Western philosophy and social sciences, including psychology, have conceptualized identity as an endeavor that is primarily individually formed or decided upon, although influenced by social relationships. For instance, various ego identity theories (e.g., Blasi, 1988; Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1994) suggest that individuals contemplate their identities internally and individually, while referencing different social groups. Social discrepancies create internal conflicts that the individual works through in order to maintain a continuous and authentic self-identity. This individualistic idea of identity works well with an individualistic orientation to therapy, in which the focus is helping the individual change internal affects and understandings to create a sense of self that fits well within his or her social environment. However, this individualistic orientation has been criticized by many feminist and multicultural therapists as overpathologizing, potentially oppressive to minorities and women, and depoliticized (see, e.g., Sue & Sue, 2002): We see this view as the narrow, walled, paved pathway mentioned above.

Although individuals appear to have choices in how they create identities, these identities are actually claimed in light of how others perceive, understand, and presume them to be and how the individuals understand the others’ perceptions. For instance, individuals’ identities are usually influenced by how their families understand who they are (e.g., as members of certain races, ethnic groups, nationalities, or religious communities) and transmit these perceptions of shared memberships and associations to the individuals (Rigazio-DiGilio, 1997). Individuals’ identities are also influenced by relationships with significant groups of people, such as close friends, colleagues, or members of a particular community or geographical region. These groups of people may actively accept or reject individuals as belonging within their group membership and identity. This influence constitutes the social contexts for considering the meanings of identities in relation to others (Kim, 2003; Suyemoto, 2002b). Thus, the meaning of an identity is created through an interactive process that includes the identity meanings created by other individuals and groups and the shared meanings created by individuals and groups together (Cox & Lyddon, 1997; Gergen, 1991, 1999; Suyemoto, 2002a).

How others impact identity is developmentally related (Rigazio-DiGilio, 1997). The importance of different relationships (parents, peer groups, significant others, children) varies in different personal and family developmental contexts. One’s ability to differentiate what is positive, what is negative, what is personal, and what is social depends upon cognitive abilities that are also developmentally related. One reason to discuss Jenny (as a fourth grader) along with Maria (as an adult woman) is to consider some of these developmental processes and meanings and how different social influences may have different impacts at different developmental ages.

In relation to racial identity, white Americans influence the socially agreed-upon meanings and the inclusion criteria of racial minority groups more than racial minority groups influence the socially agreed-upon meaning of the white American identity. The dominant white American group has the power to create group-identity criteria for their own group (socially, institutionally, and legally) that makes it more difficult for marginalized racial groups to claim identities associated with that group that would create access to rights or privileges. This process is evident, for example, in historical legal challenges to the denial of rights based on racial categorization, such as the 1922 case of Ozawa v. United States and the 1923 case of United States v. Thind (described in Ancheta, 1998). Ozawa argued that he should be eligible for naturalization because he (and other Japanese people) were white on the basis of skin color. His argument was rejected by the Supreme Court, who said that the intended meaning was Caucasian. A year later, in United States v. Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians were barred as well, in spite of their classification as Caucasian, due to the popular (racial) equality of white and Caucasian (Ancheta, 1998). The rulings, made by white judges, defined and redefined Asian Americans in ways that maintained their exclusion from privilege; the meaning of white was never articulated and was not affected by the attempts of the Asian Americans to influence it.

Groups with more power may also actively shape how groups with less power see each other. The dominance of the black–white paradigm and the race “hierarchy” are largely due to the historical constructions of race by the dominant white European American group in the United States (Omi & Winant, 1994; Perea, 2000). These dominant understandings of race and race relations affect the ways in which racial minority groups interact and are maintained today by the dominant group because of the benefits to them of the “divide-and-conquer” strategy.

