What Is The Multicultural Approach To Counseling?

Multicultural counseling occurs when a professional counselor works with a client from a different cultural group. It takes into consideration racial, spiritual, and ethnic diversity in addition to sexual preferences, disabilities, social class, and cultural bias.

Throughout history, and still to this day of course, people of various ethnic and cultural groups have been discriminated against. One of the main goals of multicultural therapy is to acknowledge and respect the history of oppressed and disregarded people and to address the socialization and power issues that accompany that oppression.

This work also attempts to focus on a client's issues within a cultural context, to help realize how family and cultural factors influence perception of self and the world at large.

An important part of multicultural counseling is for therapists and patients to openly acknowledge differences. This is accomplished through mutual respect and by the therapist expressing a willingness to learn more about a client's belief system, cultural worldview, and daily realities.

Some factors that we consider in the therapeutic environment are a client's religious/spiritual identity, their economic or class background, their sexual identity, their racial or ethnic identity, their family history, their unique physical characteristics, their language background, and their cultural background.

After all, culture plays an extremely important role in psychotherapy. The likelihood of a person seeking help, available treatments used by mental health professionals, and the outcome of treatment are greatly affected by cultural considerations. At KKJ, we are trained and continually strive to provide excellent care for people from all backgrounds.