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Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT)
An inclusive, culturally responsive approach that recognizes identity, values, and community as central to healing and growth.
Introduction
The basics
What is Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT)?
Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) is a type of therapy that honors the unique cultural identities, backgrounds, and worldviews each client brings into the therapy room. It recognizes that culture profoundly shapes how people understand mental health, express distress, seek support, and find healing.
Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model, CIT integrates these cultural perspectives into the heart of the therapeutic process, making treatment feel more authentic, relevant, and respectful.
Goal
What is the goal of Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT)?
The central goal of Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) is to create a therapeutic space where clients feel truly seen and understood not just as individuals, but as whole people shaped by culture, community, and lived experience.
More specifically, it aims to:
- Reduce cultural barriers to healing: Make therapy accessible and comfortable by minimizing misunderstandings or biases that might otherwise get in the way.
- Promote authentic self-expression: Create a safe environment where clients can share all parts of their identity without needing to hide or downplay their culture.
- Enhance therapeutic effectiveness: Improve outcomes by using approaches that align with clients’ values, communication styles, and ways of making meaning.
- Build on cultural strengths: Recognize and celebrate the resilience, wisdom, and traditions within each client’s culture as vital tools for healing.
- Address systemic impacts: Help clients process the effects of discrimination, racism, or displacement on mental health while building strategies for resilience.
- Develop cultural pride and identity integration: Support clients in embracing their heritage as a source of strength while navigating bicultural or multicultural identities.
- Prevent further harm: Ensure therapy does not unintentionally reinforce oppressive messages or dismiss cultural realities.
Ultimately, the goal is to co-create healing experiences that feel real and meaningful for clients, leading to growth that aligns with their cultural values and life context.
Uses
What conditions does Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) treat?
Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) can address a broad range of mental health concerns and life experiences. It is especially supportive for:
- Clients from marginalized or underrepresented communities
- People navigating immigration-related stress
- Those experiencing discrimination or racism-related trauma
- Individuals working through acculturation challenges or intergenerational trauma
- Anyone exploring cultural identity or navigating cross-cultural relationships
Subtypes
What are the subtypes of Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT)?
Yes, there are several subtypes of Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT). Specialized approaches have emerged to meet the unique needs of specific groups or to incorporate cultural healing traditions. Examples include:
- Afrocentric Therapy: Grounded in African and African American cultural values, this approach emphasizes community, spirituality, and collective identity.
- Liberation Psychology: Focused on the psychological effects of oppression, this approach highlights social justice, empowerment, and collective healing.
These variations highlight the flexibility of culturally-informed care and its ability to integrate diverse traditions into therapy.
Effectiveness
Origins
Who developed Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) and when?
Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) didn’t come from one person at one point in time. Instead, it has grown over decades, especially since the 1960s and 1970s, through the work of many psychologists, researchers, and community leaders who recognized the urgent need to make therapy more inclusive, responsive, and equitable.
Evidence Base
Is Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) evidence based?
Yes, a growing body of research consistently shows that culturally-informed approaches improve outcomes for clients.
Studies highlight that they often lead to:
- Better engagement and retention: Clients are more likely to stay in treatment when it feels culturally relevant.
- Improved outcomes: Clients show stronger symptom relief and overall functioning compared to standard models.
- Stronger therapeutic alliance: Trust and connection between client and therapist deepen when cultural awareness is woven into the process.
How it works
Techniques Used
How does Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) work?
Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) weaves cultural awareness into every step of the process. In practice, this may look like:
- Assessment and conceptualization: Therapists explore clients’ cultural backgrounds, family histories, acculturation, experiences with discrimination, spiritual practices, and cultural strengths to understand problems within a larger context.
- Therapeutic relationship building: Therapists approach with humility, acknowledging their own cultural lens and openly discussing differences to build trust.
- Treatment planning and goal setting: Goals are created collaboratively to reflect clients’ cultural values. For example, in collectivist cultures, therapy may focus on family or community harmony rather than individual independence.
- Intervention modifications: Techniques are adapted to fit cultural realities. This might include using familiar metaphors, incorporating spiritual practices, adjusting communication styles, or including family/community members.
- Addressing systemic factors: Therapists help clients process the impact of racism, oppression, or marginalization, while fostering cultural pride and resilience.
- Ongoing cultural responsiveness: Therapists check in regularly to ensure the process continues to feel culturally relevant and respectful.
Because each client’s relationship to their culture is unique, this approach remains flexible, collaborative, and deeply personalized.
What to expect in a session
What can I expect from sessions in Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT)?
Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) sessions are guided by a few key principles:
- Cultural awareness and humility: Therapists examine their own assumptions and meet each client’s culture with openness and respect.
- Contextualized understanding: Problems are seen within cultural, social, and historical contexts, not just as isolated personal struggles.
