Educate Yourself or Listen to Me? Diversity, Expertise, and the Here-and-Now in Group Psychotherapy
Haim Weinberg, PhD, CGP
In conversations about racism and other forms of social inequality, we increasingly hear an injunction directed toward members of privileged groups: “Educate yourself.” White people should learn about racism and White privileged men should educate themselves about sexism; heterosexual people about homophobia; members of dominant cultural groups about the experiences of minorities. The underlying message is important: do not expect members of marginalized groups to carry the burden of teaching you what generations of scholarship, testimony, and historical documentation could have taught you already.
There is considerable wisdom in this position. A White therapist who knows nothing about the history of racism in the United States, for example, may fail to recognize experiences that are obvious and painful to Black group members. A male therapist who has never seriously examined sexism may inadvertently reproduce it while imagining himself to be neutral. Ignorance is not necessarily innocence.
Yet, as a group therapist, I find myself uneasy when “educate yourself” becomes a prerequisite for genuine interpersonal encounter. Something in this prescription conflicts with one of the most basic principles of process-oriented group psychotherapy: we learn about the other by listening to the other.
Two kinds of knowledge
The distinction may be between knowledge about and knowledge of.
I can educate myself about racism. I can read about microaggressions, structural racism, White privilege, intersectionality, and the historical experiences of African Americans. Such knowledge can enlarge my capacity to notice what I might otherwise overlook. It can help me understand the social matrix within which the individual enters the group.
But none of this tells me what it means for this particular Black member to be Black.
Similarly, reading feminist theory cannot tell me what being a woman means to this particular woman sitting across from me. Reading about antisemitism cannot tell me what Jewishness means to a particular Jewish group member. The same applies to sexual orientation, disability, immigration, social class, religion, nationality, and every other dimension of identity.
There is a danger that knowledge intended to reduce stereotyping can paradoxically produce a more sophisticated form of stereotyping. I may enter the group believing that I already understand something about you because I have studied people who share one of your identities. The group therapy question is different: Who are you, and what is happening between us now?
The here-and-now as an epistemology
Yalom placed the here-and-now at the center of interpersonal group psychotherapy. The group becomes therapeutic partly because members do not merely discuss relationships outside the group; they discover how they experience and create relationships with one another in the immediate encounter. Contemporary group psychotherapy continues to regard here-and-now work as a central, if sometimes overly privileged, organizing principle.
Applied to diversity, this principle has radical implications. Suppose a Black member tells a White member, “When you said that, I felt you were not really seeing me.” The White member may respond from acquired knowledge: “I understand. This is a microaggression.” Perhaps it is. But something may be lost if the conversation ends there. A process-oriented response might instead be: “Can you help me understand what happened between us? What did I do that made you feel unseen? And what is it like for you to tell me this now?” The second response does not deny racism. Nor does it require the Black member to deliver a seminar on racism. It invites two people to investigate an interpersonal event occurring in a social and historical matrix.
The difference is crucial.
Cultural competence or cultural humility?
The concept of cultural humility may provide a bridge between these positions.
Hook and colleagues define cultural humility as an other-oriented stance characterized by openness, respect, and an absence of superiority regarding another person’s cultural experience. Their research found that clients’ perceptions of therapists’ cultural humility were associated with stronger therapeutic alliances and better therapeutic outcomes. This is importantly different from imagining that I can become “competent” in somebody else’s culture.
Hook, Davis, Owen, and DeBlaere make the point even more explicitly in their work on cultural humility: therapists should attend not merely to what previous education has taught them but also to what they do not know about the particular client sitting across from them. Their model combines multicultural knowledge with curiosity about the individual person’s lived experience.
Mosher and colleagues similarly conceptualize cultural humility as a framework for engaging diverse clients rather than as the acquisition of exhaustive knowledge about cultural groups.
I find this position particularly compatible with group psychotherapy.
Perhaps our task is not to choose between education and encounter, but to understand the proper place of each.
The problem with “Go educate yourself”
The phrase can serve an important boundary-setting function. A marginalized person should not be obligated to repeatedly explain the existence of racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, or other forms of oppression to someone unwilling to make even a minimal effort to learn.
