Intracultural Humility: The Myth of Shared Experience

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Intracultural Humility: The Myth of Shared Experience

When I wrote Decolonised Minds: When Radical Becomes Rational, there was a concept I introduced that I now believe deserved considerably more space. I called it intracultural humility. I described it in Chapter 3, under the second foundation of decolonised psychotherapy, as “the active recognition that shared heritage does not guarantee shared lived experience” (AlAli, 2025, p. 49). I developed the concept through practice, through moments when cultural familiarity initially appeared to give me an advantage in understanding a client and later became precisely the reason I had to question my assumptions.

The concept emerged from a problem that cultural humility alone did not fully explain for me. Cultural humility has become an important corrective to the idea that therapists can acquire sufficient knowledge about cultures and subsequently become “competent” in working with people from those cultures. Tervalon and Murray-García (1998) conceptualised cultural humility as an ongoing process of self-evaluation, self-critique, attention to power imbalances, and mutually beneficial relationships. Hook et al. (2013) subsequently operationalised cultural humility as an other-oriented stance characterised by respect and an absence of superiority, demonstrating its relevance to the therapeutic relationship. The emphasis is therefore on the therapist recognising the limits of their knowledge and remaining open to the client as the authority on their own experience.

I consider intracultural humility to be a further movement within this logic. Cultural humility asks me to recognise that I cannot know another person simply because I come from a different cultural background. Intracultural humility asks me to maintain that same humility when the client and I appear to come from the same cultural world.

That distinction matters because cultural similarity can create a particularly persuasive illusion of understanding. When a therapist and client share ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, migration history, political history, or some other important aspect of identity, the therapist may experience familiarity before they have actually developed understanding. Familiarity can quietly become assumption. The therapist may begin completing the client's story before the client has told it.

The white working-class client and the problem of assumed sameness

The example I used in Decolonised Minds illustrates this clearly. The example concerns a white, middle-class therapist in London working with a white, working-class client who grew up in an overcrowded flat in a neglected neighbourhood. Despite their shared ethnicity, their class positions and material histories are substantially different. The therapist could easily interpret the client's anxiety, depression, or low self-esteem through an individual psychological framework while failing to recognise the effects of poverty, deprivation, social exclusion, and class-based stigma (AlAli, 2025).

This is a particularly stark example of why intracultural humility matters. Both people are white. Yet “white experience” tells us very little about the client's actual life. Class, housing, education, geography, economic security, family history, and access to resources produce very different realities within the same broad racial or ethnic category. A therapist who assumes that racial similarity provides sufficient cultural understanding can therefore miss precisely those forms of difference that are clinically significant.

This example is also useful because it demonstrates that intracultural humility is not restricted to racial or ethnic difference. It concerns difference within any apparently shared cultural category. A therapist and client may share nationality while occupying very different social classes. They may share religion while holding different relationships to religious practice. They may share ethnicity while having grown up in different countries. They may both identify as Palestinian while having radically different experiences of occupation, displacement, class, geography, political violence, or diaspora. They may both identify as Syrian while one grew up in Damascus and another in a rural community, a refugee camp, or a diaspora household. The category is shared; the experience is not.

When the therapist is Palestinian

This became particularly important to me as a Palestinian psychotherapist. I grew up in the West Bank. That history is part of me, and it inevitably enters the therapeutic room in ways that require reflection. Yet working with Palestinians from Gaza who have survived the catastrophic full scale of genocide inflicted on Gaza by Israel requires intracultural humility precisely because I am Palestinian.

My Palestinian identity does not give me automatic access to the experience of a Palestinian from Gaza. The histories overlap profoundly. The political structures are connected. The language, cultural references, collective memories, and experiences of dispossession resonate deeply. Yet Gaza and the West Bank have distinct political, geographical, social, familial, and historical realities. A Palestinian therapist from the West Bank can therefore make assumptions about a Palestinian client from Gaza just as easily as a therapist from outside Palestine can make assumptions about a Palestinian client.

The same principle applies when I work with Syrians. I have worked extensively with Syrian clients and communities, but I am not Syrian. Even where there are shared experiences of war, displacement, Arab culture, religion, colonial histories, or regional political violence, those commonalities do not erase difference. My responsibility is to remain curious about what the client's particular Syrian experience means rather than allowing my familiarity with the broader region to become a substitute for listening.

This is close to the experience I described in Decolonised Minds when working with an Iraqi client in Jordan. I initially assumed that my own Palestinian experience of occupation and displacement created a form of understanding that could be readily transferred to his experience. During one session, the client challenged my framing of therapy as a “safe space,” responding, “Safety is a luxury when you don’t know who’s your friend and who’s your enemy” (AlAli, 2025, p. 50). That moment exposed the limits of my assumption. Although we shared experiences of colonial violence and collective grief, the client's Iraqi identity, experiences of sectarian persecution, and trauma associated with ISIS were not mine to claim.