Conceptualizing identity in this co-constructed manner is one way to connect our understanding of the individual—with her or his own internal and interpersonal experiences, reflexive awareness, and agency—with our analysis of the social systemic contexts that influence group formation and reflect the current and historical social system of power and privilege. Conceptualizing therapy as a means of exploring and changing the meanings of these co-constructed identities in order to improve mental health and functioning enables us to bring our critical social justice analysis into the treatment. This conceptualization sees therapy as aiming to change individuals’ understandings of themselves in relation to, and as shaped by, social experiences (Neimeyer, 1995). Therapy is, itself, a co-constructive process in which the therapist and the client reconstruct identities, partially through exploring and explaining the construction process itself. Many identity theorists discuss how identity formation is a process of moving between the experiencing I and the explaining me, whereby we consider our experience and explain it (see, e.g., Ashmore & Jussim, 1997; James, 1890/1989). Therapy, too, is conceptualized as contributing to the creation of a balance between experiencing and explaining (or observing, integrating, actively shaping, etc.; Guidano, 1995), whereby clients move between experiencing (relating their experience, feeling in the moment with the therapist) and explaining (reflecting on their experience, considering its connection to other experiences, exploring alternative meanings, practicing new ways of reacting).

Mapping the Terrains

In this section we seek not only to provide basic understandings of definitions and contexts that create a foundation for the later chapters in this book,2 but also, through discussion of Maria and Jenny, to explore (1) how each of these areas of identities are socially as well as individually constructed, and (2) how actively considering the interaction of identities and bridging the terrains contributes to a better understanding of the individual in therapy. We focus on those statuses and identities that the editors of this book have chosen to make their relative focus—gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and class, religion and spirituality, and sexual orien-tation—in order to provide definitions and identify complexities, with particular attention to the first four variables, which are especially salient to Maria and Jenny.

Each of the concepts we discuss not only reflects individual differences but also social systemic differences in power, which are associated with socially constructed and maintained hierarchies of privilege. Thus the meanings created by individuals, groups, and therapists have implications for social justice and personal empowerment because of the value-laden nature of the constructed identities.

“Gender” is defined as beliefs about what each sex means in the culture. Although frequently confounded with sex, gender is more about the social meanings associated with categorization, whereas sex is the categorization between male and female based on physical and biological determinants such as hormones, gonads, external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics (e.g., facial hair; Calhoun, 2002b; Colman, 2001).3 The meanings and social norms related to gender vary across culture and certainly across historical context. State licensing boards and the American Psychological Association policies make it clear that therapists are expected to have a minimal understanding of the personal and social implications of gender, the ways in which the system of gender has contributed to inequities between men and women, and the ways in which therapy needs to resist contributing to these inequities. The feminist movement has contributed to our field’s great progress in holding us as therapists accountable for the effects of our own gender socialization on the services we provide to our clients. Nevertheless, not only does gender continue to be an important aspect of identity, it continues to be an area that involves great discrepancy in power and privilege.

Although Maria never stated an explicit identification as a woman or a feminist, it was clear that the individual and social meanings of her gender were contributing to her presenting difficulties. In many areas, Maria felt trapped by meanings and identities that she simultaneously valued and perceived as conflicting with her own desires. For example, the meaning of “woman” for Maria affected her experiences in relationships, at school/work, and in relation to herself and her self-care. Maria felt that “woman” essentially meant being subservient to men and sacrificing herself to the needs and desires of others. This meaning was created in interaction with her family’s meanings, as well as those of her peers and her cultural communities. Maria’s first model of woman was her mother, whom Maria described as “like a slave” to her husband and family. Maria’s mother created her identity primarily in relation to her family relationships; even at work, she was particularly polite to the male members of the families for whom she worked. She taught Maria to be deferential to her father and brothers. She tolerated her husband’s alcoholism and gave Maria the message that husbands and fathers should be indulged and accommodated, even if abusive or intoxicated, and even if it meant denying or suppressing one’s own emotions. When Maria was a child and her father was intoxicated, he wanted most to be with her and hear her say how much she loved him. Although Maria made it clear to her mother that these moments were hurtful to her, and she frequently hid to avoid them, her mother would bring Maria to her father and encourage her to tell him that she loved him, regardless of what she was feeling at the moment (fear, anger, hatred) in order to avoid angering her father. As an adult, Maria resisted expressing her love to her partners, because she felt that to say “I love you” would be to lose herself.

