Part 2 of 2 — Read Part 1: What Is the Hays ADDRESSING Model?
In Part 1, I introduced the Hays ADDRESSING model, which is a psychological framework for examining the ten dimensions of your cultural identity. I explained what it is, why it was created, and how you can use it yourself.
Now I’m going to do the thing I actually find harder, which is show you mine.
This is ✨ my ✨ ADDRESSING profile that I completed as part of my Master’s of Science program in Psychology at Capella University. I expanded here with the benefit of a lot more honesty (also while seeing a therapist at the same time). This is more of a map for understanding myself and the world around me better.
A — Age and Generational Influences
I’m a Millennial and currently thirty-seven now, though this was written when I was a few years younger. It’s still relevant though as I share with the class.
My generation exists in a particular tension: old enough to remember a world before the internet reshaped everything and young enough to have grown up alongside the language of identity politics, mental health awareness, and intersectionality becoming mainstream. I connect naturally with my generation and younger. We tend to speak the same language about identity, about questioning, and about refusing to inherit things just because they were handed to us.
However, with older generations, I have noticed more friction. It’s not always the case, however it’s more common than not. Some of the issues stem from a gap in frameworks. Examples of this are how we understand gender, mental health, queerness, trauma, which can make connection harder. I try to stay curious rather than dismissive. However, I’d be lying if I said it was always easy to do that. This is especially true when I meet them for the first time or work with them in a professional setting.
D — Disability (Developmental and Acquired)
I don’t have a developmental or acquired disability, and I hold that as a genuine privilege, not a throwaway statement.
I’ve spent years helping my uncle navigate life with schizophrenia. Getting him to appointments, picking up his medications, and making sure the systems that are supposed to support him actually do makes me experience second-hand the complexities and struggles of having a disability. I’ve watched those systems fail him in ways that were entirely preventable. I understand what it looks like when care is inaccessible. I know that understanding is not the same as living it, though.
This is a place where I try to listen twice as more than I speak.
R — Religion and Spiritual Identity
I’m Wiccan✨
I grew up surrounded by religious plurality. Starting with the majority of my father’s side, which was Southern Baptist. They were deeply rooted and God-fearing in a way that left little room for questioning. There was a kind of religious war on my father’s side (still is) where a minority of my relatives are Muslim. I’ve always felt closer to my Muslim family members than any of the rest on that side. Then there is my mother’s Jamaican family. Majority of this side was Methodist with one being a Buddhist later on in life. Mom also noted practicing some witchcraft, but it’s been benched as more spiritual, with her converting to Catholicism. I was exposed to many traditions before I found my own.
What I found in Wicca was a practice that honored the earth, the seasons, and the fluid. A spirituality that didn’t require me to make myself smaller to belong, but rather had more room for me to spread my wings further. It’s closer to my holistic nature at times, and my deep care and respect for those around me.
Where I struggle is when religion becomes a weapon. When faith is the justification for rejecting someone’s identity or causing harm. I’ve lived that wound for decades since indoctrination. The religious trauma of being denounced by people who claimed to love me also hurts and cuts me deeply. To be clear, that historically if not only on my father’s side with the Christians, and not with any other faith in my family (both sides). I try not to carry that into how I approach people with different beliefs, however I won’t pretend the scar isn’t there. It’s worse being in the Deep South AND Black where the assumption is I am Christian (too), and when I’m not I can’t even say what I am in fear of ironic crucifixion.
E — Ethnicity and Racial Identity
I’m Jamaican and Creole: Black and multiracial-ish.
When people hear “Jamaican” and flatten it into a single image of a dark skin person stereotypically with dreads. However, Jamaica is a multicultural island, not that different from America actually. My mother’s family is mixed, carrying histories that don’t fit neatly into any one box. My father’s side is Creole (from Louisiana), predominantly Black, and deeply Southern. My grandfather on my father’s side was a Civil Rights figure in Louisiana, celebrated and remembered every year.
Both family lines carry histories of racial struggle. Both also have shaped how I understand Blackness: not as a monolith, but as a living, contested, deeply varied experience. Being Black is a rich tapestry of culture, tradition, and complex: beautiful and burdened in the same breath.
