BRAND-NEW!
Law & Ethics, Health Equity, and/or
Cultural Competence CEs
Cultural Humility in Working with Immigrant Clients
Presented by: Dr. Gitika Talwar
When: Friday, June 12th, 2026 | 9:00 AM – 12:15 PM, Pacific Time
Where: Live on Zoom. You will receive your Zoom link/invitation the week of the workshop.
Continuing Education Credit Hours: 3 Law & Ethics, Health Equity, and/or Cultural Competence CEs | $99.00
This continuing education workshop will discuss how therapy is a site of acculturation for the therapeutic dyad (therapist and client/therapist and couple/therapist and family). Recognizing values alignment and values misalignment can be an opportunity for a deep and sincere therapeutic encounter. Cultural humility can be a practice to navigate this therapeutic encounter in helpful ways.
Cultural humility can help the therapist effectively steward the therapeutic space by fostering continuous self-reflection, discovery, and honest, trustworthy relationships with clients (Yeager & Bauer-Wu, 2013). It represents a shift from cultural competence, which emphasizes “knowing” about various cultural groups, to an ongoing process of “understanding” and “being” with the client (Tervalon & Murray-García, 1998; Lekas et al., 2020).
Key aspects and principles of cultural humility include:
- Acknowledging power dynamics and biases: Therapists are invited to recognize their own biases and the inherent power imbalances within the therapeutic relationship (Summers & Nelson, 2022).
- Not being the expert: Therapists understand that they are not the experts when clients have lived experiences different from their own (Summers & Nelson, 2022).
- Advocacy: It includes advocating to dismantle systemic barriers that impact clients (Summers & Nelson, 2022).
Mosher et al. (2017) report that the impact of cultural humility in therapy includes:
- Deeper therapeutic alliances
- Opportunities to communicate respect for the client’s cultural identity
- Better therapy outcomes
- Opportunities for meaningful engagement and repair of cultural mistakes
Given how religious and spiritual beliefs can be entwined with cultural beliefs, cultural humility can be expanded to include humility towards spiritual and religious beliefs in order to serve our racially, ethnically, and spiritually diverse clients.
Workshop Objectives:
- Learn about cultural humility by recognizing how immigration shapes cultural experience, and reflect on the role of spirituality in our culturally diverse clients.
- Identify ethical considerations that challenge the therapist’s capacity to be open, curious, flexible, and empathic in responding to clients’ needs. Develop practices to remain culturally attuned.
- Identify common clinical conceptualizations that can create cultural tensions within this therapeutic space, especially when cultural or spiritual values challenge the therapist’s own value system
- Recognize the importance of advocacy in dismantling systemic barriers that impact clients. Develop practices that foster greater allyship.