Barriers to Cross-Cultural Counseling

Lack of Counselor Cultural Self-Awareness

A major barrier to effective cross-cultural counseling is the counselor's lack of cultural self-awareness. Cultural self-awareness refers to the counselor's awareness and acknowledgment of his or her own cultural beliefs, attitudes, and values as well as an awareness of his or her biases and faulty assumptions about other groups. Essentially, a counselor with a heightened sense of cultural self-awareness acknowledges and recognizes when his or her culture is contradictory to a client's culture. When a counselor does not recognize that he or she has biased views and stereotypical beliefs about other groups, he or she will likely provide ineffective counseling services and experience high rates of client dropout. Also, a culturally aware counselor is able to recognize when he or she is conceptualizing a client's case based on prejudiced and/or stereotypical beliefs about a particular group of people.

Lack of Counselor Cultural Knowledge

In many cases, the counselor's lack of cultural knowledge can serve as a barrier to effective cross-cultural counseling. Cultural knowledge includes the counselor's understanding and knowledge of other cultural groups' behaviors, norms, beliefs, and attitudes. Both counselors and clients bring to counseling a set of cultural norms that have been reinforced for long periods of time. These norms then influence the way in which the counselor and client perceive their world, each other, and their approach to counseling. Counselors who are knowledgeable of their clients' cultural preferences and norms are better equipped to make appropriate clinical decisions. For example, in some cultures, passivity rather than assertiveness is revered. A counselor adhering to the Western culture may have great difficulty understanding a Chinese client's unwillingness to “demand” more from others. However, after learning more about the client's culture, the counselor introduces counseling interventions that take into account Chinese cultural norms.

When counselors lack knowledge of varying cultural groups, they will often rely on stereotypes to better understand clients from different cultural [Page 1010]backgrounds. Stereotypes are often negative, based on faulty perceptions, and are of unspecified validity. Many argue, however, that some stereotypes or generalizations can be helpful in the process of learning to understand other cultures. African Americans are an example of an entire ethnic minority group that has been subject to historical and contemporary stereotyping. African American stereotypes have ranged from portrayals of African Americans being lazy and intellectually inferior to being violent and poor. For example, a White career counselor might assume that an African American client is not able to pay for a series of career-exploration courses. The counselor, therefore, fails to share information about the workshops with the African American client but she shares the information with a White client. Her faulty assumption is based on the stereotype that all African Americans are poor, from low-income backgrounds, or both.

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