In therapy, Maria came to realize that, as a woman, she did not expect her needs to be met and attempted to suppress her own recognition of the existence of her needs and feelings in order to avoid being disappointed. As we explored the pattern of her depressive episodes (occurring in the fall of years she attended college or graduate school), Maria expressed a strong feeling of being an imposter, as if she did not really belong in school and as if her achievements were somehow a mistake or a fraud that would soon be discovered by others.

Race

The boundaries of racial groups are unclear and highly contextual, depending on historical period, geographical region (e.g., in the United States vs. in Cuba), and politics. Different people have developed between 3 and 200 categories of race (Schaefer, 1988, as cited in Atkinson, Morton, & Sue, 1998). Criteria for membership in different racial groups also vary according to the person or group judging. As described above, the ways in which various groups define a particular racial identity affects an individual’s identity meaning and choices. However, because the meanings of race are so uncertain, discrepancies between individuals’ and groups’ identities are even more frequent and magnified. For example, multiracial individuals judged as Asian by white people may not be judged as Asian by Asian people, which may create challenges in the construction of racial identity for these individuals. Another example is that the criteria for Native American identity or tribal affiliation varies among nations, between the criteria set by the nation and that set by the

Groups and individuals with less power due to historical or current social systems may also have less access to knowledge or experiences that would increase the number of identity options open to them. It may therefore be significantly more difficult for them to create and claim adaptive empowering identities. For example, the social “scripts” associated with being a black woman may cover a narrower range than those possibilities open to white women (see Stephens & Phillips, 2003) as reflected in the types and number of media images of white women and black women. The “procedural knowledge” (i.e., the information and resources) needed to create an identity may also be limited by a group’s access to a systemic power (see, e.g., Yowell, 2002): If one has never seen a black intellectual, for example, then the ability to imagine oneself with that identity is significantly constrained.5

For Jenny, what it meant to be a multiracial white and black girl became salient in her relationships with others, at school, and in her self-attitude. Jenny had a very close relationship with her immediate family, feeling close to her white European American mother and building a positive relationship with her stepfather. She spent a lot of time with her maternal white European American cousins and extended family. Although her white maternal family accepted her and loved her dearly, the family members did not speak much about the effects that race might have had in her relationships with others. Initially, Jenny seemed not to have contemplated her own multiracial identity much but accepted the identity offered by her family (e.g., that she was just a girl who was loved by her family, and that racial differences did not matter), which seemed developmentally appropriate for a latency-age child.

The urban girls’ black identity also reflected the intersections of their racial identities with ethnic and class identities. The urban African American girls told Jenny that she was not tough (and black) like them because she had a white mother. In this case, black racial identity seems to have been connected with being tough and may have also been related to the way some girls linked being urban with being black. Being tough and knowing how to be assertive may be adaptive for some girls of minority backgrounds, helping them to navigate social systems that historically have been racist and classist. Constructing collective identities around the racial identity and the attribute of assertiveness can serve as a strong, inner holding space in which young girls develop positive identities and a sense of community. However, in Jenny’s context, the preadolescent girls connected toughness, black racial identity, and class differences in a way that differentiated Jenny from them and from a black racial identity. By framing black as being tough, the girls not only restricted the black identity to their own immediate experiences, but also demonstrated their internalization of the limited “scripts” available for African American girls. They may also have judged Jenny as less black because they perceived her as less ethnically/culturally African American, based on Jenny’s primary ethnic socialization in her European American family. Furthermore, the preadolescent girls seemed to have related the perceived differences in class between Jenny and others, based on where they lived (in a surburb vs. city), even though Jenny’s family lived in a subsidized housing in a suburb.

