Research has repeatedly shown that there are two kinds of power that cause problems in psychotherapy. Both can lead clients to defer to their therapist, to minimize their own lived experiences, and to become passive rather than fully engaged in therapy.
The first is cultural power (e.g., the privileging of certain identities) that can prevent clients from drawing from their own experiences and tailoring interventions to their needs—especially in the face of oppressive cultural narratives. The second is professional power, which is held by therapists by virtue of their training, the authority ascribed to them, and the clients’ learned responses to authority.
Although both forms of power may limit clients’ ability to be empowered in therapy, the two forms are usually discussed separately (Levitt et al., 2016) and rarely are considered in intersection with each other. Yet most clients come into therapy having had experience with both types of power. Supporting clients to value, recognize, and draw from their own experiences can be especially important when clients have had to compromise themselves in the face of either repressive cultural messages or domineering others. For instance, clients’ minoritized cultural power can influence their response to professional power, potentially making them more deferent to, passive with, or suspicious of therapists (e.g., Levitt et al., 2019; Morrill, 2022). Therapists who address only one type of power may not have been trained to perform effective therapy in accordance with social justice values.
Historically, therapists using feminist–multicultural approaches to therapy have developed well-explicated interventions for responding to cultural power as it arises in therapy (e.g., Brown, 2018; Comas-Díaz, 2020). Although humanistic psychologists have produced a rich body of empirical literature on maximizing clients’ agency (e.g., Rogers, 1942), these core processes have rarely been framed in relation to power from a social justice perspective. Taking encouragement from leaders in multicultural psychology who have advocated for the necessity of humanistic interventions in social justice therapies (Brown, 2007; Comas-Díaz, 2012; Jenkins, 1991), Heidi M. Levitt and William J. Whelton, in an article published in The Humanistic Psychologist, have translated core features of this therapy approach to make their relevance clear for client empowerment.
In this article, Levitt and Whelton describe five core humanistic principles that guide therapists to better address professional power in their sessions. For each principle, a key intervention that can be used in training therapists to enact that principle is described, as is an explanation for how its use improves the practice of feminist–multicultural approaches to therapy, thereby facilitating the incorporation of social justice into therapy.
This article is well suited for classes and practica on critical feminist–multicultural and humanistic approaches and on psychotherapy broadly. For each of the principles, Levitt and Whelton present accessible exercises intended for therapist trainees from a range of backgrounds and therapy orientations. In keeping with recent efforts to incorporate critical conceptualizations into humanistic psychotherapies (e.g., Hoffman et al., 2020), the article provides a contemporary understanding of how humanistic and feminist–multicultural approaches have become intertwined and are foundational across social justice therapies. In the course of deliberate supervision and training in feminist–multicultural–humanistic approaches to therapy, these principles can aid both trainers and trainees to develop a comprehensive approach to working with power in psychotherapy.