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Communication is very substantial when it comes to counseling clients. When counselors practice good communication, it helps shape a trusting relationship between the counselor and client. However, communication issues can transpire during counseling sessions. Different culture background or personal experience can lead to disagreement, misinterpret and misunderstanding. The reason why is because communication style is different between cultures. For example, smiling is a type of expression in our society that is believed to indicate liking or positive affect (Sue, Sue 2016). On the other hand, some Asians believe that smiling may suggest other meaning or even weakness (Sue, Sue 2016). Effective helping depends on the counselor and the client being able to send and receive both verbal and nonverbal messages accurately and appropriately (Sue, Sue 2016).

I’m now going to describe my communication style. I am a young African American female and from a small town. I will start with nonverbal communication. There are several nonverbal communications and they are proxemics, kinesics, paralanguage and high low context communication. I will describe my communication style based on my race and culture. Let start with Proxemic. Proxemic refers to someone’s personal and interpersonal space. I prefer whoever I’m engaging a conversation with not to get close to me. I think it very rude for someone to stand close to me while holding a conversation. It also makes me nervous when someone violates my personal space. I been working with offenders for four years and personal space is very important. In my workplace, it’s not professional to be close to an offender. We are also taught to always walk behind the client. The clients are also aware of personal space and if they violate their parole officer personal space then it can result in the client getting in trouble. However, I also like to keep a desk between myself and the client.

Next, kinesics which refers to body movement. In my workplace, we are not allowed to shake our clients hand. By doing so it shows a sign of the parole officer being friendly. However, outside of my workplace I greet others by shaking hands right hand. I think shaking someone’s hand with your left hand is very rude and look at it as if that person doesn’t like me or look at as in not being good enough. Lastly, I consider myself a high context communication.

I would describe my helping skill as being more expressive. Research shows, black males and females tend to use the more active expressive skills with greater frequency than whites (Sue, Sue, 2016). Expressing my concerns and thoughts will help the client open in therapy. I think the most difficultly I would experience is being judge by white clients. I fear that white clients would not attend my session and will not prefer me to be their counselor because of my color. I fear that they may judge me as not being smart enough to counsel them. This will cause discomfort and It will make me angry. I experience this before with my current job. I had a client who was part of the aryan brother hood. He reported me to my supervisor stating that I wasn’t doing my job properly and he prefer if he had a white Parole Officer that knows what they are doing. It upset me because it’s not that I didn’t know what I was doing he just had something against African Americans. I fear that a similar incident will occur. I hate that I am to be labeled as less educated individual. Today African American must work twice as hard than any other race to be successful.

Sue, D. W., & Sue, D. (2016). Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice. (7th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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