Developmental aspects are clearly relevant to understanding Jenny. As a preadolescent, she was trying to struggle with the pull toward trying to be the same with everyone else while simultaneously exploring the similarities and differences between herself and others—and noticing her uniqueness. She did not talk in depth about her identity, because it was not her primary concern at this developmental phase, but instead focused on social interactions at school. At the same time, she was willing to explore how issues related to race, as illustrated by her social relationships with the other girls, affected her peer relationships and the behavioral choices she made. Jenny experienced some tension between her identities formed within her family and her identities that were being challenged by her peers. Balancing these identity tensions might be a general developmental task for any latent-age child (i.e., noticing differences between what one has learned/been taught at home vs. what one notices/hears at school). Jenny’s situation, however, was complicated by a very challenging set of factors: how racial identities and their meanings are socially constructed and embedded in sociopolitical history, the intergroup dynamics between black and white groups, and associated issues of power and privilege.

“Culture” refers to meanings that are shared by an identifiable group of people and passed on to others within that group (Tomlinson-Clarke, 1999; Triandis, 1995, 2001). “Meanings” are broadly defined to include cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of individual and group functioning, such as values, beliefs, customs, norms, gender roles, affective styles, social behavior, language, and ways of self-understanding. Although we most frequently discuss ethnic culture (and, specifically, ethnic-minority culture), there are many types of culture associated with many types of identifiable groups. Most of the other identities and statuses discussed here have cultures associated with them, such as women’s culture, ethnic cultures, lesbian culture, cultures associated with religion or spirituality (e.g., Jewish culture,6 Muslim culture, Wiccan culture). There are cultures associated with other oppressed or marginalized groups, such as with differentially abled groups (e.g., deaf culture or a more general culture of disability); with privileged groups, such as American culture; or with other identities such as Democrats or Republicans. Culture is also constantly changing, both in the modal construct and in the individual manifestation (American Psychological Association, 2003).

Ethnicity” refers to cultural patterns usually related to a shared national or geographical origin (Pinderhughes, 1989; Suyemoto, 2002b). Ethnicity is not determined by physical characteristics and is much less frequently an imposed identity compared to race. Within the five major racial groups in the United States (white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American), there are hundreds of ethnicities. The ways in which race and ethnicity are confounded are affected by the differential salience of ethnicity and ethnic differences and the presence or absence of a dominant ethnicity within a given racial group. Both the white and black racial groups have a largely dominant ethnic ide“ntity and culture within them (European American for the white group and African Ameri-can—meaning, descended from the legacy of slavery in the United States—for the black group). For these groups, the confounding of ethnicity with race, such that ethnic differences are discussed in relation to race (e.g., black culture), is extremely common, as demonstrated by the discussion of Jenny. Within these groups the confounding of race and ethnicity may be less problematic for those within the dominant in-group space (i.e., black African Americans who are the children of two black African American parents descended from slaves; white European Americans descended from early colonists). However, for those within these racial groups who do not belong to the dominant in-group space (e.g., Caribbean or African immigrants, Bosnian refugees), the erasing of distinct ethnicity in the service of “racialization” may be significantly more problematic (see, e.g., Bailey, 2000; Thompson & Bauer, 2003).

The modal construct of any given ethnic culture is constantly changing in relation to the composition of the group and the groups’ interactions with other groups, cultures, and subcultures. Ethnic minority groups in the United States that are characterized by ongoing immigration (such as most Latino groups, most Asian American groups, and some black groups such as Haitians and Cape Verdeans) are constantly renegotiating the meanings of their ethnic identities in response to the infusion of cultural patterns brought from the homelands. Thus there can be widely discrepant meanings of ethnic identity within a particular group, and especially across immigration generational status (e.g., immigrant generation, first U.S.-born generation) and across family generational status as it intersects with immigrant generational status (e.g., between immigrant parents and their U.S. born children).

