Intercultural Therapy

 

Working interculturally with clients means that the difference between the client and the counsellor is recognized and explored. The counsellor should be aware of their own cultural values and beliefs and have a sense of cultural identity. This way she/he is more equipped to facilitate a similar exploration for the clients around their cultural awareness. Being aware, admitting and working through your own blind spots, biases and prejudices can be really important. This will enable the counsellor to keep the focus on the client’s agenda rather than being guided by own emerging countertransferential feelings. It can be useful to develop an awareness, pride even, in our own culture and yet accept the predominant culture. 

Continuous training and development around difference and diversity and the expansion of cultural knowledge is also necessary as the world and the society is changing around us so fast. Adaptation of interventions to meet the clients’ unique needs is also necessary. Identifying, acknowledging, appreciating and respecting clients’ diversity is a key to inclusion. We can be really culturally competent by displaying cultural responsiveness and sensitivity. (instead of just saying I treat everyone the same or I see no colour) It is also an ethical consideration.

The intercultural movement in counselling started in the 1960s as a result of significant political and social changes. In the 1980s in London, Jafar Kareem established Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre. His main motivation was that he noticed that there was a lack of provision of mental health services within ethnic minority groups. In addition, he noticed that there were several barriers which affected access to therapy services such as language barriers, racism or refugee status. The mental health of people from these marginalised ethnic minority groups was further affected by their external realities such as poverty, deprivation, social powerlessness etc.

Intercultural therapy is a form of psychotherapy aimed at benefiting culturally diverse groups. It recognises the importance of race, culture, beliefs, values, attitudes, religion and language in the life of the client. Kareem said: “taking into account the whole being of the client – not only the individual concepts and constructs as presented to the therapists – but also the clients’ communal life experience in the world, both past and present. The very fact of being from another culture employs both conscious and unconscious assumptions – both in the patient and in the therapist.”