Culture is always present in the therapy room. We often recognise it in visible expressions such as dress, food and language. Yet it is also woven through how people understand distress, express emotion and seek support. It shapes the meaning of family, loyalty, conflict, intimacy and belonging.

Many frameworks developed in Western contexts emphasise autonomy, emotional expression, assertiveness and personal agency. These ideas can give language to clients who minimise their needs. However, they are not culturally neutral. For some, identity is shaped through family, community, faith and shared responsibility. Wellbeing may be understood relationally. In these contexts, “putting yourself first” can feel at odds with lived experience.

As a mixed-race practitioner who grew up in Pakistan and later lived in England, Canada and Australia, I have learned that culture extends beyond what we can see. It shapes the values, relational rules and expectations that inform family life, responsibility and selfhood. In counselling, this emerges through relationships. A client may feel overly involved in family dynamics, struggle to make decisions without approval, or find it difficult to distinguish their own needs and choices from those of people closest to them. They may want more space from a parent, sibling or partner, while fearing they will be seen as ungrateful, selfish or disloyal. Change can feel costly when it affects the people they love.

This is not a simple divide between Western and collectivist cultures. These are broad, imperfect categories, and many people hold multiple cultural connections and values. The same is true for practitioners. A counsellor’s training and life experience will inevitably shape how they show up within the therapeutic alliance. However, many of the therapeutic models practitioners use around the world were developed within Western contexts. Cultural responsiveness, then, is not only about where someone was trained. It asks us to expand our perception and remember that the person sitting in front of us is not a cultural category, but a nuanced human being. Our role is not to convince clients to adopt a particular way of being, but to help them explore what feels aligned with their values, relationships and lived experience. This requires compassion and a willingness to remain aware of the assumptions we may bring into our clinical approach.

Boundaries illustrate this tension. Clients are often encouraged to say no, name their needs and reduce over-responsibility for others. For some, this is immediately helpful. For others, particularly those raised in close-knit families or collectivist communities, boundaries may evoke guilt, fear or betrayal. They can feel less like self-care and more like a threat to family harmony, shared expectations, interdependence and belonging.

A client may understand they are allowed to have needs, wants, likes and limits, yet still feel that asserting them rejects the people they love. They may fear stepping away from the role they have always held: the dependable daughter, the peacemaker, or the partner who carries more than their share. A boundary can be both necessary and unsettling. It can be an act of care for oneself while creating discomfort for people adjusting to a new way of relating.

There can be grief in this. Letting go of a familiar role can mean grieving the version of oneself that has been needed, agreeable or emotionally available. People-pleasing can be tied to identity and to the ways someone has learned to maintain connection.

My own experience of setting boundaries within a Pakistani-English family dynamic was not initially met with open arms. At times, the boundaries I was trying to establish were misunderstood or violated. This did not mean my family lacked care. It reflected the adjustment required when someone begins to invest more fully in their own life, meet their needs more directly, and speak clearly about what they can and cannot offer.

Lived experience does not make a counsellor an authority on another person’s culture, family or history. It should never replace curiosity. But when we have done some of the work that we invite our clients to do, it can deepen our therapeutic presence. It can make us more attuned to the gap between our own insight and our client's capacity and initiate a slower stance towards interpreting ambivalence as resistance. In my experience, this humility strengthens the therapeutic alliance.

The task is not to abandon boundaries, but to explore what they might look like within the client’s value system. For some clients, boundary work is not simply about becoming more independent. It is about learning how to remain in relationship while meeting their own needs.

A client who values family loyalty may still seek family input, while allowing the final decision to belong to them. A client who values care may still support a parent or sibling, while limiting emotionally demanding conversations. In these examples, the boundary is not about choosing the self over the relationship. It is about helping the client stay connected to the relationship while remaining connected to themselves. Rather than asking, “How can you put yourself first?”, we might ask: “What kind of relationship do you want to have with this person over time? What are you hoping to protect? Could clearer expectations reduce resentment and make connection more sustainable?”

Cultural responsiveness should never minimise coercion, intimidation, abuse or significant power imbalance. Where safety is compromised, the work must remain centred on the client’s protection, agency and access to support.

Where relationships are complex rather than unsafe, culturally responsive practice asks us to slow down. What does respect look like in our client’s family? How might change be received? What does the client want to protect?

Culturally responsive counselling is not about applying a different technique for every cultural group. It is about recognising that people arrive in therapy shaped by relationships, family stories and, for some, intergenerational trauma, alongside cultural values, losses, hopes and responsibilities. They also arrive with an internal picture of who they have learned to be: the good daughter, the easy-going partner, the person who always copes, gives generously and rarely receives.

Our task is not to ask clients to reject these things in order to grow. It is to help them build self-trust, loosen patterns of self-abandonment and find ways of relating that leave room for their own needs. A culturally responsive approach does not ask a person to choose between connection and selfhood. It helps them create relationships in which both can have a place.

Anika Ahmad Bull is a registered counsellor, writer and founder of Anika Bull Therapy, a private counselling practice based in Deniliquin, NSW, and online. Her work brings together integrative counselling, trauma-informed practice, community mental health experience and a background in communications. She supports her clients with anxiety, burnout, grief, relationships, identity, belonging and self-trust. Anika holds a Master of Communication and a Diploma of Counselling, with additional training in CBT, mindfulness and emotionally focused couples therapy. She is currently undertaking an Applied Neuroscience Certification, deepening her understanding of brain-based approaches to emotional regulation, decision-making, relational patterns and sustainable behavioural change. Raised in Pakistan and later living in England, Canada and Australia, Anika brings a cross-cultural and relational lens to her work. Her move into counselling was an intentional career change, grounded in her values, life experience and commitment to evidence-informed practice. As both a counsellor and storyteller, she is particularly interested in making complex psychological ideas clear, accessible and meaningful.