Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling

Written by: Kyana Aston

Cultural diversity and acknowledgment of the client’s ethnic background are essential to any therapeutic alliance. Integrating diverse perspectives will allow a “cultural voice” while maintaining the ethical standards to advocate and provide effective counseling services. Emphasizing multicultural advocacy requires integrating complex theories to appreciate the client’s cultural perspective (Hays & Erford, 2022). Counselors must support and advocate for the inclusion and representation of various cultures in professional counseling. The counselor’s role is to inspire a desire to engage in counseling practices that support personal enlightenment to establish idealistic therapeutic outcomes.

Diverse therapeutic application has four fundamental aspects: exploration, examination, integration, and personalization. Exploration involves researching the prominent counseling theories and adhering to the theory that aligns and resonates with one’s values and beliefs. Examination includes analyzing relevant resources that apply to the counseling theory to prompt familiarity, efficacy, and adaptability. Integration requires thorough explanation and collaboration between the client and counselor to create mutual understanding and adherence to counseling theory. Personalization is the last aspect that highlights the counselor’s unique theory while reflecting on the influential factors contributing to this theoretical decision.

The primary goal in counseling marginalized communities requires multiculturally competent counselors to develop a self-awareness of their social identities, privilege/oppression, values/beliefs, underlining biases, and professional experience to understand and become culturally sensitive to clients’ cultural experiences. Clinical counseling professionals should practice and implement various skills, including attentive silence, active listening, and observing client responses to enable acceptance and adherence to the counseling process. Prospective counselors must actively promote change to alleviate oppression, advocate for multicultural awareness, and seek to understand the cultural differences between diverse clientele (Hays & Erford, 2022). The established therapeutic rapport will gradually progress from hesitancy and reluctance to engage in counseling to acceptance of feelings and collaboration between counselor and client. The ultimate goal of this approach is client self-acceptance which aligns with a culturally diverse worldview (Hays & Erford, 2022). Psychodynamic counseling prioritizes the individualistic perspective compared to the collaborative or unified ideology (Hays & Erford, 2022). This individualistic viewpoint expresses primarily through behavioral changes, which depend on the client’s effort and commitment while receiving psychological treatment. In my opinion, Adlerian therapy would be the most applicable therapeutic approach to counsel diverse clientele mainly due to respect and cultural awareness for both the client and their ethnic background. There is an emphasis on cultural factors’ influence on the development and treatment of clients’ presenting issues (Hays & Erford, 2022).

Several principles include the concept of collectivism, the impact of family dynamics, collaborative goal setting, the influence of multigenerational legacy, and intervention strategies variability (Hays & Erford, 2022). Due to the collaborative essence, the variability of intervention strategies and techniques is imperative for establishing an empathic rapport between the counselor and client. Adlerian therapy aligns with the traditional beliefs of many marginalized communities that offer a variety of culturally sensitive, relevant, and aware resources to clients enduring mental distress (Hays & Erford, 2022). It is fundamental to recognize and address these racial injustices while analyzing their subsequent impact on the counseling profession and therapeutic alliance.

References

Hays, D. G., & Erford, B. T. (2022). Developing Multicultural Counseling Competence: A Systems Approach (4th ed.). Pearson Publishing.