Because of being both Jamaican and Creole decent and raised in Atlanta, I’ve sometimes found it hard to connect across racial and ethnic lines. Many people of the Black diaspora (and outside it) don’t bring the same depth of understanding. I’ve also found it hard within the Black community, where my queerness and non-binary/transmasc identity, have sometimes made me feel like an outsider in a space that should be home. That particular pain has its own texture of complexity. Historically, Black people would always make anything LGBTQ a “white thing”, which also doesn’t help that I’m quite fair skin. When I was younger and permed my hair, I would get bullied for saying I’m Black, being told I’m White or mixed (which mixed is still Black).
S — Socioeconomic Status
I’m considered middle class. Earned, and not inherited.
I grew up in a rough area of Riverdale, Georgia. I know what it’s like not to have a lot. Even more when you have to stretch it between two households: Mom’s and my aging immigrant Grandmother and immigrant uncle that lived with her (with schizophrenia). I helped take care of both households especially when I learned how to drive. I wanted to get a place and move my Grandmother in because she was frightened of my mother. I wanted to provide for her, but she died before I could try. Because my mother was more than likely a malignant narcissist and my father emotionally immature (but also possibly some kind of narcissist) I’ve had to learn how to survive on my own. I only had me at times, and vowed to never let myself ever substitute needing help from them for abuse; I was hyper independent to never be dependent on them. Ever. I’ve worked my way into stability, and I’m aware that is its own kind of privilege. I can pay my bills, and I have options. Many people I grew up around did not and do not have that, sadly.
If you combine my income with my partner’s, we approach upper middle class, which increases privilege further. I try to stay honest about that rather than minimizing it. We both came from lower ends of the totem pole, with my partner coming from Fitzgerald, Georgia aka the country. Practically new age sun-down town.
What I know for certain: class shapes everything. It unlocks access to therapy, to education, to safety, and to rest. The ability to do inner work at all is something that requires a baseline of stability most people don’t have. I don’t forget that, nor do I take it for granted.
S — Sexual Orientation
I am Pansexual and Demisexual.
I started out identifying as straight because, it was what was modeled for me, what was expected, and what the world around me assumed. I was always an ally, always drawn to the community in ways I didn’t yet have language for.
It wasn’t until I had the space to explore that I found my place. Pansexuality, attraction regardless of gender, fit in a way nothing else had. However, the other half of the picture is demisexuality: I don’t experience sexual attraction without a deep emotional bond first. That’s not a preference; That’s just how I’m wired. I did a lot of self-reflection from when I was a kid in grade school between middle and high school to notice then that there was probably more than just being straight. I had a few encounters even that I was confused about then, but make total sense today.
Understanding both together finally made sense of a lot. Why connection always had to come before anything else. Why casual felt not just uncomfortable but genuinely foreign. How there is no “objectively’ good-looking sexually, but maybe aesthetically. How gender was never a defining thing for me in terms of who I was attracted to. Which funny enough, I used to be made fun of by how all kinds of people of all walks of life would be attracted to me.
My experience of queerness is layered and nuanced, which may not be many people’s experience. Especially with demisexuality being a big part of why. I try to hold that difference with humility rather than assuming my path represents anyone else’s. I also have nothing against other’s who identify in any other way including allosexuals; However, I find allosexuals find me a joke or something they could never hold space for and understand.
I — Indigenous Heritage
Not really. More like none.
My father’s side is said to have indigenous roots. My ancestry DNA test has partially confirmed this with 1% identified. However, the generations between that heritage and me are many, and I hold it lightly as an acknowledgment, and not a claim. I am an ally to Indigenous communities. I have knowledge of the struggles and ongoing injustices they face. However, I would never position myself as someone who can speak from that experience.
One thread I find meaningful is that some Indigenous cultures use the term two-spirit to describe non-binary gender identities within their traditions. There is something quietly significant to me about that. A recognition that what I am has existed and has been named across cultures and centuries.
N — National Origin
I’m American-born and Jamaican-raised in spirit.
I grew up under my mother’s Jamaican teachings and culture far more than I grew up under traditional American heritage. I feel like an outsider here more often than not. I connect more easily with international people than with many Americans. The cultural assumptions baked into American identity, the individualism, the particular brand of optimism, the way certain histories get erased or celebrated, often feel foreign to me.
And yet I hold the privilege of an American passport. I’ve traveled around the world as a globetrotter, visiting 10+ countries worldwide. I know what that access means in a global context. I try not to forget it.
G — Gender
I’m Non-binary/Transmasc.
