You Don’t Have to Explain Yourself Here
The Importance of Being Understood in Therapy - Before You Even Begin
Starting therapy can take courage. But for many people from diverse or minority backgrounds, it takes something extra: the energy to explain yourself before the real work can even begin.
Your accent. Your faith. Your values. The way your family shows love, or doesn’t talk about feelings. Things that are norms for you, but that you worry your therapist will judge. Things you may feel you need to defend or justify. Sometimes it feels like you need to translate your entire life before you can talk about what’s actually hurting.
Diversity Is Always in the Room
Whether it’s visible or invisible, diversity is always part of the therapeutic relationship. Culture, language, religion, age, personality, values - they all sit quietly between two people trying to understand one another.
Sometimes a client recognises something familiar in their therapist - a shared language, a shared faith, closeness in age, a similar cultural rhythm. That small sense of recognition can help build trust quickly. Clients often talk about the relief of not needing to ‘explain’ their backgrounds before opening up.
The Subtle Fear of Being Misunderstood
But familiarity can also be a double-edged sword. When we feel similar, it’s easy to assume understanding. Yet no two experiences are identical. Even within the same culture, pain, shame, fear, heartbreak, sadness, worry - all take their own shape. It is important that the therapist be able to hold both the comfort of shared experience, alongside the humility of knowing that another’s story can never be assumed until they choose to show it.
Oftentimes a shared background increases clients’ worry that they will be judged - fearing that they might be held up to some cultural or moral standard. For clients from minority or marginalised backgrounds, there can be an unspoken worry: “Will they understand me - or will they judge me?” These concerns can only be allayed when openness is encouraged, and when clients feel able to voice their fears directly within therapy.
It is within these conversations that real safety begins. Because therapy is not about sameness — it is about freedom from shame. The freedom to be honest, to bring forward the parts that have long felt hidden, and to discover that they, too, can be met with understanding.
When There’s Less Common Ground
Other times, therapists and clients lives look completely different to each other.
There’s no shared language or background to lean on - but that doesn’t mean there’s distance. When difference is met with genuine curiosity and humility, it becomes a bridge rather than a barrier.
It’s not the client’s job to educate the therapist about their world - that can be exhausting when they’ve come for support. But if therapists create a space filled with warmth and openness, clients want to share of themselves. They begin to teach, not because they have to, but because they feel seen.
What It Means to Be Truly Seen
An ethnic minority background brings a quiet awareness of the difference between being merely “included” and being truly understood - between being accepted politely and being welcomed as you are.
Such experiences can shape how therapy is offered and received. The aim is not to erase difference, but to honour it. Difference is not an obstacle in therapy; it is part of its richness.
Ultimately, what matters most is that the therapeutic space feels safe enough for every part of a person to exist - language, culture, faith, history, and emotion - without the need for translation or defence.
When this happens, therapy becomes what it was always meant to be: a meeting of two human beings, where understanding is felt before it is explained.