I wrote in the book that my error was assuming solidarity erased difference. It does not. Shared oppression does not produce identical experience. My response involved examining my relative privilege and position, including my professional status and Jordanian passport, and recognising that these factors created a power relationship even within what might superficially appear to be a culturally familiar therapeutic encounter. The subsequent work was shaped by the client's own preferences, including Quranic recitation, prayer, maqam, Iraqi mawwal, and sensory associations with foods and cultural memory (AlAli, 2025).

The significance of this experience for me was not simply that I learned more about Iraqi culture. The deeper lesson was that knowledge about a culture can itself become another form of certainty if the therapist begins to believe that knowledge grants access to an individual person's experience.

Intracultural humility and cultural humility

Intracultural humility therefore sits within cultural humility while drawing attention to a particular clinical danger: the assumption that similarity reduces the need for humility. Cultural humility requires the therapist to recognise the limits of their cultural knowledge. Intracultural humility requires the therapist to recognise the limits of their cultural familiarity.

This distinction also helps explain why the concept should not be reduced to learning more facts about different communities. Cultural knowledge has value, but a therapist can know a considerable amount about Palestinian history and still misunderstand a Palestinian client. They can know the history of Syria and still misunderstand a Syrian client. They can understand the structural effects of racism and still misunderstand a particular Black client. They can understand working-class deprivation and still misunderstand the particular meanings that poverty carries for a client.

The clinical question is therefore not simply, “What do I know about this culture?” It is also, “What am I assuming I know because I recognise myself, my history, or my community in this person?”

That question brings intracultural humility into conversation with established psychological concepts such as countertransference and over-identification. These concepts are relevant, but they do not fully describe what I mean by intracultural humility.

Over-identification has long been recognised as a potential countertransference problem. A therapist may identify so strongly with a client's experience that their capacity to recognise difference becomes compromised. In ethnocultural work, Comas-Díaz and Jacobsen (1991) specifically identified overidentification, distancing, and cultural myopia as possible forms of intraethnic countertransference. Contemporary trauma literature similarly identifies over-identification as a potential problem when therapists recognise aspects of their own experience in a client's trauma (Davoren et al., 2024).

Intracultural humility overlaps with this literature, but its starting point is different. Countertransference primarily concerns the therapist's emotional and relational responses to the client. Intracultural humility is a decolonial epistemic and ethical discipline concerning what the therapist assumes they know. A therapist may experience little obvious emotional countertransference and still make an intracultural error by assuming that shared ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, migration history, or political experience makes the client's perspective familiar enough to interpret without sufficient curiosity.

The distinction from similarity research is also important. Research has examined whether therapist-client similarity influences the therapeutic alliance, with findings that are mixed and dependent on what kind of similarity is being considered (Wall, 2026). Similarity may sometimes contribute to connection, recognition, or shared understanding. Intracultural humility does not require therapists to deny the value of similarity. It requires them to resist turning similarity into presumed knowledge.

Intracultural humility and broaching

There is also an important relationship between intracultural humility and the literature on broaching. Day-Vines et al. (2020) developed the Multidimensional Model of Broaching Behavior, which includes an intracultural dimension concerning issues arising within the therapist's own cultural group. This literature is important because it demonstrates that cultural conversations are not confined to relationships between culturally different people.

My formulation of intracultural humility overlaps with this recognition while placing greater emphasis on the epistemic problem of assumed shared experience. Broaching asks therapists to engage explicitly with culture, race, identity, and power rather than allowing these subjects to remain invisible. Intracultural humility asks what happens when the therapist believes these conversations are unnecessary because “we are the same.”

That is particularly significant within decolonised psychotherapy because colonial systems of knowledge have historically positioned professionals as authoritative interpreters of other people's experiences. A therapist can reproduce that hierarchy even while sharing the client's cultural background. The therapist may become the person who explains what the client's culture means, what their community believes, or how someone from “our culture” should understand a particular problem. The client's individual experience is then subordinated to the therapist's cultural interpretation.

Intracultural humility interrupts this process by returning epistemic authority to the client.

Why this matters in sex therapy

I originally developed this concept within my broader work on decolonising psychotherapy, and I have been interested in its implications for sex therapy. Sexuality is deeply embedded in cultural, religious, familial, historical, political, and social meanings. Contemporary sexual medicine literature increasingly recognises this, with the Fifth International Consultation on Sexual Medicine explicitly recommending cultural humility and emphasising that members of the same cultural community may hold very different beliefs and practices concerning sexuality (Wittmann et al., 2025).

This creates an important challenge for therapists who share cultural backgrounds with their clients. A therapist who grew up within the same cultural or religious environment may feel especially well positioned to understand a client's sexual concerns. Sometimes that familiarity will genuinely help. It may facilitate language, trust, recognition, and sensitivity to meanings that another therapist would initially struggle to understand. At the same time, familiarity can conceal assumptions about what sexuality means, what a “healthy” sexual relationship should look like, what marriage should involve, how desire should be expressed, or how religious and cultural values should relate to sexual behaviour.

