It is well recognised that working with mental health problems across different cultures poses profound challenges to all therapeutic models including CAT, and notwithstanding the emphasis in CAT on the importance of internalised and current socio-relational factors. The Western focus on the ‘individual’ as the ‘locus’ of mental distress and disorder in particular is highly problematic when attempting to help people from more socio-centric cultures where any sense of ‘self’, of ‘distress’ or ‘disorder’ may be experienced very differently, and where the forms of help sought may also be very different. Conceptually our approaches, we suggest, need to be much more cognisant of background and current socio-relational factors in ‘treatment’, which in turn will need to be considerably modified to be appropriate to working with persons form such cultures. Some of these background issues may relate, notably and explicitly, to recent experience of colonisation and subsequent loss of traditional culture, language, and ways of life. We have been attempting to develop a broader, partly CAT-based, meta-conceptual framework to attempt to address such issues. In particular in Aotearoa-NZ where we have conceived of this as a ‘korowai āria’ , to attempt to bridge across and helpfully understand the considerable distress and problems that many Māori experience, and also to bridge across to consider, respect, and learn from more traditional ways of healing. Consideration of the features of more traditional ways of life and healing may in turn, we suggest, constructively illuminate some limitations of Western, including CAT-based, understandings of mental health problems and of treatment for them.