Multicultural Counseling Competence

Multicultural counseling competence—the intentional consideration and utilization of culture to facilitate therapeutic change—has become one of the most critical forces guiding the discipline of counseling psychology. In response to both the diversifying of the population of the United States and the civil rights, women's rights, and gay and lesbian rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, pioneers in the counseling profession instigated changes in their theories and practices. One of the enduring changes is the profession's deploring of racist, ethnocentric, sexist, and heterosexist practices, which were found to be ubiquitous in the mental health system. Although the deplorable practices sometimes were unintentionally motivated, the consequences for consumers, nevertheless, were deleterious. Among the more formidable initiatives were attempts to make counseling more accessible to members of disenfranchised groups and also the development of new competencies to shape and guide counseling practice.

Counseling psychologists, led by visionaries such as Derald Wing Sue, Patricia Arredondo, Stanley Sue, William Cross, Joseph Ponterotto, Janet Helms, Gargi Roysircar, Teresa LaFromboise, Michael D'Andrea, Thomas Parham, Paul Pedersen, Allen Ivey, Donald Atkinson, Madonna Constantine, Donald Pope-Davis, Hardin Coleman, and others, drew formal critiques of a mental health system that had been steeped in racist practices for nearly a century. The findings and conclusions of their careful analyses were disturbing. Traditional theories of counseling and psychotherapy were developed primarily by European White middle-class men without consideration of the cultural Zeitgeist in which their theories were rooted. Training followed from these theories and reinforced European ideas about normalcy and pathology. Racial and ethnic minority clients often were underserved, more likely provided with substandard care from inexperienced therapists, and more likely to terminate prematurely than were White clients. A call for systemic-wide change was heeded.

D. W Sue and his colleagues have been among the most influential counseling psychologists to respond to the call for change. In 1982 the team of scholars published a groundbreaking article titled “Position Paper: Cross-Cultural Counseling Competencies.” The position paper provided a general description of three competencies: attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, and skills. Attitudes and beliefs pertain to counselors' self-awareness as cultural beings and their sensitivity to, and respect of, cultural differences with their clients. Knowledge is having a good understanding of sociopolitical systems, particular client populations, generic characteristics of counseling, and institutional barriers for minority clients. Abroad range of skills are deemed necessary, covering verbal and nonverbal communications and also institutional interventions. In 1992 D. W Sue and another group of scholars expanded on the tripartite model in an article titled “Multicultural Counseling Competencies/Standards: A Call to the Profession.” Intending to provide a new lens through which counseling could be conceptualized and practiced, the Standards offered important initial perspectives for the field. The Standards were organized in a 3 (characteristics) x 3 (dimensions) matrix format in which the characteristics (i.e., counselor awareness of own assumptions, values, and biases) were each grounded along the three dimensions of beliefs and attitudes, knowledge, and skills. The Standards implored counselors to develop a more nuanced understanding of their own cultural identities, as well as those of their clients, and to best use this understanding to help develop therapy strategies and interventions.

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