In some ways, Maria’s parents were less traditional in their gender expectations than the stereotypical first-generation Mexican American parents that Maria expected them to be. Specifically, Maria’s parents had always supported and encouraged her pursuit of education and a career. Similarly, they had encouraged her brother to marry an educated woman who had a career. Although this was a rather untraditional attitude toward Mexican American daughters, Maria did not see this divergence as a challenge to the stereotype and a means to consider multiple possible meanings of being a Mexican American woman. Instead, Maria framed her parents’ acceptance of her educational and career goals in a way that reflected her identity meaning: Mexican American woman as subservient and trapped. Maria felt that her parents’ support of her own educational and career goals was actually a burdensome obligation and that she must do well in school to please them (particularly her father), fulfill expectations, and be obedient. Furthermore, Maria associated her need for academic success with her ethnic identity: She believed that because so few Mexican Americans had the opportunity to get a doctorate, she must therefore fulfill her obligation to her community by doing so, even if she did not personally want to do so. Maria’s feeling that her success was an indication of her subservience and her experience of obligation as burdensome and dystonic contributed to her feeling like an imposter and made it difficult for her to feel connected to her own achievements and to her ethnicity. Although her Mexican American identity engendered a genuine desire to contribute to the Mexican American community (a more positive view of “obligation”), she could not conceive of genuine and positive ways to make this contribution because being a Mexican American woman meant being a woman who was subservient and who erased her own needs. Thus Maria’s achievements and relationships gave her little joy.

As Maria began to see new possible meanings and identities, she sought out different experiences and considered behaving in ways with her family that affirmed her connection to them and to her role as a Mexican American daughter, but did not feel subservient or self-sacrificing to her. Maria began to more actively explore relationships that supported her new identities. For example, she sought out discussions with her sister-in-law regarding her immigrant experiences, her view of being Mexican American, and her seeming subservience to Maria’s brother. Through these conversations, Maria learned more about how her brother actively supported his wife and her career and how her sister-in-law made active choices about balancing caretaking of others with her own needs and desires to achieve and be connected to the Mexican American community. Maria’s view changed from seeing this relationship as forcing her sister-in-law into submission to seeing how her sister-in-law was a strongly identified Mexican American woman in a mutually supportive heterosexual relationship, who was doing work that she loved and that also contributed to the Mexican American community. Although Maria had known her for years, she had never perceived her sister-in-law in this way or identified with her so strongly.

Class

Given the current and historical racial discrimination, class is strongly associated with race and, in some racial groups, with specific ethnicities. Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and some Asian Americans (such as Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees) are overrepresented within the lower class (Sue & Sue, 2002; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). For these groups, class and ethnic cultures may become linked, so that to be accepted by some groups as Vietnamese or African American may mean enacting cultures associated with class-specific experiences of race or culture.

Jenny was one of the few black children at her school who lived in an affluent suburb; the other black girls were being bused in from economically challenged areas of the inner city. Jenny’s family lived in subsidized housing in the suburb, and they received some support from her maternal extended family, particularly around child care. To me (GSK) it was unclear how Jenny was seen in the socioeconomic status hierarchy at school, in relation to the girls from the inner city as well as the other children who were residents of the suburb. To these girls, living in a suburb related to being white and affluent—and therefore not black. The range of choices relating to race, culture, and class was limited; they could not conceive of a rich, suburban black girl, or even a poor, suburban black girl. Jenny did not fit into the group of black girls who strongly identified with being black, urban, and from a lower socioeconomic class. Although most of the categorizations the girls were making were dualistic and based on their perception of class differences (especially given Jenny’s actual socioeconomic status), they were no less real in the girls’ lives.

Jenny’s experiences provide a glimpse into how a preadolescent girl is beginning to consider her identity in complex ways. Whereas her initial problems seemed to be confined to ADHD and behavioral issues, identity emerged as a major underlying theme in therapy. The way Jenny understood herself was very much in the light of, and was influenced by, her relations with other people and the meanings of race, class, and ethnicity that they communicated to her. Looking ahead to Jenny’s development into the teenage years and adulthood, we could imagine that she might continue to encounter some of the issues she has faced in the fourth grade, and that her journey might be complicated if her identity as an African American continued to be rejected by others. Therapy served not only as a setting in which to engage problem-solving skills regarding her current relational problems, but also as a space in which she could play out various ways of seeing herself and her situations. It created and modeled multiple possibilities and meanings for Jenny’s identities (e.g., expanding the meanings of what it meant to be “African American” and a suburban girl), and may have contributed to preventing difficulties that could have emerged, given continuous social rejections based on the current social meanings.