A Palestinian therapist working with a Palestinian client on sexual concerns therefore needs intracultural humility just as much as a therapist working across cultural boundaries. The therapist may understand the historical context, family structures, religious references, social pressures, and cultural language. Yet the client's relationship with those same structures may be radically different. One Palestinian client may experience a particular religious value as protective; another may experience it as restrictive. One may experience family involvement as supportive; another may experience it as intrusive. One may understand sexual modesty as an important personal value; another may reject it. Shared culture provides context. It does not provide the answer.

Intracultural humility as a clinical discipline

If intracultural humility is to be more than a useful phrase, it needs to become part of clinical reflection and supervision. I would suggest three questions as a starting point.

First: What am I assuming I understand because this client's identity overlaps with mine? The purpose is to identify the point at which familiarity has begun replacing curiosity.

Second: Where might my own social position within this culture differ from my client's position? This requires attention to class, geography, education, gender, migration, citizenship, religion, political history, family structure, generation, and other dimensions of power.

Third: What has the client said or done that challenges the story I had already constructed about them? The answer can become a particularly useful route into supervision because it identifies the moment when the therapist's internal model of the client and the client's own account begin to diverge.

These questions are consistent with the broader principles of cultural humility, which emphasise ongoing self-reflection, recognition of limitations, attention to power, and openness to correction (Tervalon & Murray-García, 1998; Hook et al., 2013). They also fit with contemporary approaches to cultural rupture and repair, which emphasise examining identity, power, privilege, and countertransference rather than assuming that the therapist's interpretation is the neutral account of what has happened (Boswell et al., 2025).

Intracultural humility ultimately requires a particular kind of restraint. It asks the therapist to resist the seduction of recognition. The feeling of “I understand” can be useful, but it can also be the moment when the therapist stops asking.

For me, this is why the concept belongs within a decolonial framework. Decolonising psychotherapy involves questioning who is permitted to know, whose knowledge becomes authoritative, and whose experience is interpreted through professional frameworks. Intracultural humility extends that interrogation inward. It asks therapists to question their authority even when they believe they belong to the same cultural world as the person sitting in front of them.

When I wrote that shared heritage does not guarantee shared lived experience, I was writing from mistakes I had made in practice. The concept was not produced in abstraction. It emerged from recognising that solidarity, cultural familiarity, and shared history can create genuine connection while simultaneously creating blind spots. I continue to think that both truths have to be held.

Intracultural humility therefore does not ask therapists to abandon cultural knowledge, shared identity, solidarity, or lived experience. It asks us to hold them with enough humility that they do not become claims to another person's story. The client remains the authority on their own experience. The therapist's task is to listen closely enough to discover where their assumptions end and the client's actual world begins.

References

AlAli, T. (2025). minds: When radical becomes rational: A framework for decolonising psychotherapy. Decolonised Minds Press.

Boswell, N., Barghini, R., Bhatt-Mackin, S., Murray, A., Topor, D., Nakamura, A., Pellegrino, L., & Ruble, A. E. (2025). Repairing Cultural Ruptures in Psychotherapy: Strategies to Enhance the Therapeutic Alliance. American journal of psychotherapy, 78(2), 119–123. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.20240045

Comas-Díaz, L., & Jacobsen, F. M. (1991). Ethnocultural transference and countertransference in the therapeutic dyad. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61(3), 392–402. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079267

Davoren, N., McEleney, A., Corcoran, S., Tierney, P., & Fortune, D. G. (2024). Refugees and asylum seekers who have experienced trauma: Thematic synthesis of therapeutic boundary considerations. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy, 31(1), e2894. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.2894

Day-Vines, N. L., Cluxton-Keller, F., Agorsor, C., Gubara, S., & Otabil, N. A. A. (2020). The multidimensional model of broaching behavior. Journal of Counseling & Development, 98(1), 107–118. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12304

Day-Vines, N.L., Cluxton-Keller, F., Agorsor, C. and Gubara, S. (2021). Strategies for broaching the subjects of race, ethnicity, and culture. Journal of Counseling & Development, 99(3), 348–357. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcad.12380

Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Utsey, S. O. (2013). Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(3), 353–366. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032595

Hook, J. N., Davis, D., Owen, J., & DeBlaere, C. (2017). Introduction: Beginning the journey of cultural humility. In J. N. Hook, D. Davis, J. Owen, & C. DeBlaere, Cultural humility: Engaging diverse identities in therapy (pp. 3–16). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000037-001

Tervalon, M., & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117–125. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2010.0233

Wall, H. J., and S. Mather. 2026. “Does Mismatching Matter? A Systematic Review Into the Impact of Therapist-Client Personality Similarity on the Therapeutic Alliance.” Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 26, no. 2: e70103. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.70103.

Wittmann, D., Promodu, K., Osur, J., Abdulcadir, J., Johnson-Agbakwu, C., Sorial, N., Ghanem, H., Sharlip, I., Zandoná, P. C. E., Pearlman, A., Chang, H.-C., & Glina, S. (2025). The socio-cultural aspects of sexual medicine: Recommendations from the Fifth International Consultation on Sexual Medicine (ICSM 2024). Sexual Medicine Reviews, 13(4), 574–588. https://doi.org/10.1093/sxmrev/qeaf050

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