Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Counselors are often ineffective with culturally diverse clients because they
view cultural differences as de1cits rather than strengths. In addition, counselors will
often neglect to discuss a clients problems in the context of current social issues
facing the client. Counseling professionals create barriers in counseling when they
do not consider clients problems in the context of educational, economic, social,
political, legal, and cultural systems. The de1cit perspective, coupled with a neglect
to address social contextual issues, can hinder the cross-cultural counseling
process.
Because of the vast number of cultures that clients may ascribe to, it is
impossible for a counselor or therapist to know everything about every culture.
Working together with a counselor, healer, or helper from an unknown culture can
vastly improve a counselors ability to be effective and the probability of success in
implementing appropriate interventions
.
Lack of Culturally Appropriate Counseling Skills
Distinctions can be made between general counseling skills, which may
include active listening, empathy, and illustrating genuineness, and the speci1c skills
that are central to working with a client who is culturally different. Counselors who
lack multicultural counseling skills are at risk of providing culturally insensitive
counseling. Examples of skill requirements speci1c to cultural competency are (a)
determining effective ways to communicate with a client that may use a different
style of thinking, information processing, and communication; (b) discussing race
and racial differences early in the counseling process; (c) engaging in multiple verbal
and nonverbal helping responses, recognizing responses that may be appropriate or
inappropriate within a cultural context; (d) using resources outside of the 1eld of
psychology, such as traditional cultural healers; and (e) modifying conventional forms
of treatment to be responsive to the cultural needs of the client. Some counseling
professionals have indicated that there is no simple methodology or approach that
can easily de1ne the how-to in the counseling session with the culturally diverse
client. One of the greatest dilemmas in the area of cultural competency is
determining what counseling strategies and interventions are most effective with
different cultural groups.
Language Barriers
Language may be a barrier in the cross-cultural counseling process.
Language differences in counseling can lead to miscommunications, misdiagnoses,
and misinterpretations. A lack of language or communication skills often emerges as
a major stressor for clients who are bilingual, immigrant, or both. It is also important
to consider immigrant clients level of acculturation, which might be linked to their
command of their native and English languages. Bilingual clients may have the
ability to express themselves in English in a rudimentary way but may need to use
their native language to discuss more emotional subjects. Because of language
barriers, many immigrants will avoid counseling services fo of being unable to
communicate with counselors. Likewise, counselors may avoid immigrant clients
because the language barrier frustrates them.
Because counseling is a process of interpersonal interaction, communication is
paramount to the counseling process. Both parties in counseling interpret the
information transmitted between them, and if interpreted inaccurately, the counseling
process and outcomes can be negatively inuenced. The dif1culties
related to communication are most prevalent when interpreting nonverbal patterns
because nonverbal communication is highly inuenced by culture. Types of
nonverbal communication that are important in cross-cultural counseling include
proxemics,
kinesics,
paralanguage,
high-low
context
communication,
and
very little English pro1ciency to counseling. Without any prior information about the
nature of counseling, the client is frightened by the paperwork and extensive intake
procedures at the counseling agency, and she does not return for her next
counseling appointment.