The authors of your text have identified the three conditions related to cultural context that the counselor must recognize to be able to help clients as follows: the issue of power and privilege, cultural values and worldviews of clients, and the complexity of cultural diversity. Briefly explain why it is important for the multicultural counselor to understand those issues when working with clients from nondominant groups.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Issue of power has to do with its uneven distribution among different groups, particularly minority groups, making them powerless. Privilege connotes unearned advantages and benefits by virtue of being born into a privileged group. Both power and privilege are responsible for different types of cultural discrimination, prejudice, and social injustice in the United States and in the world. The result is an unjust and oppressive social environment that may be implicated as the cause of mental health concerns for some. Mental health counselors must understand the relationship between mental health and oppression by the dominant groups to be able to help clients from the nondominant groups. It is also imperative for counselors to recognize the different values and worldviews inherent in working with clients from diverse backgrounds may be different from their own. Traditional Eurocentric counseling values individualism, independence, autonomy, individual rights over collective duties. Such differences may lead to misunderstandings between counselor and client that may result in harm to clients. When the counselor is unaware of the differences in his or her values and worldview from the client’s, there is a chance that misunderstanding, misconceptions, and harm will occur. The complexity of cultural diversity is yet another that the counselor must understand to effectively serve clients from culturally diverse backgrounds. Individual clients are not only from a distinct cultural group, but have multiple cultural identities, each identity is not static but changes over time, place, and social context, and individuals from the same cultural group may be different in terms of their sense of identity, cultural values, and worldviews. Such complexity may be challenging to the counselor who may have the tendency to expect members from a certain cultural group to be the same.