8 Use modalities that are consistent with the lifestyles and cultural systems of your clients, as well as with your training.
9 Understand that one's multicultural orientation (cultural humility, cultural comfort, and cultural opportunity) is very important to successful multicultural counseling.
Microtraining Series Video: Cultural Competence in the Helping Professions
SUMMARY
Traditional definitions of counseling, therapy, and mental health practice arise from monocultural and ethnocentric norms that may be antagonistic to the lifestyles and cultural values of diverse groups. These Western worldviews reflect a belief in the universality of the human condition, a belief that disorders are similar and cut across societies, and a conviction that mental health concepts are equally applicable across all populations and disorders. These worldviews also often fail to consider the different cultural and sociopolitical experiences of marginalized group members. As a result, counseling and therapy may often be inappropriate to marginalized groups in our society, resulting in cultural oppression. The movement to redefine counseling/therapy and identify aspects of cultural competence in mental health practice has been advocated by nearly all multicultural counseling specialists.
MCT is defined as both a helping role and a process that uses modalities and defines goals consistent with the life experiences and cultural values of clients; that recognizes client identities to include individual, group, and universal dimensions; that advocates the use of universal and culture‐specific strategies and roles in the healing process; and that balances the importance of individualism and collectivism in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of clients and client systems. Thus, cultural competence is the ability to engage in actions or create conditions that maximize the optimal development of clients and client systems.
On a personal developmental level, multicultural counseling competence is defined as a counselor's acquisition of the awareness, knowledge, and skills and the cultural humility needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society (ability to communicate, interact, negotiate, and intervene on behalf of clients from diverse backgrounds); on an organizational/societal level, it is defined as advocating effectively to develop new theories, practices, policies, and organizational structures that are more responsive to all groups. Another attribute, cultural humility, seems central to effective multicultural counseling. Cultural humility appears more like a “way of being” than a “way of doing.” The attitudinal components of respect for others, an egalitarian stance, and diminished superiority over clients mean an “other‐orientation” rather than a self‐focus. Along with cultural humility, cultural comfort and cultural opportunity are important attributes of effective MCT as well. Finally, it appears that there is a strong need to integrate social justice competencies with cultural competence. Becoming culturally competent is a lifelong journey but promises much in providing culturally appropriate services to all groups in our society.
Full Counseling Session Analysis video (Part II) for “The Superordinate Aspects of Multicultural Counseling and Therapy”
GLOSSARY TERMS
Multicultural counseling and therapy (MCT)
REFERENCES
1 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (fifth ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association.
2 American Psychological Association. (2017). Multicultural guidelines: An ecological approach to context, identity, and intersectionality. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/multicultural‐guidelines.pdf.
3 Apfelbaum, E. P., Sommers, S. R., & Norton, M. I. (2008). Seeing race and seeming racist: Evaluating strategic color‐blindness in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 918–932.
4 Arnett, J. J. (2009). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist, 63, 602–614.
5 Arredondo, P., Gallardo‐Cooper, M., Delgado‐Romero, E. A., & Zapata, A. L. (2014). Culturally responsive counseling with Latinas/os. Alexandria, VA: American Counseling Association.
6 Bale, T. L., Baram, T. Z., Brown, A. S., Goldstein, J. M., Insel, T. R., McCarthy, M. M., … Nestler, E. J. (2010). Early life programming and neurodevelopmental disorders. Biological Psychiatry, 68, 314–319.
7 Buchanan, N. T., Perer, M., Prinstein, M. J., & Thurston, I. B. (2020, December 11). Upending racism in psychological science: Strategies to change how our science is conducted, reported, Reviewed & Disseminated. 10.31234/osf.io/6nk4x.
8 Chang, J., & Sue, S. (2005). Culturally sensitive research: Where have we gone wrong and what do we need to do now? In M. G. Constantine, & D. W. Sue (Eds.), Strategies for building multicultural competence in mental health and educational settings