generation of therapists and healers embracing this framework—because it reflects a deeper, more just understanding of how power, identity, access, and structural inequity shape both suffering and recovery. This shift is not just theoretical—it’s practical, and it’s overdue.
Culturally responsive care is an approach to therapy that is fundamentally rooted in social justice. It doesn't treat mental health as separate from the world we live in but instead recognizes that our emotional and psychological well-being is profoundly shaped by the systems, structures, and lived experiences that surround us. At its core, it asks questions that are often left unspoken in traditional therapy spaces: Who has access to healing? Whose emotions are seen as valid? Whose pain is dismissed, pathologized, or ignored? Who stands to lose if we start asking harder questions?
This approach centers on intersectionality, a term coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how different aspects of our identity—such as race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, class, disability, and more—interact to shape our experience of the world. No one identity exists in isolation, and neither does our suffering. Our mental health cannot be fully understood without considering the broader social and political forces that impact us daily.
For example, my ability to access therapy—whether I can afford it, feel culturally safe in it, or even believe I'm allowed to express vulnerability—has everything to do with how I'm positioned in society. Privilege and power shape how we enter healing spaces. And when access is missing, it's not a failure of motivation or self-discipline—it's a reflection of systemic inequities.
Culturally responsive care invites us to reframe the question from "What's wrong with you?" to "What has happened to you?" and "What has this person had to carry, survive, or navigate just to be here?" As a therapist, I've seen the power of this shift. It's in the moments when we gently remind someone that they were a child when the harm occurred—and that what happened wasn't their fault. It wasn't fair. Others had power, choices, and responsibility—and they didn't use them in a way that protected or honored the person sitting in front of us now. These are not excuses. They are explanations—and they often become the cracks where internalized shame begins to fall away.
This kind of care also asks therapists to take responsibility for their own power. Therapy is never neutral. As therapists, we sit in positions of influence—we hold authority, expertise, and access. Some therapeutic models emphasize hierarchy and direction. However, culturally responsive care calls us to move toward a more collaborative and egalitarian relationship. It invites us to follow the client's lead, to co-create the space, and to remain accountable for how our presence—our words, our identities, our assumptions—impacts the room.
To practice this kind of care well, we must commit to ongoing self-reflection. That means continually examining our own cultural identities, biases, blind spots, and privileges. It means noticing not only what we were taught in training programs and institutions but also what was left out—what narratives, communities, and traditions were made invisible. It means unlearning the default norms of the dominant culture and replacing them with something more spacious, curious, and just.
Culturally responsive care also makes room for non-Western and Indigenous understandings of healing—for collective grief rituals, ancestral wisdom, spirituality, storytelling, land-based practices, and community care. It challenges the assumption that healing must be individual, clinical, or confined to a 50-minute session. For many people, healing includes reclaiming what was lost or erased: language, tradition, rhythm, rest.
Above all, culturally responsive care honors the client as the expert of their own experience. Therapy becomes less about diagnosing and fixing and more about witnessing, validating, and supporting someone's journey toward self-discovery.
In that way, this model is not just a therapeutic approach. It's a call to reimagine what healing can look like—when it's shaped by equity, relationship, cultural humility, and a profound commitment to collective liberation. You've probably already noticed that I use the word liberation intentionally—not just as a radical acknowledgment of the intergenerational traumas and hardships so many of us carry, but also as an invitation to reclaim the parts of ourselves we've had to hide, silence, or protect. It's about the freedom to feel, to express, and to live more fully in our authentic selves.