Counseling the Culturally Diverse. Laura Smith L.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ (Lorion, 1974). When clients are relatively unfamiliar with the therapy process, the smooth progress of the session can be affected. Therapists may interpret these experiences as reflecting client resistance or hostility; the client can in turn feel misunderstood by the therapist, with the result being a premature termination of therapy. Considerable evidence exists to suggest that clients from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds have significantly more interviews with their therapists, and that middle‐class patients tend to remain in treatment longer than lower‐class patients (Gottesfeld, 1995; Leong, Wagner, & Kim, 1995; Neighbors, Caldwell, Thompson, & Jackson, 1994).

      Working effectively with clients who are poor requires several major preconditions (Smith, 2010). First, therapists must spend time understanding their own class‐based biases and prejudices. Confronting one's own classism can help detect the influence of commonplace social stereotypes of poor people, which can vary in association with race. For example, poor White people can be seen through the lens of “White trash” stereotypes, while poor Black women have been stigmatized with the racist stereotype of “welfare queens” (Smith & Redington, 2010). These widespread social biases can affect the diagnosis and treatment of clients who live in poverty. Second, it is essential that counselors understand how poverty affects the lives of people who lack financial resources, and behaviors that are associated with the survival of poverty should not be pathologized. Finally, poverty and the economic disparities that are the root causes of emotional distress among the poor demands that therapists apply a social justice context to their case conceptualization (Smith, 2010).

      Several conclusions are suggested at this point: (a) poverty and classism present overwhelming stressors that undermine the mental and physical health of clients; (b) a failure to understand the life circumstance of clients who lack financial resources, along with unintentional class bias, may affect the ability of helping professionals to deliver appropriate mental health services; and (c) classism can make its appearance in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of lower‐socioeconomic‐class clients.

OVERGENERALIZING AND STEREOTYPING

      It is critical for therapists to have a basic understanding of the generic characteristics of counseling and psychotherapy and their connections to foundational assumptions within mainstream European American values and preferences. With this understanding in mind, we can prevent ourselves from unconsciously operating from this values system in a way that discounts and/or discriminates against clients with other cultural backgrounds. At the same time, overgeneralizing and stereotyping are also ever‐present dangers. For example, the listings of cultural group variables, provided by way of example in this chapter, should not be taken to indicate that all persons coming from any cultural group will share all or even some of the same traits. We know that clients come from families who embody a multifaceted array of perspectives that range from strict preservation of their cultural heritage to active integration with mainstream culture to a combination of both (Atkin & Yoo, 2021). Generalizations are helpful tools for learning and analysis; however, they are guidelines to be tentatively applied in new situations, and they should be open to change and challenge. Accordingly the information provided in this chapter (and throughout the book) should be seen as guidelines rather than absolutes—these generalizations can serve as the background from which distinct individuals emerge.

      IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

      1 Become cognizant of the generic characteristics of counseling and psychotherapy: culture‐bound values, class‐bound values, and linguistic factors.

      2 Learn to stop and consider how your conventional therapeutic training, with its deeply embedded European American cultural assumptions, can lead you to misinterpret the views, values, and behaviors of clients of diverse racial, ethnic, and social class backgrounds.

      3 Realize that the problems and concerns of many clients of color are related to systemic and external forces rather than to internal psychological problems (Chavez, Fernandez, Hipolito‐Delgado, & Rivera, 2016).

      4 Know that our nation's increasing diversity means that psychotherapists must broader their cultural conceptions of the family with the understanding that one is not superior to another.

      5 Realize that no family can be understood apart from the cultural, social, and political dimensions of their functioning. The traditional definition of the nuclear family as consisting of two heterosexual parents in a long‐term marriage, raising their biological children, and having the father as primary wage earner refers to a statistical minority of people.

      6 Know that the United States is increasingly becoming a multilingual nation and that the linguistic demands of clinical work may place some populations at a disadvantage.

      7 Consider the need to provide community counseling services that reach out to diverse cultural and social class communities.

      8 Learning about cultural characteristics is important, and so is the need not to overgeneralize or stereotype. Familiarizing ourselves with general and/or traditional group characteristics is different from rigidly applying preconceived notions.

       Microtraining Series Video: Overcoming Barriers to Effective Multicultural Counseling and Therapy

       Microtraining Series Video: Multicultural Counseling/Therapy: Culturally Appropriate Intervention Strategies

SUMMARY

Theories of counseling and psychotherapy are influenced by assumptions that theorists make regarding the goals for therapy, the method used to invoke change, and the definition of mental health and illness. These assumptions are often rooted in culture‐ and class‐bound perspectives that can be so taken for granted by conventionally‐trained therapists that they are not even noticed. Counseling and psychotherapy have traditionally been conceptualized in Western individualistic terms that may lead to premature termination of counseling and underutilization of mental health services by marginalized groups in our society. Other culture‐bound values that may prove antagonistic to members of diverse groups include the following: focus on the individual, verbal/emotional/behavioral expressiveness, insight orientation, self‐disclosure, scientific empiricism, and separation of mental and physical functioning.

      Culture‐related communication barriers are among the most relevant of these pitfalls for counselors, given that verbal communication is the basic vehicle by which counseling and therapy take place. When the counseling style of the counselor does not match the communication style of his or her culturally diverse clients, many difficulties may arise, including premature termination of the session, inability to establish rapport, and cultural oppression of the client. It is clear that effective multicultural counseling occurs when the counselor and the client are able to send and receive both verbal and nonverbal messages appropriately and accurately. Proxemics, kinesics, paralanguage, and other nonverbal factors are important elements of communication, and may be highly culture‐bound; effective mental health professionals understand these factors and shift are flexible in their helping styles.

      In СКАЧАТЬ