The "I" in DEIA: What Inclusion Is Starting to Mean to Me

I have spent years working in the space of diversity, equity, and inclusion without ever really seeing the I.

That sounds strange to say out loud, but it's true. DEI has been part of my professional vocabulary for a number of years. I understood diversity — the fact of difference, the value of it. I understood equity — the recognition that not everyone starts from the same place. But inclusion, the I, was somehow always there without ever coming into focus for me. Not overlooked exactly. Just... not yet visible.

Recently that changed. I heard a group colleague talk about inclusion in a way that made something click — and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. This post is me trying to put words to what I'm seeing, now that I can see it.

A Quick Note on the Language

You may have noticed that the term DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — has been in the news quite a bit, and not always in ways that feel calm or neutral. The language itself has been evolving too. More recently, the framework has been extended to DEIA, adding Accessibility as a fourth pillar: a recognition that belonging requires more than good intentions — it requires removing real barriers that prevent people from participating fully.

These terms have become politically charged in ways that can make it hard to hear what they're actually pointing at. I'm not writing this post to enter that debate. I'm writing it because the I — Inclusion — has recently come alive for me in a new way, and I want to think out loud about what I'm learning.

Welcome and Inclusion Are Not the Same Thing

Here is the distinction that stopped me: welcome is the signal you send at the door. Inclusion is what a person feels once they're inside.

Welcome says: you can come in. Inclusion says: you belong here. And belonging — real belonging — isn't something you announce. It's something a person feels, or doesn't feel, in their body, in the room, in the relationship.

What I'm realizing is that I have always cared about this. Connection, mattering, belonging — these have been central to how I think about therapy and about groups for as long as I can remember. But I didn't have a frame for it within the DEI conversation. I didn't know there was a letter that pointed here. Finding the I hasn't taught me something foreign — it's given a name and a home to something I was already trying to live. And that reframing has been genuinely exciting, because now I can think about it more deliberately, talk about it more precisely, and hold it more consciously in my work.

Visible and Invisible Identities — and the Complexity Within Them

Most conversations about inclusion focus on identities that are visible or easily named: race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion. These matter enormously, and they shape what people carry into any room.

But inclusion also extends to identities that are less visible — or that people haven't yet named, even to themselves. Someone's complicated relationship to their faith community. The family they came from, or left behind. The grief they're holding privately. The diagnosis no one else can see.

And then there is something further still — something I find myself increasingly drawn to in this work. Inclusion isn't only about which whole persons are welcomed. It's about whether the whole of a person is welcomed, including the parts that don't fit neatly together, that contradict each other, that a person may not have fully claimed yet.

A woman who is commanding and professionally dominant may also carry a deep femininity she hasn't had much room to explore. A person who holds conservative values sincerely may also have genuinely liberal parts of themselves that need air. Someone who identifies clearly as straight may have aspects of their experience that don't map so cleanly onto that identity — and vice versa. A man may have receptive, tender qualities that he's never quite known what to do with. And on and on — the parts of us that coexist uneasily, that we haven't always had permission to bring into the same space.

This, too, is what I want inclusion to hold. Not just the named identity, but the unnamed one alongside it. Not just the self a person presents, but the self that is still forming, or still waiting to be seen.

What I'm Working Toward — and What I'm Still Learning

I want to be careful here not to overstate what I can offer or promise. I'm not saying that everyone who comes to group therapy with me will feel included. Feeling included — really feeling it — is not something I can produce or guarantee.

What I can say is that inclusion has become a more conscious intention for me, one I am actively holding and developing. I have a clinical framework I believe in. I have training and experience that inform how I work. What I don't have is certainty about how any of this lands for any particular person. That's different from not having answers — it's just honesty about the limits of what one person can control in a relationship.

And perhaps most importantly: if someone comes and doesn't feel included — if they feel like an outsider in the group, or unseen, or that their particular experience doesn't quite fit — I want to know that. I want them to bring it. That kind of noticing, named out loud in the room, is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It's often where the most important work begins.

What's shifting for me isn't something you would necessarily see from the outside. It's internal — something I'm carrying differently now, a question I'm holding more deliberately as I sit with people. Writing this post is part of how I'm making that internal shift visible, to myself and to others. Putting words to it is part of how it becomes real.

The question I'm sitting with — the one the I in DEIA opened up for me — is this:

Does the person in front of me feel like they belong here — and if not, do they know that matters to me?

I'm still learning what it means to hold that question well. But I'm glad I can see it now.

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Paul Callister, PhD, CMHC, CGP is a licensed clinical mental health counselor and certified group psychotherapist. He founded the Utah Group Therapy Center to offer interpersonal process groups in Utah.