Therapists have been interested in religion from very early on, whether to vilify it (e.g., Freud 1953/1964) or to laud it (e.g., Fromm, 1950; Jung, 1938). Like all of the issues discussed here, religion is a complicated concept with multiple meanings. Meanings of “religion” include personal beliefs about, relationship with, and actions in relation to a spiritual being (God/god/Goddess/goddess/higher power) or spirituality more generally, as well as acceptance of, or adherence to, shared doctrine or institutions (Brown & Forgas, 1980; Fromm, 1950; Jung, 1938). Religious and spiritual frameworks/groups/communities seem to actively support the mental health of many women, especially those who are part of ethnic minorities, and to function as primary models/arenas for self-care and social support (see, e.g., Dudley-Grant, 2003).

Like all of the concepts discussed here, those of religions and spiritual systems have sociohistorical meanings and hierarchies that reflect a continuum from privilege to oppression. For example, Jews have a long history of oppression, and Chesler (2003) argues that there is a new and intensifying rise in anti-Semitism in current times. Religious beliefs have also been used to oppress others, particularly those who are different in relation to other variables discussed here, such as gender (e.g., the oppression of strong women through witch hunts), race (e.g., the justification of slavery on the basis of paganism), or sexual orientation (e.g., the vilification of gay and lesbian marriages by some current religious leaders). The identities created in relation to, or in interaction with, religion reflect these complicated and dynamic aspects of power and privilege. For example, Maria’s Catholicism supported her through a belief in a positive God and by contributing to the positive meaning of her Mexican American identity; but her Catholicism was also problematic for her as she tried to make sense of the church’s dictates about sex and birth control, and the ways in which Mexican American women are framed within Catholicism (e.g., the meaning of the Virgin Mary as a role model of self-sacrifice). For many women, religious and spiritual identities are both salient and central, and the socially co-con-structed nature of them, in interaction with other identities described here, will be important aspects of therapy.

Identity in relation to sexual orientation(s) includes one’s gender in relation to the gender of people (1) for whom one feels intimate affection or sexual desire, (2) with whom one has had sexual or intimate affectional relationships, and (3) about whom one fantasizes or dreams in sexual, intimate, or affectionate terms. These various referents may or may not be congruent with each other or with one’s claimed identity (Garnets, 2002). For example, a woman may identify as a heterosexual but have sexual fantasies about other women, or a woman may feel most comfortable in intimate, long-term relationships with other women but also feel sexual desire toward men. Identity in relation to sexual orientation may also relate to one’s politics or ideologies; for example, a radical separatist feminist may identify as lesbian first as a political identity, rather than because of strong feelings of desire for women. Because gender is itself a contested concept, so is sexual orientation, which is strongly confounded with gender meanings within dominant social understandings (e.g., lesbian women are expected to be masculine in their gender roles and behaviors). Furthermore, just as gender norms and meanings vary with ethnic culture, meanings of sexual orientation and the intersections between sexual orientation and gender also vary with culture (Garnets, 2002); for example, Asian lesbians may experience less flexibility in gender roles and less access to a “butch” experience (Lee, 1996) than European American lesbians.

