The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 4 415 privilege and marginalization. Accordingly, counselors must work to understand the privileged and marginalized statuses related to all of their identities and specifically related to ability/disability in order to broach effectively. To do so, counselors must examine their attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about PWD to combat unconscious biases that could influence their behavior or interpretations in the counseling relationship (Chapin et al., 2018). To do so, Deroche et al. (2020) recommended reading autobiographies or blogs written by PWD (e.g., Heumann & Joiner, 2021), listening to or watching Ted Talks given by PWD (e.g., Young, 2014), following or joining social media pages specific to disability or PWD, and/or reading scholarly literature centered on the lives of PWD. Additionally, we recommend counselors engage in culturally responsive care, including use of disability-inclusive language (Kattari, 2020); discuss specific accessibility and accommodation needs (Chapin et al., 2018); assess office accessibility; and create disability-friendly policies (Chapin et al., 2018; Olkin et al., 2019). Counselor educators and supervisors are responsible for preparing students and supervisees to work with PWD. Consequently, professional counselors need more than one day slated for disability topics in their multicultural counseling course. Most importantly, professional counselors need to know that PWD have historically been and are continually on the frontlines advocating for their civil rights and promoting social justice and equality. Although it is likely impossible for most programs to add another course to their curriculum, it is reasonable and doable to integrate disability into established courses as they have for other cultural topics and for supervisors to make intentional efforts to address ability/disability within clinical supervision. Strategies include creating case studies that portray PWD or disability identity (see Smart, 2012 for examples); developing activities, assignments, or projects that require counselor trainees to explore negative attitudinal barriers and social inequities experienced by PWD (Deroche et al., 2020); discussing how disability impacts family roles, responsibilities, and dynamics; using cultural broaching in the classroom and in supervision (Day-Vines et al., 2021); and designing program policies and materials that reduce attitudinal and access-related barriers for students and supervisees with disabilities. Limitations and Future Research The study results must be understood in the context of its limitations. Self-selection bias may have influenced who decided to participate in the study. Although we included a definition and examples of ableist microaggressions in our informed consent document, PWD who were more familiar with or had an interest in this topic may have chosen to participate compared to PWD who were less familiar or knowledgeable about ableist microaggressions. Our use of the AMS (Conover et al., 2017b) introduces limitations associated with its psychometric properties, as no normative data is available. Additionally, the AMS purports to measure the lifetime occurrence of ableist microaggressions, requiring participants to retrospectively report information from years prior; retrospective recall of ableist microaggressions may result in inaccurate data (Kattari, 2019). Although there is benefit to understanding the long-term effects of ableist microaggressions, we suggest that researchers pursue longitudinal studies rather than utilizing a one-time measure that relies on participants’ recollections. Although our sample included people with a range of disability types and visibility of disability, the majority identified as White, heterosexual women who are employed and who had some level of higher education experience. The racial (Goyat et al., 2016), educational (Paul et al., 2021), and employment (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023) inequities reported in the disability community are not representative of our sample. We suggest that future studies intentionally sample individuals who are more representative of the disability community. Finally, counseling researchers must continue to investigate how ableist microaggressions manifest in the counseling relationship, best
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