Multicultural Counseling

Minority Worldviews, Therapist Biases, and Relationship Dynamics

Multicultural counseling is best understood in relation to competence guidelines published and enforced by professional counseling and psychology associations in multicultural countries (e.g., United States). A tripartite model presented by Derald Wing Sue and his colleagues in 1992 provided a conceptual basis to delineate three key components of multicultural counseling competency: (1) knowledge of cultural minority groups, (2) awareness of therapist's own worldview and cultural biases, and (3) application of culturally appropriate skills to intervene with client's presenting concerns as well as therapist biases.

Cultural Knowledge

In the past, multicultural counseling has focused on knowledge of cultural characteristics (e.g., Asians are collectivistic) and culture-specific tactics purported to be preferred by minority clients (e.g., Asians prefer a directive counseling approach). Stanley Sue and Nolan Zane have argued that knowledge of this kind, however, is distal to positive treatment goals as it perpetuates cultural stereotypes and ignores the individual differences within the respective minority groups. What is more important is therapist knowledge of the within-group differences in minority clients' cultural identity development. Some minority group members aspire to or internalize majority values, some embrace their cultural roots and reject the majority culture, and some attempt to appreciate and integrate both majority culture and cultural roots toward developing a bicultural identity. Theories of racial identity development, including the work of Janet E. Helms and her colleagues, and lesbian/gay/bisexual identity development, including the work of Reynolds and Hanjorgiris, have delineated the identity confusion and conflicts between self-acceptance and self-rejection among cultural minorities during the process of developing awareness of and confronting oppression and marginalization. As such, multicultural counseling competence entails therapist empathie understanding of the catalytic impact of majority oppression on the identity development and coping of minority clients.

Recognizing that both clients and therapists are products of cultural socialization that assigns them a majority or minority status, multicultural counseling emphasizes therapist knowledge of how cultural upbringing and ascribed status shaped their own worldview. Along with micro-knowledge of cultural group characteristics and macro-knowledge of societal forces that perpetuate and exacerbate client's counseling concerns, multicultural counseling emphasizes therapists' knowledge of their own attitudes and biases toward other cultural groups, especially therapists who are members of the majority group. Rather than developed through the lens of a single theorist, multicultural counseling is rooted in a culture-centered tradition, recognizing the therapists and the mainstream theoretical approaches they are trained to use are also culture bound. In a multicultural counseling relationship, therapist credibility is reflected by competence to discern and curb the therapist's own biases that may result in discriminatory, oppressive, or racist practice throughout the assessment, diagnostic, and intervention process.

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