But inside a therapy group, “go educate yourself” can have another effect. It can close precisely the conversation that the group exists to make possible.
Imagine a member saying: “You can’t understand what it is like to be me. Go educate yourself before you talk about this.” Perhaps the first task of the group therapist is not to correct that statement. It is to become curious about it.
What is happening here?
Does the speaker feel exhausted by repeatedly having to explain herself? Does she expect not to be understood? Has the other member behaved in a way that confirms this expectation? Is there anger toward privileged people that has found a legitimate home in this particular interaction? Is the recipient ashamed, frightened, defensive, guilty, or resentful? Does he now withdraw because he believes anything he says will be wrong?
And what happens to the rest of the group?
These questions transform a sociopolitical statement into group process without stripping it of its sociopolitical meaning.
That last qualification is essential. An exclusive focus on interpersonal process can itself become a defense. A conductor might interpret racial tension entirely in terms of projection, transference, envy, sibling rivalry, or authority while ignoring actual inequalities outside, and inside the group.
The social matrix is real. But so is the interpersonal matrix.
The danger of knowing too much
There is another risk in diversity education that we discuss less often: the educated therapist may become too certain. If I have attended enough workshops, learned the correct vocabulary, and read the recommended books, I may begin to believe that I know what another person’s experience means before hearing it.
Cultural humility asks for almost the opposite posture. The culturally humble therapist might think: I have studied something about the social forces that may shape your experience. But I do not yet know your experience. I need you to tell me.
This position is supported by the multicultural orientation literature. Cultural humility emphasizes openness to clients’ identities, while “cultural opportunities” involve recognizing and engaging moments in which cultural material actually emerges in therapy. For group therapists, those cultural opportunities are everywhere.
A member interrupts another. Someone repeatedly remains silent. Two members disagree about the meaning of a political event. A White member anxiously avoids discussing race with a Black member. A gay member feels that heterosexual members are treating him as their educator. A member of a minority group assumes that another minority member will agree with her. Rather than importing a predetermined explanation, we can ask: What is happening between you right now?
Education outside, curiosity inside?
I therefore wonder whether we need a modification of the slogan “educate yourself.” Perhaps it should be: Educate yourself—and then become humble about what your education allows you to know.
Read history. Learn about racism. Understand privilege and structural inequality. Examine your own social location. Become familiar with experiences that your position in society may have allowed you not to notice. Indeed, models of cultural humility explicitly include attention to biases, power, privilege, and continuing education rather than suggesting that curiosity alone is sufficient.
But when another human being sits across from you, temporarily put your textbook aside. Do not make the Black member representative of Black people, the woman representative of women, the Palestinian representative of Palestinians, the Israeli representative of Israelis, or the transgender member representative of transgender people.
Ask.
Listen.
Risk misunderstanding.
And when you misunderstand, as inevitably you will, remain in the relationship long enough to discover what happened. Perhaps the most important diversity competence for a group therapist is therefore the capacity to not know.
This is not innocent ignorance. It is informed not-knowing: the paradoxical position of learning enough about culture, history, privilege, and power to recognize their importance while remaining humble enough to know that none of this knowledge tells us who the person in front of us actually is. That is where multicultural thinking and process-oriented group therapy can meet. The opposite of “educate yourself” need not be “remain ignorant.”
It can be:
Educate yourself—and then listen.
References
Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Utsey, S. O. (2013). Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(3), 353–366.
Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., & DeBlaere, C. (2025). Cultural humility: Engaging diverse identities in therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.
Hook, J. N., Watkins, C. E., Jr., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Van Tongeren, D. R., & Ramos, M. J. (2016). Cultural humility in psychotherapy supervision. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 70(2), 149–166.
Mosher, D. K., Hook, J. N., Captari, L. E., Davis, D. E., DeBlaere, C., & Owen, J. (2017). Cultural humility: A therapeutic framework for engaging diverse clients. Practice Innovations, 2(4), 221–233.
Owen, J., Tao, K., Drinane, J. M., Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., & Foo Kune, N. (2016). Client perceptions of therapists’ multicultural orientation: Cultural (missed) opportunities and cultural humility. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 47, 30–37.