78 The Professional Counselor | Volume 14, Issue 1 microaggressions. While our study findings are not congruent with these statements, counselors must take clients’ expressions seriously, work to understand how clients have developed these beliefs, and seek to understand their impact on the client who is stating them. Finally, four participants indicated that Microaggressions Include Identities Other Than Disability. Given the high percentage of the sample that had multiple nondominant identities, it is curious that so few participants spoke to this phenomenon. However, we theorize that this may have to do with identity salience (Hunt et al., 2006) and the fact that this was a study about ableist microaggressions. For the participants who spoke to this theme, the important features they reported were the compounding effect of microaggressions when one has multiple nondominant identities and the inherent confusion that results from microaggressive experiences, particularly when one has multiple nondominant identities. Again, counselors must screen for and be prepared to address the complexity and the impact of ableist microaggressions based on each client’s unique identities and experiences. Implications for Practice The study findings illustrate the ubiquitous, troubling, and impactful nature of ableist microaggressions. These findings expose many counselors, supervisors, and educators to a world they may not know well or at all, while for others, these findings validate experiences they know all too well personally and professionally. We began this article with a quote from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: “Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become.” This quote captures the charge we are issuing to counseling professionals: It is time to take action to become counseling professionals who think as, act as, and are disability-affirming professionals. The task at hand is for each counseling professional to decide what steps to take next to strengthen their disability-affirming identity based on their current awareness, knowledge, and skill level, as well as how they can enact their disability-affirming identity based on their professional roles. Fundamentally, disability-affirming professionals validate, support, encourage, and advocate for and with PWD consistently throughout their professional activities. For many, this begins with developing their awareness and knowledge, followed later by their skills. Based on the findings presented in this article, we suggest counseling professionals engage in self-reflexivity by examining the ways in which they have unwittingly adopted the dominant discourses about disability, what they believe about the abilities and lives of PWD, how they understand disability within the context of other nondominant identities, and the ways in which they have participated in perpetuating ableist microaggressions. Without engaging in disability self-awareness development, professionals risk conveying ableist microaggressions to clients that can result in early termination, impede the therapeutic relationship, and/or inflict additional psychological harm (Sue & Spanierman, 2020). For example, counselors may assume that clients with disabilities have diminished social–emotional learning skills compared to clients without disabilities and initiate formalized assessment based on this assumption. While counselors should be attuned to all clients’ social–emotional skills, it can be damaging to PWD’s sense of self and the counseling relationship to assume their social–emotional learning skills are deficient rather than assessing how environments are not conducive to PWD’s social–emotional needs (Lindsay et al., 2023). Counselors’ self-reflexive process is meant to foster self-awareness; to better equip counselors to recognize ableist microaggressions in clients’ stories when they occur in personal, training, and professional environments; and for them to avoid unintentionally communicating ableist microaggressions in their practice. To start this process, we encourage counselors to question whether any of the study findings rang true, whether as someone who has experienced ableist
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