Detecting Microaggressions Toward a Muslim Client in Psychotherapy

Microaggressions are an all too common occurrence in psychotherapy, and they lead to poorer therapeutic relationships and worse client outcomes. An important step in reducing therapist microaggressions toward clients is helping therapists to discern statements that contain microaggressive content. While the literature on microaggressions within the context of the therapy relationship has been growing in recent years, little attention has been paid to expressions of bias related to clients’ religious identities. Moreover, there has been a continued rise of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the United States, and therefore, there is a need to understand and enhance therapist multicultural orientation related to clients who hold Muslim identities. The present study used a microaggression detection task (first used in Owen et al., 2018) to see whether participants (N = 48), predominately graduate students, could identify three microaggressions in an audio-recorded vignette of a therapist conducting a session with a Muslim client. Less than half of the participants (41%) identified all three of the microaggressions embedded in the vignette. Participants who identified more microaggressions rated the therapist in the vignette as less culturally humble and culturally comfortable and as having missed more cultural opportunities in the session. There were no differences between religious and nonreligious participants in identifying microaggressions. The results suggest that there is significant variability in whether people can detect microaggressions. Implications for training, including the importance of training on client’s religious and spiritual identities and accounting for trainees’ cognitive complexity, are discussed.