REFLECTION OF CROSS-CULTURAL COUNSELING

Position Paper No 1

“ Teaching Cross-Cultural Counseling to trainee counselors is a waste of time.”
From that statement above, I strongly disagree because learning Cross-Cultural Counseling is very important to know better about the other people’s cultures. In my opinion, it is important to make the counseling sessions is successful when the counselors are facing with clients who are in different cultures. Teaching Cross-Cultural Counseling is vital to make counselors are able to describe culture and the application of the broad definition of culture. As we know, culture is something that we have to understand well. Why I mentioned like that?. It is because culture is something that shared values, tradition, norms, customs, art and so on. So, when the counselors do not know about the others culture, it becomes difficult to make effective communication with clients. Thus, changing behavior and solving the problem in the counseling session cannot be done effectively.
Here I would say that Cross-Cultural Counseling emphasizes the establishment of the effective communication between the counselor and client across cultures. Therefore counselors tend to become knowledgeable, sensitive, respectful and also non-judgmental in dealing with people whose culture is different. In addition, when we learn about the others culture automatically we build the trust between counselor and client.
Last but not least, competent counselor is one who can adapt the counseling models, theories, or techniques to the needs of each client. These skill require that the counselor be able to see and describe the client as an individual and also as a member of particular cultural group.
Teaching Cross-Cultural Counseling makes the counselors able to describe various dimensions of worldview and deliver relevant services to the specific population. Because of that, I could say that teaching this subject is very important to trainee counselors in order to understand the others peoples’ life style in different cultures.
In conclusion, I stand my opinion that I strongly disagree when the statement mentioned that “teaching Cross-Cultural Counseling is waste of time and these have nothing to do with culture.” Actually, as a good counselor, they must be aware of learning theory and how theory relates to the development of cultural factors. The counselor itself must have developed a sense of worth and awareness before attaining competence in counseling the culturally different. I believe that teaching Cross-Cultural Counseling is very interesting and valuable subject to the trainee counselors to demonstrate an awareness of self and an openness to culturally diverse populations.

SITI FARHANA BINTI ELIAS
0719618