- Flexible techniques: Strategies are adapted to fit cultural preferences, whether that means adjusting communication, integrating spiritual practices, or reframing goals.
- Identity integration: Clients are encouraged to bring their whole selves—race, ethnicity, faith, gender, sexual orientation, class—into the therapy room.
- Systemic perspective: The therapy acknowledges that individual struggles often reflect broader systemic realities like racism or oppression.
Unlike traditional Western therapy models that can feel individualistic or disconnected from cultural realities, culturally-informed therapy creates space for healing that feels more inclusive, relevant, and empowering.
Treatment length & structure
How long does Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) typically take? Is there any set structure?
Multicultural/Culturally-Informed Therapy (CIT) doesn't have a rigid length or structure. Because healing looks different across individuals, this approach avoids rigid structures and instead adapts to each client’s values, needs, and expectations for change.
Together, you and your therapist will find a pace and process that feels both culturally congruent and effective for your unique situation.
Getting care
Finding a therapist
How do I find a therapist who uses Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT)?
Alma’s directory has many therapists who specialize in Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT), including:
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Similar types of therapy
Besides Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT), what other types of therapy might be right for me?
If after reading this, you’re not sure if Multicultural/Culturally Informed Therapy (CIT) is quite the right fit, here are some other types that might be worth looking into:
Narrative Therapy: if you want to reframe your story
Narrative therapy helps people separate themselves from problems and re-author stories in ways that reflect values, strengths, and meaning.
Psychoanalysis: if deeper long-term insight feels useful
Psychoanalysis explores unconscious patterns, early experiences, and recurring conflicts through deep, long-term self-exploration.
Interpersonal Psychotherapy: if relationships are affecting symptoms
IPT focuses on how mood symptoms are connected to relationship patterns, role transitions, grief, and interpersonal stress.
Motivational Interviewing: if readiness for change is a concern
Motivational interviewing is a collaborative, nonjudgmental approach that helps people explore ambivalence and strengthen their own reasons for change.
This article was written and medically validated by Drs. Jill Krahwinkel-Bower and Jamie Bower.
FAQs
Multicultural therapy may be a good fit if you've felt that previous therapy didn't fully account for who you are — your cultural background, your experiences with racism or discrimination, your family's values, or the way your community shapes how you understand mental health. It's particularly relevant for people from marginalized or underrepresented communities, immigrants navigating acculturation, people dealing with identity-related stress, and anyone for whom cultural context is an important part of their experience. Culturally informed therapy isn't a separate specialty so much as an orientation — and it makes therapy more effective by making it more relevant.
Yes. Absolutely, this therapeutic approach translates well to the virtual setting. Sessions are delivered effectively over secure video platforms, and consistent data shows results are comparable to traditional in-person care. If you're looking for this type of therapy online, you can use this link to find a multicultural or culturally-informed therapist who takes your insurance.
Whether multicultural or culturally-focused therapy is covered depends on your individual insurance plan. Most major insurance plans cover therapy when it's provided by a licensed mental health professional, regardless of the type of therapy you choose. What matters more is whether therapy is considered medically necessary given your diagnosis. The best way to find out what you'll pay is to check your plan's explanation of benefits, call the member services number on your insurance card, or use Alma's free cost estimator tool before booking.
Culture shapes virtually everything that happens in a therapy room: how distress is understood and expressed, what counts as a problem versus a normal human experience, the role of family versus individual in decision-making, attitudes toward help-seeking, and the very language used to describe inner life. A therapist who doesn't account for these dimensions may inadvertently pathologize behaviors that are culturally normative, miss the significance of spiritual or community-based resources, or apply Western-centric concepts about autonomy or emotional expression in ways that don't fit the client's worldview. Culturally informed therapy attends to these layers explicitly.
Cultural competence in therapy involves more than knowing facts about different cultures — it requires self-awareness about one's own cultural lens, genuine humility about what you don't know, and the ongoing willingness to learn from each client about their specific experience. A culturally competent therapist asks about and honors the client's cultural background rather than assuming; adapts their approach, language, and goals to fit the client's values; acknowledges the impact of systemic factors like racism, discrimination, and historical trauma; and is willing to integrate cultural strengths, spiritual practices, and community resources into the therapeutic work when they're relevant.
Yes, and research supports this directly. Studies consistently show that clients from marginalized communities are more likely to stay in therapy, report stronger therapeutic alliances, and achieve better outcomes when working with a therapist who has shared cultural experience or who is explicitly culturally informed in their approach. A Alma survey found that 37% of people of color prioritize their therapist's race in their search — a reflection of how much shared cultural understanding matters for the therapeutic relationship. Alma's directory allows you to filter by therapist identity, language, specialization, and cultural background to help you find a provider who is positioned to truly understand your context.
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