A White Counselor in a Multicultural World: Understanding the Need for a Spiritual, Multicultural Counseling Course
Author/s: Kate Walsh Soucheray
DOI: 10.37898/spc.2020.5.2.86
Year: 2020 Vol: 5 Number: 2
Abstract
Multicultural counseling must be seen a significant factor in today’s multicultural world as therapists provide therapeutic services offered to clients, especially clients who have immigrated from one country to another within the past 50 years. Multicultural counseling refers to the preparation and practices that help White counselors learn to integrate multicultural and culture-specific awareness, knowledge, and skills into counseling interactions into their practice with multicultural clients. White counselors who work with multicultural clients have the choice to either remain handmaidens of the status quo or transmitters of society’s values or become agents of change. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that White counselors who have participated in a multicultural training program have greater therapeutic skill to offer their multicultural clients. Furthermore, when multicultural counseling is incorporated in a spiritually-enriched therapeutic relationship, White counselors are able to relate more effectively with their multicultural clients. A spiritually-enriched therapeutic relationship offers counselors the opportunity to work with their multicultural clients and incorporate the vital aspect of spirituality, because it is universal to human existence.
Therefore, through the use of spirituality in multicultural counseling, White counselors must have the desire to understand their multicultural clients’ worldview, which incorporates the view these clients have of their spirituality. Counselors must understand the importance of developing a curiosity to understand how spirituality influences the lives of their multicultural clients and use this new awareness to help facilitate healing and wholeness for their clients.
Keywords
Ethnocentric, Ethnorelative, Multicultural Counseling, Spirituality