Finding Compassionate Awareness for our Biases

Firstly, it is important to address our current cultural context (in britain) and the potential morality that can be attributed to certain attitudes and beliefs.

Britain is a society founded on racism, classism, sexism and other forms of minority demographic oppression (Bentil, 2017). We can see this in our history and in the way our society holds inherent assumptions about certain demographics. This means we may have implicit biases that are in line with those present in our social culture. Other cultures may have different foundations and so its members different biases. 

There is no moral value to an attitude that exists internally, as a result of social conditioning. The potential moral value comes from how we react to, and engage with this attitude and its potential to cause harm or fear.

‘I am implicitly racist because I was raised in a racist society. I can bring awareness to how this may show up and work with the factors that have influenced this bias to deconstruct it, and prevent me from being explicitly racist and operating on unconscious assumptions. I can work with any feelings of shame or guilt I may have for this unconscious attitude through meditation (Stoll, 2024), journalling (Szulejewska, 2025) and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) (Stoll, 2024).’ Byrdie Sommerville

Leaning on our pluralistic skills as counsellors, we can think about this in the same way we may work with emotional reactivity in emotion focused therapy, to find the origins of a feeling and move to responding to a situation after thinking (system 2), rather than following our immediate reaction (system 1)(Greenberg, 2004).  

While we must refrain from attributing moral value to an internal and implicit attitude, we are still responsible for our actions and our potential to cause harm. The tasks and methods in this framework will allow us to achieve the goal of finding awareness of and working with our implicit biases. We must know that change is possible, implicit biases are malleable with new information, as our behaviours are changeable through engaging with internal processes and choosing new ones (Devine, 1989).

Implicit biases/attitudes/opinions exist on a subconscious level, we learn them from our environment as we grow up and our brain uses them to categorise and store information more easily, regardless of the external truth attached to them. 

Can we offer love and compassion to the part of our mind that learned these ideas to help us make sense of the world and believes them to be true? As we may offer love to our inner child even if they were scared or wrong about something in Internal Family Systems work (Schwartz, 2023).

Can we, with this same love and compassion, release ourselves from harmful bias or stereotypes?

Bringing awareness to our hidden biases; we are all racist, we are all homophobic, starts with self acceptance and love (Sommerville, 2025).

‘Epistemology of ones own implicit bias is non-cartesian’ (Brownstein and Saul, 2016). We cannot know about our own bias, simply because the bias exists. We must unearth it, like we, as counsellors, unearth unprocessed trauma or shine light on a clients challenges, with empathy, compassion and love (Sommerville, 2023). 

We must learn the awareness, learn how to see the sources we get our bias from (personal research) and identify how and when they show up (reflection and peer discussions). We can do this in the same ways we bring awareness to our own experiences and feelings that come up in the counselling room, in supervision. This is a slow and on going process, not a finite one.

There is the potential for many feelings to arise when working with internal, challenging biases and attitudes. If we have an attitude that may be harmful, then likely the place it originated from is also harmful. Here we must lean on our skills as practitioners, engaging in grounding (EFTs, meditation, journalling) to work with feelings that may be hard or overwhelming. 

‘I have experienced shame, fear and anger when uncovering my biases (far from completely) because not only have these biases shaped how I view the world, they have shaped my perception of myself and caused me harm in many ways. The upside to this is that often when we break free of bias and assumption, what waits on the other side is freedom. Freedom for us to be with others un-blocked by assumptions or stereotypes and freedom for us to be ourselves without the internal feelings of hesitation or shame.’ Byrdie Sommerville