Cultural humility
As research has revealed, when health, especially mental health, practitioners demonstrate cultural humility, they develop a better working alliance with their clients: a key determinant of whether the therapy will be successful. To illustrate, in a study that Zhu et al. (2025) designed and implemented, 610 individuals who had received psychotherapy services from a licenced counsellor completed a survey. Specifically, the participants completed
- the cultural humility and enactment scale to measure the degree to which these counsellors demonstrated cultural humility—such as a willingness to learn about cultures rather than impose their cultural beliefs,
- the working alliance inventory (Hatcher & Gillaspy, 2006) to gauge the quality of this relationship between the participant and counsellor, including questions like “What I am doing in therapy gives me new ways of looking at my problem”,
- the Barrett–Lennard Relational Inventory (Barrett-Lennard, 2015) to gauge the degree to which the counsellors seemed empathic, including questions like “My counsellor usually senses or realises what I am feeling”.
Cultural humility was positively associated with the working alliance between the participants and counsellors—and empathy mediated this relationship. Presumably, when a counsellor demonstrates cultural humility, clients feel their personal needs and circumstances are not as likely to be misconstrued. This understanding enables counsellors to be empathic—and empathy is a key feature of a strong working alliance. When counsellors and clients have developed a strong working alliance, in which they agree on therapeutic goals and tasks as well as establish an emotional bond, clients are more likely to benefit significantly from the sessions (for a meta-analysis, see Flückiger et al., 2018).
