Counseling the Culturally Diverse. Laura Smith L.

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      3 What do you think “understanding yourself as a racial, ethnic, cultural being” means? Some questions to guide you in finding the answer are the following. What does it mean to be a Person of Color? What does it mean to be White? These questions are best answered in a group activity.

      4 Do you think it is possible to “leave politics” outside of the classroom when discussing issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia? Is it possible not to consider the sociopolitical nature of counseling and psychotherapy when working with marginalized group members?

RECOGNIZING AND UNDERSTANDING RESISTANCE TO MULTICULTURAL TRAINING

      As a counselor or therapist working with clients, you will often encounter psychological resistance or, more accurately, client behaviors that obstruct the therapeutic process or sabotage positive change (Ivey, Ivey, & Zalaquett, 2018). Clients may change the topic when recalling unpleasant memories, externalize blame for their own failings, fail to acknowledge strong feelings of anger toward loved ones, or be chronically late for counseling appointments. All of these client behaviors are examples of resistance or avoidance of acknowledging and confronting unpleasant personal revelations. Oftentimes, these represent unconscious maneuvers to avoid fearful personal insights, to avoid personal responsibility, and to avoid painful feelings. In most cases, resistance masks deeper meanings outside the client's awareness; tardiness for appointments is unacknowledged anger toward therapists, and changing topics in a session is an unconscious deflection of attention away from frightening personal revelations. In many respects, multicultural training can be likened to “therapy” in that trainees are analogous to clients, and trainers are comparable to therapists helping clients with insights about themselves and others.

      As we shall see in Chapter 2, the goal of multicultural training is cultural competence. It requires trainees to become aware of their own worldviews, their assumptions of human behavior, their misinformation and lack of knowledge, and, most importantly, their biases and prejudices. Sometimes, this journey is a painful one, and trainees will resist moving forward. For trainers or instructors, the job is to help trainees in their self‐exploration as racial/cultural beings, and the meaning this has for their future roles as multicultural counselors. For trainees, being able to recognize, understand, and overcome resistance to multicultural training is important in becoming a culturally competent counselor or therapist. In many respects, to be uncomfortable and to experience negative reactions to the material may be signs of potential growth. In the next few sections, we focus upon identifying how resistance manifests itself in training and propose reasons why many well‐intentioned trainees find multicultural training disconcerting and difficult to undertake. By so doing, we are hopeful that trainees will attend to their own reactions when reading the text or when participating in classroom dialogues on the subject.

In work with resistance to diversity training, research reveals how it is likely to be manifested in three forms: cognitive resistance, emotional resistance, and behavioral resistance (Sue, 2015). Recognizing the manifestation and hidden meanings of resistance is one of the first priorities of multicultural training for both trainees and trainers. For trainees, it is finding the courage to confront their own fears and apprehensions, to work through the powerful emotions they are likely to experience, to explore what these feelings mean for them as racial/cultural beings, to achieve new insights about themselves, and to develop multicultural skills and behaviors in their personal lives and as mental health professionals. For trainers, it means understanding the nature of trainee resistance, creating a safe but challenging environment for self‐exploration, and using intervention strategies that facilitate difficult dialogues on race, gender, sexual orientation/identity, and other topics in the area of diversity.

      COGNITIVE RESISTANCE—DENIAL

       To date, my biggest discovery is that I didn't really believe that people were being discriminated against because of their race. I could hear them say it, but in my head, I kept running a parallel reason from the White perspective. A Chinese lady says that her party had to wait longer while Whites kept getting seated in front of them. I say, other people had made reservations. A black man says that the receptionist was rude, and made him wait longer because he's Black. I say she had a bad day, and the person he was there to see was busy. A Puerto Rican couple says that the second they drove into Modesto … a cop started tailing them, and continued to do so until they reached their hotel, which they opted to drive right on by because they didn't feel safe. I say, there's nothing to be afraid of in Modesto. It's a nice little town. And surely the cop wasn't following you because you're Puerto Rican. I bet your hotel was on his way to the station. I know that for every story in which something bad happens to someone because of their race, I can counter it with a White interpretation. Moreover, while I was listening with a sympathetic ear, I silently continued to offer up alternative explanations, benign explanations that kept my world in equilibrium. (Rabow, Venieris, & Dhillon, 2014, p. 189)

      This student account reveals a pattern of entertaining alternative explanations to the stories told by Persons of Color about their experiences of prejudice and discrimination. Although the author describes “listening sympathetically,” it was clear that he or she silently did not believe that these were instances of racism; other more plausible and “benign” explanations could account for the events. This is not an atypical response for many White trainees when they listen to stories of discrimination from classmates of color (Sue, 2015; Young, 2003). Because of a strong belief that racism is a thing of the past, that we live in a post‐racial society, and that equal access and opportunity are open to everyone, People of Color are seen as exaggerating or misperceiving situations. When stories of prejudice and discrimination are told, it directly challenges these cherished beliefs. The student's quote indicates as much when he says that the “benign explanations” preserves his or her racial reality (“kept my world in equilibrium”).

      The fact that the student chose not to voice his or her thoughts is actually an impediment to learning and understanding. In many classrooms, teachers have noted how silence is used by some White students to mask or conceal their true thoughts and feelings about multicultural issues (Appiah, Eveland, Bullock, & Coduto, 2021; Sue, Torino, Capodilupo, Rivera, & Lin, 2010). Denial through disbelief, unwillingness to consider alternative scenarios, distortion, fabrication, and rationalizations are all mechanisms frequently used by some trainees during racial conversations to prevent them from thinking about or discussing topics of race and racism in an honest manner (van Dijk, 1992; Sue, 2015; Sue, Rivera, Capodilupo, Lin, & Torino, 2010). In our teaching in multicultural classes, we have observed many types of denials that work against honest diversity discussions. There are denials that students are prejudiced, that racism still exists, that they are responsible for the oppression of others, that White American occupy an advantaged and privileged position, that they hold power over People of Color, and even denial that they are White (Feagin & Vera, 2002; McIntosh, 2002; Sue & Spanierman, 2020; Tatum, 1992; Todd & Abrams, 2011). This latter point (Whiteness and White privilege) is an especially “hot topic” that will be thoroughly discussed in Chapter 7. As a trainee in this course, you will be presented with opportunities to discuss these topics in detail, and explore what these denials may mean about you and your classmates. We hope you will actively participate in such discussions, rather than passively dealing with the material.

      EMOTIONAL RESISTANCE

Emotional resistance is perhaps the major obstacle to multicultural understanding, СКАЧАТЬ