Teaching Cross-cultural Counseling

Topic: “Teaching Cross-cultural Counseling to trainee counselors is a waste of time. Instead, we should focus on equipping them with the skills and competencies for being good counselors. These have nothing to do with culture.”
Name: Ili Kaiyisah bt Muhammad Kamal
Matric No: 0720266


Cross-Cultural counseling is one of the essential subjects in learning counseling. There are many reasons way cross-cultural counseling is a need in developing a professional counselor. According to Sue and Sue, the counselor or therapist must be extremely sensitive to cross cultural issues which include individual, to the culture of the client, and his or her own prejudices and racism. The counselor’s he or she must has the potential to belief and accept the client value and trust. Therefore, teaching cross culture counseling is an important method for the trainee counselors to improve and to complete their knowledge and skills.
Sue and Sue (1990) believe that as mental health professions, we have a personal and professional responsibility to confront, become aware of and take action in dealing with our biases, stereotypes, values and assumption about human behavior. Secondly, to become aware of the culturally different client’s world view, biases, values, and assumptions about human behavior, and thirdly, develop appropriate help-giving practices, intervention strategies, and structures that take into account the history, cultural, and environmental experiences or influences of the culturally different client. Consequently, the trainees or the counselor should prepare the knowledge to be unconditional positive regard to any types of races, group or genders. If the client is from Sarawak different races such as ‘Bisaya’ and Christian, the counselor should evaluate the client based what the client will think, react and behave. Do not under estimate the way Client think because if it happened the client feels insulted by the counselor feedback or judgment. The counselors can intervene strategies efficiently and knowing what type of helping giving skills and theories that will be used.
Moreover, Sue and Sue (1990) state that much of the reason minority populations generally tend to avoid counseling is the counselors generally lack of cultural sensitivity and mistrust of practice that essentially geared toward white middle-class America. All of this happen when the theories and techniques is basically for the white American and their culture. When the counselors basically used the theories, skills or even attitudes toward the other races it seems rare and unacceptable for them. According to Sue and Sue (1990) there are need to be different approaches based on cultural needs. This is because different cultural born in different ideology. If all over the world have the same values, cultural and norms there will be no creativities and conflict like a machines in the factory, everyday do the same thing and have the same colors, very dull and bored. Without varieties of culture there will be no colors merely black and white.
Besides, rather than demanding that the client adapt to the counselor’s culture, it may be better for the counselor to adjust to the work within the client’s culture. In the other words, alternative roles involve the counselor more actively in the client’s life experiences than what we traditionally been trained to do. By adapting the new environment in the counseling the client will be more comfortable with the counseling and the counselor will understand more deeply about the client. For example, not all client love to sit in the office and discuss or interact with the client privately but some of the client love to walk and talk in the park or just go to some place to drink and talk about some issues or problems. The counselor should learn more about the client not the client. When this happen the process will be flow and will close the gap between the both parties.
In addition, Sue and sue (1990) also point out that many culture don’t values verbalizations the same way U.S. American do. In fact many Japanese clients respond with silence to the counselor who is older, wiser and who occupies a position of the higher status. At issues is who to work with the clients from different cultural backgrounds, respect their customs and culture, not allow racism and judgments to color sessions, and still be of help. Thus, cross-cultural counseling is an important method to be the guideline in helping people who are in different culture. This is because the counselors learn about the sensitive issues and be consistently aware about others cultural.
In conclusion, teaching cross-cultural counseling is essential and not waste of time to the trainee counselors which gives lots of opportunities and benefits to them in term of understanding others cultural client and be bond with them.