Help Needed

Respond to classmates in a minimum of 175 words each person, post must be substantive responses: 

C.G.

Multicultural counseling is a very different type of counseling because there are a number of issues that can be brought up that we may not be familiar to me as it is impossible to be an expert of every ethnic or cultural group that exists. It is important to be well-rounded, but inevitably there will be a cultural issue that I may feel very strongly about yet hold my tongue when the client is speaking. There are some who come to this country and still believe in child brides or even polygamy because it is practiced in their country. I have a difficult time listening to others while they are speaking without interrupting.

I hear a lot of comments and opinions a this time when there are such wide political divisions and I hear a tremendous amount of anger and frustration. This has happened within racial, ethnic and even LGBT groups, where biases and opinions are so strong that there is no alternative opinion in their mind; you are either with them or against them.

This means that I tend to try and jump into the conversation to attempt to calm their anxiety with my own comments and my own biases, especially when they are contrary to my own opinions. This is one part that I need to work on is when the opinion of a client might be completely opposite from mine, and as a counselor, I have to maintain a professional posture in order to serve the client and hear them out.

M.K.

I believe some counselor think incorrectly, that once they have learned about multiculturalism they have “checked the box” and are done, Some counselors believe they are automatically competent about multicultural issues in counseling because of their own backgrounds, heritage or exposure to those from other cultures. For example, we might think, “Well, I dated someone from this culture, so I know about issues relating to this group.” Although we likely learned from that experience, that one particular experience should not be considered representative of an entire group of people. Multi culturally competence requires constant work, study and development as we move through our careers. In Western cultures, counselors are taught that when a client asks a question, that we should reflect it back, saying something along the lines of, “What do you think the problem is? And what do you think the answer should be?” That ambiguous, reflection-based response may work within a conventional Western perspective, but we must also have an awareness of when that perspective doesn’t fit with the client sitting in front of them. Otherwise, we run the risk of compromising their credibility with those clients. For a lot of culturally diverse clients, those kinds of reflective responses can appear as though you don’t know [the answer] or we’re avoiding the question, Instead we could use more of an engaging responses with culturally diverse clients. For example, we might consider asking these clients to role-play as if they were talking with someone important in their life who has provided them with those kinds of definitive answers in the past. You may say "Let’s have a conversation with that person and move forward with that". I think we have to have authentic, honest discussions — not politically correct discussions. We have to take risks and be honest with each other in talking about these issues of diversity and race. We need to get it on the table rather than brushing over it. To talk about similarities, differences, biases, stereotypes, prejudices — talk about these issues honestly, talk about history with these issues, talk about the current state of these issues. In order to understand prejudice, you have to admit your own prejudice. The bottom line is that you can’t grow up in a racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., society and not have vestiges of it yourself. All human beings do. But it’s what we do with that knowledge and those feelings that are the keys to being a very effective counselor. In my multicultural counseling career so far, I try to give clients a safe place to talk about all this in a respectful and caring manner. Too often we allow human differences — race, gender, age, ethnicity — to be barriers to us getting to know each other. One of my areas i can improve on is on nonverbal communication in therapeutic relationships, and I’ve recently focused on its impact on multicultural counseling. Nonverbal communication is very closely linked with our emotional selves, and because of this, I believe it should be a critical area of focus for counselors. In addition, a link between counselors’ nonverbal behavior, awareness and attending skills and the development of effective therapeutic relationships with clients has been shown in a number of studies. It should not come as a surprise that there is a difference in nonverbal communication patterns across cultures, and neither should the idea that nonverbal miscommunication can negatively impact the formation of a cross-cultural counseling relationship. I don’t believe it’s reasonable, or even possible, to learn all of the nonverbal differences that exist between cultures. Rather, I think that building multicultural competence in this area comes from building awareness of the types of differences that can exist and then developing general intervention skills to target nonverbal signals in counseling.