Identity salience: an intersectional approach to understanding multicultural processes & outcomes in psychotherapy

Identity salience refers to the relative importance of each of our multicultural identities. Examples of these identities include race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, and age among others. How salient these identities are within us changes across our lifespan and in many ways are shaped by our experiences with others, within the cultures we live, and within the political systems in which we exist. Recent literature on multicultural identity in psychotherapy has found that therapists often rupture relationships with clients through microaggressions and are often unaware of these occurrences. This literature encourages practitioners and scholars to continue to understand the ways in which multicultural identity is important in therapy and how therapists can respond better when exploring culture. However, much of this literature only focuses on singular identities and does not allow for participants to express how important those identities are to them. This study examined if the relationship between therapists’ MCO and clients’ perceived improvement in psychotherapy differ as a function of the salience of their cultural identities.

Participants in this study were 193 individuals who had received at least five sessions of psychotherapy in the last six months, and who were at least 18 years of age. They responded to a survey that included rating their therapist on many factors related to how culture was discussed in therapy and how comfortable the therapist was in discussing cultural identity with them. They also reported how much they improved within therapy and what their salient identities were. Results showed that as therapists were rated higher in their humility and comfort when discussing multicultural identity in therapy, and clients salience of multiple identities was high, clients reported more positive improvement in therapy.