Similar to the other identities discussed, sexual orientation and its meanings affect one’s overall identity and the process of therapy, whether or not they are explicitly stated and discussed. For instance, Maria identified as heterosexual. I (KLS) know this because I asked her as a standard part of the initial interview, not because it was a particularly salient identity for her that she specifically discussed. Because sexual orientation is not visible, like race, we frequently see it as less salient (unless one belongs to the minority space) and may assume heterosexual identity (particularly if the client is in a heterosexual relationship). Although Maria’s sexual identity was not explicitly (for her) connected to her presenting difficulties, it certainly affected her identities and the ways in which she constructed meanings. Imagining Maria as a Mexican-American Catholic lesbian would lead to a different expectation and conceptualization of the issues with which she was struggling. This possibility points to the need to attend not only to explicitly claimed identities but also to social meanings of identities that are implicit because they are more privileged. These identities and meanings may also interact in important ways with actively claimed identities and may have positive or negative effects, even if they are not currently in clients’ awareness.

We’d like to comment briefly here on the impact of the therapist’s identities and self-awareness on the journey (explored more fully in Vasquez & Magraw, Chapter 3). Because therapy is a co-constructed process, the ther-apist’s own identities actively affect the conduct of therapy and the identities that are co-constructed for the client within therapy. If the therapist is a guide through the terrain of multiple socially co-constructed statuses and identities, then the therapist’s own knowledge of that terrain (including the terrain that has not been personally salient in the therapist’s own life) becomes of great importance. The identities of the therapist will have an impact on the therapy regardless of whether they are actively brought into the therapy or whether the client (or the therapist) is consciously aware of the impact. The conceptualizations of Maria and Jenny and the therapeutic decisions arising out of those conceptualizations may (or may not) have been very different if we had had other primary identities, but they were certainly affected by our own identities and our understandings of the identities of our clients. Our therapies with Maria and Jenny were affected by all of our identities because those identities have shaped who we are and, therefore, how we see and understand our clients. The effects of our identities occurred not only in how they shaped our understandings of Maria and Jenny, but also in relation to what they meant to Maria and Jenny and how these clients experienced us. Some of these effects are illustrated in the discussion and interpretations above. But here we would like to explicitly discuss our ethnicity, language, immigrant status, and race as examples of interacting client–therapist identities.

My (GSK) therapy with Jenny was also shaped and influenced by my own identities, the way I thought about race, culture, and their meanings, and the way I understood Jenny. Working with Jenny was remarkable in relation to my own identity journey, as my identities intersected with her identities. While I focused on helping Jenny find creative ways to face her peers, I was very conscious of my identity as an Asian American and a woman of color. As a first-generation immigrant from Korea who is aware of the intergroup dynamics between various generations (e.g., immigrants as compared to second-or third-generation Asian Americans) within Asian American groups, and as someone who experienced discrimination based on my race, I could empathize with Jenny’s situation in personal ways, and was conscious that my role was not only to be a therapist but also a role model to Jenny as a woman of color. My own awareness of, and attention to, the racial and cultural similarities and differences affected the intervention choices, such as choosing to invite Jenny to talk explicitly about the racial and cultural dimensions within her peer relationships, which had not been done before either at school or at home.

Therapists also need to be aware that the effects of their identities are not only determined individually, but are influenced by the social systemic issues described above. Clients may project certain understandings on therapists, and therapists may project certain understandings on clients—even if they actively desire not to do so—because of social meanings that are internalized. Conscious and continuous attention is necessary to address these potential factors. The framework of constructed identities that we describe here is one way to focus that attention.

Although therapy is not often considered as a space in which identities are co-constructed, we believe that an emphasis on social co-construction of identities can be a useful way to conceptualize therapy with individuals. To begin with, therapy provides a space in which clients can explore, examine, understand, and “imagine about” their lived experiences. These explorations take place not only in regard to a presenting problem, but also in relation to how the client understands her situations in light of the way she organizes her self-understanding, the various social relationships she maintains, and the social meanings to which she was exposed and has internalized. Using the relationship between the therapist and the client, therapy becomes a space in which the client’s views of herself, her possibilities, and her relationships with others are revamped and expanded. It is a space that can facilitate identity shift, which is also a socially co-constructed process in therapy, because the therapist brings to the sessions her own perspectives, lived experiences, and identities.