Leonita Arbaiman (0724142)

Teaching Cross-cultural Counseling to trainee counsellors give a lot of benefits towards the counsellors to let them know their client very well according to the information and knowledge that they learn about it in cross cultural. In a way of focusing on equipping them with the skills and competencies for being good counsellor, we cannot ignore the necessity of knowing particularly our client background and their culture as well. The term culture encompasses the values, beliefs, and behaviours shared by a group of people. But culture does not delineate an ethnic or racial heritage, it also can refer to groups identified by gender, age, sexual identity, religion or socioeconomic status. We belong to a particular cultural group and so do our client. Culture will influence the behaviour of both we and our client, with or without awareness. By having and seeking knowledge of being awareness with others culture will help us to work sensitively with culturally diverse clients. Achieving cultural competence is a lifelong journey. Therefore, it is such as important sources of knowledge that the counsellor must know in order to gain more information about the clients add on to become a competent counsellors. Every client and individual specifically has their own uniqueness and values. That makes a different between not only to the clients but also to the counsellors as well. Instead of just focusing to the client’s problems or essence from the sessions, we must give attention to the clients root to increase our understanding about the client’s way of behaving and their belief based on their differ culture that they come from. We can state many benefits of getting information about cross cultural counselling such as it can increase the counselor awareness of own cultural values and biases. It can be shown according to their attitudes and beliefs, knowledge and the skills that might be distinguish from each other. The differentiations of each criteria will contribute a big significant of the counsellor towards the client in terms of how they see their clients based on their own uniqueness and values. Meanwhile, we can also give an attention on the counsellor awareness of client’s worldview. The client worldview can be seen as the prior factor of the counselling sessions because it tends to build a relationship with the counsellor before the counsellor have chance to explore into the clients conditions. The diversity between each client may effects the personality formation, vocational choices, manifestation of psychological disorder, help seeking behaviour and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of counselling approaches. Culturally skilled counsellor also become actively involve with minority individuals outside the counselling setting so that their perspective of minorities is more than an academic or helping exercise. By knowing all sort things of cross cultural, it will get the counsellor be prepared to understand and work with clients of different cultural background and tends to make the counsellor feel more or less comfortable working with the particular groups. The understanding of cross cultural in counseling might attempt to increase our comfortable level and skill with specific group of client. Having many kinds of life experiences that the counsellors have will enable them to understand and counsel people who have a different worldview. Different kind of experience here means a lot of various information towards lifestyle and perceptions of life. By acquiring the cross cultural knowledge will build up a congruence understanding between the counsellor and client that will emerge a good rapport between them and evolve the therapeutic relationship. Learning cross cultural will bring an appropriate intervention strategy in terms of build respect to their religious, spiritual beliefs and values, including attributions and taboos which has discrepancy within the counselling setting. The bounding of counsellor and client may be prevented earlier since the readiness of accepting others’ values is already set in mind. If the counsellor refuse and retain to equipping themselves with the cross cultural knowledge, it will contribute failure in their sessions although they had been expert in building rapport, exploring problem and very master in using the various techniques that had been provided for the counselling profession. It is still insufficient effort to the counsellor since all the practical techniques cannot be done merely by applying external approach rather than knowing their internal needs for instance their culture needs that grow up parallel with them until they reach for the counselling sessions. The essence of better knowing cross culture must be encourage towards the trainee counsellor, let them got eagerness in doing research on culture which continuously will contribute a positive and negative consequences of the counselling sessions. The perceptions and worldviews of the counsellor towards certain area of culture and lifestyle will be useful as a sources of providing ourselves with adequate information in wider area of life and broader our level of competencies as a counsellor. To conclude, I think, it is attractive to have variety of knowledge that vary with ours. Sometimes the barrier between each different person intends to recognize our own speciality and sensitivity to other culturally diverse populations in the world. Gaining and obtaining knowledge is a lifelong process that cannot be terminate in certain area of course. Then, why should we questions the profit of learning cross cultural counselling since we are requested to seek knowledge in our whole life in this living process.