Since I was five years old, I never felt I fit the gender binary. I had the word androgynous before I had non-binary. I knew something was true about me long before I had the language to say it out loud.
Transmasc, short for transmasculine, means I was assigned female at birth (AFAB), however my gender identity leans masculine. Not fully like in a straight line toward manhood. However, in a direction toward something that feels more like me than what I was handed at birth. Non-binary and transmasc aren’t contradictions; they coexist. I don’t have to choose between them. I live in the space where both are true simultaneously.
I have never felt comfortable with being seen as a girl. I’ve never really felt or had the experiences most girls or women have. The bonding rituals, the shared language of womanhood, the sisterhood people talk about? I watched it from the outside, always slightly adjacent, never quite inside it. Like pressing your face against glass.
I wasn’t a girl. I never was.
My mother wanted me in ballet. I wanted karate. Both my parents said “No”; that was a masculine sport and not for me. The message was clear before I had words for what it meant: your body, your interests, your instincts are wrong. It needs correcting. My parents were both at times quite misogynistic (but especially my father). My Mom would pick on my chest and butt sizes calling me “flat”, which actually made me happy because, again, I didn’t identify as a girl. I found my own rebellion in other places.
I liked Barbies and some girl toys. I also picked up a controller at five years old and never put it down. I’ve been a gamer my whole life. A trophy hunter on PlayStation and someone who has spent more hours in virtual worlds than most people spend on things they’re told are appropriately feminine. None of that felt like contradiction to me. It felt like just… me. A me that didn’t map cleanly onto any category.
I’ve never obsessed over my body the way women are socialized to. Never found female-centered spaces comfortable unless queer people were in the room. Because queer spaces are the only ones where I haven’t had to explain or justify the particular shape of who I am. Where my existence isn’t a disruption. Where I’m not standing slightly outside, face pressed against the glass.
The social transition was its own kind of journey. Choosing the name Kris and having it become mine, eventually legally, was one of the quieter, more profound things I’ve ever done. Pronouns also matter. They/them is not a grammatical preference; It’s a recognition. The absence of that recognition, the casual or deliberate refusal of it by people who know better, is its own particular exhaustion.
The body is complicated. There are days when I look in the mirror and something clicks: a silhouette, a haircut, the way a certain outfit sits. I feel something close to euphoria. A deep, quiet rightness. This. This is who I am. There are other days when dysphoria sits heavy. When the gap between how I feel inside and how I move through the world feels wide enough to fall into. Both are real for me and both are mine. I’ve learned to hold them without letting either one be the whole story.
In queer spaces, I’ve found both belonging and its absence. Being Black, non-binary, and transmasc means I rarely fit the image people conjure for any of those identities. I’ve learned to find my people within the spaces rather than expecting the spaces to fully hold me.
This is the identity that has cost me the most. In family relationships, friendships, and in the workplace. It is the identity people have the hardest time holding. The one that gets misunderstood, dismissed, and debated as if it’s a theoretical position rather than a lived reality.
It is also the identity I am most fiercely, quietly, irreducibly myself within.
The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About: Disadvantage at the Intersection
My disadvantages don’t come from any single identity in isolation. They come from the intersection of them.
Being non-binary/transmasc, pansexual, demisexual, and Black in the American South means navigating discrimination from multiple directions. Sometimes simultaneously and sometimes from communities that should be safe harbors. I’ve been erased by the Black community for being queer sometimes. Unseen by the queer community for being Black many times. Questioned in both and at times tokenized in professional spaces. Quietly sidelined in rooms that congratulate themselves on diversity while also making me feel like a problem to be managed.
The ADDRESSING model gave me a structure for understanding this clearer than previously, and for seeing that what I was experiencing wasn’t paranoia or oversensitivity. It was the predictable outcome of living at multiple intersections in a world that still, largely, prefers its categories clean and its people simple.
I am not simple. None of us are.
What Filling This Out Actually Did
This started as an academic assignment in grad school, and then it became something else entirely. Seeing my identities laid out dimension by dimension, naming the privilege, naming the disadvantage, naming the bias I carry as a product of everything that happened to me, was clarifying in a way I didn’t expect. It didn’t resolve anything; however, it gave me a more honest map of myself. Honest maps, even uncomfortable ones, are how you figure out where you actually are.
If you haven’t tried the ADDRESSING model yourself, Part 1 has everything you need to get started, including a link to a free self-assessment worksheet.
You might be surprised what you find.
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
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