Re-Post: Counseling the Culturally Diverse
Throughout summer 2024, we’re reposting previous blogs that showcase the range of topics in psychology. We’ll return to posting new content in August, 2024.
By Taylor McShane
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to have a career that was a part of the helping profession, specifically, counseling and helping people through hard times of their life. Throughout my years of schooling I have taken many classes that educate you about how to work with others, how to help others, and specifically how to treat every person you work with equally. It wasn’t until recently that I took a class that opened my eyes in ways unimaginable about how to work with individuals during troubling times and more specifically people who are culturally diverse. The idea that in the counseling profession you are to treat all of your clients equally couldn’t be further from the truth. As a counselor, you must treat all of your clients as an individual person because every single individual is going to be different whether by their culture, race, gender, values, etc. It is argued by many professionals that multicultural competence is essential to working successfully with diverse clients. I don’t understand how this is even an argument; it is most positively and certainly important to be a multicultural competent person when working with diverse clients.
People often mistaken what culture actually means by thinking that it is exclusively referring to race, but culture is actually much more than this. Culture is many things including: ethnicity, religion, language, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and so many more things. Most counseling and mental health training practices come from theories that are made by people who have a White, EuroAmerican, and middle-class perspective. It blows my mind that professionals actually think theories that arise from one specific culture are going to be successful in helping a wide variety of diverse cultures. Individuals of diverse cultures often face oppression, discrimination, racial issues, and stereotyping in their daily life and these factors can seriously impact their mental health. If you are of a different culture than your client, you may not fully understand the extent of how these daily struggles affect them.
Important Factors
This class recently opened my eyes to the important factors that are necessary in multicultural counseling and how essential it is that counselors are educated on multicultural competence. One important factor in multicultural counseling is the communication between you and your client. There are specific beliefs and ways of verbal or nonverbal communication, and it is important to know what communication looks like for your client. Body language, eye contact, personal space, language, and specific verbal words may mean one thing to you but be completely different for different cultures. To make your client feel comfortable communicating with you, you must understand, observe, and be knowledgeable about what this looks like for their culture. We also need to be aware of taboo topics, which are known as topics that are against culture rules to talk about or may be a topic that is uncomfortable for an individual because of their values and beliefs. Secondly, you need to be knowledgeable about your client’s values and beliefs so that you can incorporate them into your therapeutic techniques. Every culture has different values and beliefs, so it is important to know what is of high value to your client and what may not be. A few common examples of this are individualism and family. EuroAmerican views on therapy focus on the individual and how they can possibly better their own life, but to some cultures family is of high value to them and it may be helpful to include their family in their therapeutic process. Lastly, it is of major significance that the counselor has self-awareness of their own biases, prejudices, stereotypes, assumptions, etc. If you ignore or are unaware of your own biases, the client may notice it and this could severely affect your client-counselor relationship, perception of your client, and the way you react to your client’s problems. In the helping profession, we are constantly told that we must put our own biases and assumptions aside and ignore them because your job is to help the client. Although half of this is true, it is essential for counselors to not ignore their biases and rather be fully aware of them and understand why they may have these biases. Being aware of your own attitudes and beliefs can dangerously affect the way you respond to your client in a more positive way.
How We Can Change Counseling
In conclusion, there needs to be a serious change in the amount of training given on multicultural counseling and awareness. This does not mean that you must change your own personal beliefs, but your job as a counselor is to have complete focus on the client no matter what their struggles may be or what culture they are a part of. You must meet their needs even if you disagree with them personally. It is essential that you show interest and understanding in your client’s cultural identity and take this into high consideration during their therapeutic process. Our society is growing more and more diverse each day and I believe that multiculturalism should be at the center of focus in all counselor training. We see the many daily struggles that diverse cultures face and how these struggles increasingly affect mental health, yet most individuals of diverse cultures turn away from helping professionals because of the lack of education on multicultural counseling and we need to do something about this. After all, as counselors we are a helping profession, right?
References
Multicultural Counseling – Definition, Issues and Techniques. Alliant. (2018, October 30).
Home (n.d.), BestCounselingDegrees.net.
Multiculturalism & Diversity Archives (n.d.), Counseling Today.