Overview
Relationship between culture and counseling has attracted attention from many researchers in the recent years. Realization of importance of cultural competence in counseling has led to the concept of multicultural counseling. Though emphasis on cultural competence has improved counseling practices, there is still fundamental cultural bias in various treatment practices used today.
Among other factors, cultural biases result from the fact that most of the counseling practices were created in the context of the dominant Euro-American culture. While the counseling practices may work well with Euro-Americans, they may not be effective with various minority cultural and ethnic groups.
Potential Sources of Counselor Bias
Counseling is considered the best intervention to emotional and psychological challenges affecting individuals. Common counseling practices today include person centered counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy, group therapy, family therapy and marriage counseling.
Though the approached differs significantly, most of them borrow from early researchers on psychological therapy, such as Carl Rogers (Rogers, 1942). Considering that most early researchers on psychology therapy came from the dominant Euro-American culture, the resultant counseling practices may exhibit cultural bias toward other ethnic and cultural groups.
There are various sources of cultural biases in counseling practices in use today. In one way or the other, the cultural biases are linked to the assumption that counseling would take place in a homogeneous culture. One of the major sources of biases is difference in the definition of normal behavior (Pedersen, 1988). What is considered ‘normal’ behavior differs in one cultural group to the other.
Assuming that normal behavior is the same in all cultural groups can lead to faulty diagnosis and treatment intervention. For instance, what is consider normal behavior to a Mexican American may not be applicable to an Anglo-American of a Black American.
Most of counseling practices emphasis on individualism. Euro-American culture upholds individualism and therefore counseling approaches such as person centered focus on the individual client rather that the social context of the client (Pedersen, 1988).
Counselors tend to focus more on changes on the individual client without considering contribution of other individuals to the healing process. This assumption may lead to negative results in cultural groups such as Hispanic Americans and Asia Americans that value family and social harmony.
Dependence on abstract words and overemphasis on independence of clients lead to cultural biases. According to Pedersen (1988), abstract words used in counseling practice may lose meaning in context of another culture.
Abstraction such as ‘self awareness’, ‘self direction’ and ‘self actualization’ may have different meaning in different cultures. On the other hand, overemphasis on independence of a client is biased against cultural groups have close family links.
Successful Treatment Practices
Matching counselors and clients, and multicultural counseling are the major interventions to cultural biases in treatment practices. It is a fact that a client responds better when counseling process is consistent with her cultural values and beliefs. Cultural bias is unlikely to happen when a counselor and a client result from a common culture.
However, scarcity of counselors from minority cultural groups makes it impossible to implement matching successfully. Therefore, multicultural counseling remains the only viable option to overcome cultural bias (Ridley, 2005). Counselors should understand and adjust to cultural value of their clients. They should try to adopt the best counseling approach for their clients.
For instance, when offering counseling intervention to Mexican and Asian Americans, counselors can try to bring in family members to the process. In addition, group therapy rather individual based therapy can be the best approach for handling Hispanic clients.
Motivation to Multicultural counseling
A counseling process is considered successful if it helps a client to overcome his or her emotional and psychological problems. To achieve counseling objectives, a counselor must be able to understand the client in her cultural context (Worthington & Soth-McNett, 2007).
Considering that the goal of counseling process is to help the client to heal, a counselor should adopt the most effective approach to his client. Since clients respond well to counseling approaches that are consistent with their culture, a counselor should adopt the best approach depending on the culture of their client.
References
Pedersen, P. (1988). A handbook for developing multicultural awareness. Alexandria, VA: American Association for Counseling and Development.
Ridley, C. (2005). Overcoming unintentional racism in counseling and therapy: a practitioner’s guide to intentional intervention. New York: Sage Publications
Rogers, C. (1942). Counseling and psychotherapy: newer concepts in practice. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press.
Worthington, R. & Soth-McNett, A. (2007). Multicultural counseling competencies research: A 20-year content analysis. Journal of Counseling Psychology 54(4), 351-361