Part 1 of 2 — Read Part 2: My ADDRESSING Profile

---

Most of us have been asked some version of “who are you?” at some point in our lives, and most of us have given some version of a surface answer. Maybe you answered with your job title, your name, your race, or just where you’re from. However, identity is so much bigger than that as it can be layered and intersectional. Sometimes our identity is shaped by forces we didn’t choose and experiences we didn’t ask for. For those of us who sit at the crossroads of multiple marginalized identities (Black, queer, non-binary, neurodivergent, first-generation, whatever your particular map looks like) the question of “who are you?” can feel complicated in ways that are hard to even articulate.

This is where psychology comes into play 🥳

If you’ve read my post on What CPTSD Looks Like on a Good Day, you already know that I believe in naming things that matter. Having a framework or a language for your experience is one of the most powerful tools healing has to offer. One of the ways to do that is through the Hays ADDRESSING model. It’s not exactly for trauma specifically, but rather for identity and the exploration of it. It’s for the full, complicated, layered picture of who you are, and how the world has responded to you.

---

What Is the Hays ADDRESSING Model?

Developed by psychologist Pamela Hays in 1996 and expanded in her 2008 book Addressing Cultural Complexities in Practice, the ADDRESSING model is a framework designed to help people recognize and understand the multiple dimensions of their cultural identity. It was originally created as a clinical tool, and a structured way for therapists to examine their own cultural backgrounds and biases before working with clients. The goal was to reduce harm, increase self-awareness, and build genuine cultural competence. Since then its applications go far beyond the therapy room.

The acronym “ADDRESSING” actually stands for ten dimensions of cultural identity:

• A — Age and generational influences
• D — Developmental disabilities
• D — Acquired disabilities
• R — Religion and spiritual identity
• E — Ethnicity and racial identity
• S — Socioeconomic status
• S — Sexual orientation
• I — Indigenous heritage
• N — National origin
• G — Gender

Each dimension asks you to consider not just how you identify, but what that identification means in terms of access, barriers, privilege, and even bias. Where do you move through the world with ease? Where do you meet resistance? Where have you internalized messages about your own worth that were never yours to carry? How do you interact with others different from you?

---

Why It Was Created And Its Usage

The ADDRESSING framework was built in response to a real problem in mental health care: therapists were showing up to sessions with blind spots out of unexamined assumptions. A clinician who had never questioned their own cultural position was likely to pathologize what was actually a rational response to oppression, or miss entirely how a client’s identity was shaping their experience.

Pamela Hays designed the model to make cultural self-assessment structured and repeatable, so, for example, a clinician could return to the self-assessment as they grew, as the world changed, and as new clients brought new complexity. The framework makes use of four core areas of work: ongoing self-assessment and development of a multicultural orientation; attention to structural inequities embedded in systems; consideration of the impact of systemic oppression on individuals with intersecting identities; and recognition of the resilience and strengths that often emerge alongside those intersecting identities.

---

The Concept You Can’t Skip: Intersectionality

The ADDRESSING model only fully makes sense when you understand intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how different aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create unique modes of discrimination and privilege. In other words, you can’t fully understand someone’s experience of race without also understanding their gender. You can’t understand their gender without understanding their class. You can’t understand their class without understanding their national origin. These dimensions don’t stack neatly on top of each other, but they interact, amplify, and sometimes contradict each other in ways that a single-axis analysis will always miss.

The ADDRESSING model operationalizes intersectionality. It gives it ten specific axes to examine rather than leaving it as an abstract concept. For people with multiple marginalized identities, and I am one of them, this is not an academic exercise; It is the difference between being seen and being flattened. It’s also understanding the person you are and answering the question yourself: Who Are YOU?

---

Who Is This Model For?

Originally, yes, this model was for clinicians; However, over time it increasingly became for everyone. Educators use it in multicultural training. Organizations use it in DEI work (or at least before Trump tried to make it illegal and unnecessary). Researchers also use it in study design. I’d argue, though, its most powerful use is as a personal tool for anyone who wants to understand themselves more honestly. Who wants to see where they hold privilege they haven’t examined. Where they carry disadvantage they’ve been taught to pathologize as personal failure. To even see where their biases live. Not because they’re a bad person, but because bias is a human response to socialization, and socialization is something that happened to all of us.

I completed the ADDRESSING model as part of my Master’s of Science program in Psychology at Capella University. I wasn’t expecting it to land the way it did, but walking through each dimension forced me to name things I’d been carrying without language for them. Which, as I wrote about in the CPTSD post, is one of the most quietly transformative things you can do for yourself.

---

Try It Yourself

The point of this exercise is to increase awareness of the influences on your values, decisions, behaviors, and opportunities that you may never have considered. There are no right or wrong answers and no right or wrong identities, because every individual is unique.

The Multicultural Psychology Consultation Team at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School has developed a free, expanded version of the ADDRESSING self-assessment worksheet that you can work through on your own. It’s thorough, thoughtful, and designed for real reflection.

Download the ADDRESSING Identities Self-Assessment (PDF)

I’d suggest doing it somewhere quiet with a journal nearby. Likely if you sit with it honestly, it will surface things that maybe you were not aware of before.

In Part 2, I’ll walk through my own ADDRESSING profile in full: where I hold privilege, where I don’t, and what living at the intersection of all of it has actually felt like.

Continue to Part 2: My ADDRESSING Profile →

---

APA Citation:

Hays, P. A. (2008). Looking into the clinician’s mirror: Cultural self-assessment. In P. A. Hays (Ed.), Addressing cultural complexities in practice: Assessment, diagnosis, and therapy (2nd ed., pp. 41–62). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/11650-003