Different people seek counselling due to various factors and life experiences. Different diversity elements such as race, social-economic status, culture and ethnicity, and many others, are influential to a client’s identity and life circumstances. These factors may also be contributing factors in the content of people’s mental health and wellness as well as relational or personal issues. People who seek counselling services come from varying walks of life and backgrounds. The necessity for multicultural counselling, therefore, increases as people become more and more diverse.
Multicultural counselling is the practice of offering effective interventions to culturally diverse people and is integral to the counselling profession. It defines the professional counsellor’s ability to sensitively approach counselling through the lens of the client’s environment and orientation. This means that the counsellor is sensitive to ensure that his/her values or biases do not take precedence over those of the client – it means putting the client first. For Counsellors, multicultural counselling allows them to gain in-depth personal awareness, sensitivity, knowledge and disposition necessary in ensuring they help people without bias and/or discrimination. Besides ensuring that Counsellors consider suitable counselling therapies for each client, multicultural counselling ensures the Counsellor remains aware of their personal views, biases, and attitudes throughout when providing counselling services to clients. It is therefore crucial that counselling is cognisant of the various factors presenting in a client’s need for counselling.
To excel in multicultural counselling, there are three key elements to consider. One of these is to have cultural knowledge which entails being knowledgeable and aware of the cultural variations and their effect on the client’s therapeutic journey. The second aspect is to have cultural sensitivity which means you acknowledge and appreciate the influences of cultural diversity on the client’s mental and emotional health and wellness. The third and last aspect is to have cultural empathy and be able to connect with individual cultural perceptions and not allow them to cause unconscious bias when working with any given client.
Multicultural counselling has great value both to the Counsellor and client. As the world becomes more and more globalised so does the need for multicultural counselling. This is because the scope of clients seeking counselling services is also getting broader. This means Counsellors must have the right and diverse skills to handle the broad needs of individuals seeking counselling, and deal with external factors (cultural, political, etc) that may influence the clients’ circumstances and lifestyles.
As the geographical clientele landscape expands so does the technological landscape consequently increasing the importance of multicultural counselling. This means that counselling therapy can be offered to people spread across the globe through different platforms, including over email, via telephone, and video conferencing. This necessitates training for Counsellors to enable them to understand and work around the varied technological challenges each client may face. Multicultural counselling hence ensures that Counsellors acknowledge and appreciate these challenges and that they find strategic ways to still provide high-quality counselling and therapeutic help to the clients they serve.
Multicultural counselling also helps and enables Counsellors to demonstrate their in-depth understanding of their clients’ struggles such as cultural issues, racism, discrimination, and other related lived experiences. This means the Counsellors can appreciate that due to the varied backgrounds, clients may have different lenses through which they view the world around them, and this shapes their mental perceptions. Pertinent to multicultural counselling is the Counsellors adept ability to connect with their clients beyond diversity attributes such as race, gender, socio-economic status, religion, geographical location, language, and even cultural orientation. In the end, the client gets the much-needed help. And this is the ultimate goal for every Counsellor.