Centering Lived Experience: Reimagining MFT Training Through Cultural Humility

Many therapists enter the field with deep care, curiosity, and a desire to do less harm than what’s come before. And yet, so many leave training still unsure how to practice cultural humility in real relationship.

This isn’t a failure of intention. It’s a failure of structure and systems within the professional field.

Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) training often speaks about marginalized communities without meaningfully including the voices of those most impacted. Cultural humility becomes a concept to master rather than a relational stance to live inside. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice become content— rather than a system that redistributes power.

When lived experience is absent, something essential is lost.

The Gap Beneath the Curriculum

Most MFT programs now include DEI or JEDI coursework. Many continuing education offerings name cultural humility as a core value. And still, service users (clients, survivors, community members) are rarely invited into the design, delivery, or evaluation of that learning.

What remains is a top-down model of knowledge:

• Therapists as experts
• Clients as case examples
• Lived experience as something to interpret, rather than honor

This reinforces the very power imbalances cultural humility is meant to disrupt.

When therapists are trained without accountability to the people most impacted by our work, we miss opportunities for trust, repair, and relational depth.

Cultural Humility Is Relational—Not Performative

Cultural humility was never meant to be a static skill or an identity badge. It is an ongoing, relational practice that requires reflexivity, openness, and consent.

When training environments exclude lived experience:

• Cultural learning becomes abstract and aligned toward competence and mastery rather than curiosity
• Ethics remain theoretical rather than relational
• Harm goes unnamed or unintegrated, perpetuating distrust of the field

Including service users in training design invites something different: mutual influence, shared authority, and real-time accountability. This is where humility moves from idea to embodiment.

From Competency to Co-Creation

Traditional training models often aim for first- or second-order change. But what’s being called for now is third-order change—a deeper systemic shift that asks:

• Who holds knowledge?
• Whose voices shape the field?
• How is power distributed in learning spaces?

Third-order change doesn’t add another module or label. It reframes knowledge, redistributes power, and centers relational ethics over professional performance. When service users become co-educators, consultants, and collaborators, therapy education becomes more honest, more ethical, and more human.

Third-order change invites us to rebuild the training with service users as co-architects.

Ethics That Live in Relationship

The AAMFT Code of Ethics centers client welfare, dignity, and social justice. Yet when clients are excluded from shaping therapist education, ethical blind spots remain intact.

Relational ethics require feedback loops. that deliver new inputs, not the status quo repackaged. They require listening to impact—not just intention. They require humility that can be felt, not just claimed.

Centering lived experience in training is not an “extra.” It is an ethical imperative.

A Reimagined Future for MFT Training

Imagine MFT education where:

• Clients are invited as co-architects of curriculum
• CE courses are shaped by those with lived expertise
• Therapists are trained in dialogue, not dominance
• Cultural humility is practiced in real relationship

This kind of training doesn’t just reduce harm. It restores trust and expands capacity. It rehumanizes the learning process for everyone involved.

An Invitation

If you’ve ever sensed that something vital was missing from your training…
If you’ve felt the tension between theory and lived reality…
If you long for a more relational, accountable, and embodied way forward…

You’re not alone. There is space to do this differently. There is wisdom already among us.

When we center lived experience, therapy becomes what it was always meant to be: a shared, ethical, and deeply human endeavor.