Unit on Multicultural Therapy

Slide 1: Multicultural therapies

• Basic ideas

Slide 3: Where are we going?

1. Importance of values
2. Meaning of differences
3. Power, oppression and privilege
4. What does it mean to be “multicultural”?
5. Development of racial identity

Slide 4: Theme 1: Values are part of all cultures

• What are the values of your ethnic group?
• What makes this easy or difficult to identify?

Slide 5: Values are part of all cultures

• What are the values of your ethnic group?
• What are the values of another ethnic group?
• What makes this easy or difficult to identify?

Slide 6: Theme 2: Group differences

• Between group differences (as in mean differences between samples)

Slide 7: Recognizing ourselves. . .

Slide 8: Frequently reported racial differences

• African Americans
• More holistic
• More emotionally expressive
• Interdependent
• Respectful of the elderly
• Euro-Americans
• Rational and reductionistic
• Emotional restrained
• Striving toward self-actualization and autonomy
• Youth-oriented

Slide 9: Are all members of a culture the same?

• Between group differences (as in mean differences between samples)
• But I’m not like that!
• Within group differences (as in standard deviation around the mean)

Slide 10: A caveat

• While mean differences can be important and should be considered, remember differences within a group (e.g., some men are nurturing, some women are achievement oriented) are often much larger than differences between groups.

Slide 11: Theme 3: Power, oppression and values

• Counseling is an instrument of oppression designed to transmit a certain set of individualistic cultural values.  Traditional counseling has harmed minorities and women.  Counseling. . . has been the handmaiden of the status quo and as such represents a political statement. (Sue, 1992, p. 6)

Slide 12: Power, oppression and values

• What happens when two people (or groups) have different values and different amounts of power?
• One set of values often gets lost.
• One “voice” often gets suppressed.
• Sometimes one party needs to do things to equalize the power.
• Which values, which voice?

Slide 13: Power and MCT

• Rather than abusing power -- even unintentionally -- multicultural therapies attempt to challenge abuses of power by:
• Respecting different sets of values
• Is different necessarily bad?
• Identifying and challenging oppression and unearned privilege
• In what ways are your lives privileged?
• Where are your lives less than free?
• Setting up an egalitarian therapist/client relationship.
• What might this look like?

Slide 14: Theme 4: What does it mean to be “multicultural”…?

• Models have been developed by Euro-American upper middle class men, with their valuing system in mind.
• Therapy has generally focused on the YAVIS (young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, successful) rather than QUOID (quiet, ugly, old, indigent, dissimilar culturally) client.

Slide 15: Universal and focused approaches to MCT

• Focused approach
• “Culture” loses its meaning when describing too many groups
•  Should focus on issues of race and oppression, especially for ethnic minorities
• Universal approach
• “Culture” should be broadly defined to include all groups

Slide 16: A universal viewpoint

• All mental health counseling [can be] multicultural.  If we consider age, lifestyle, socioeconomic status, and gender differences... (Pedersen, 1985, p. 94)

Slide 17: Theme 5: Development of racial identity

• Not everyone looks at their race and other races in the same way.  Helms and Cook (1999) describe a model where minority members:
• Begin thinking less dichotomously and more flexibly about race at later statuses
• Are more self-valuing at later statuses
• Value Whites least at intermediate statuses
• Similar models are used to explain Whites’ development of racial identity.

Slide 18: Development of Black racial identity (Helms & Cook, 1999)

• 1. Conformity. External standards for self are accepted, even when they devalue self in favor of group in power.
• But there was a part of me that feared black power very deeply for the obvious reason.  I thought black power would be the end of my mother.  I had swallowed the white man's fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole.... I thought to myself, These people will kill Mommy.  (McBride, 1996, p. 27)
• 2. Dissonance.  Increasingly aware of the group history and discrimination, even while being uncomfortable accepting self and culture
• I cut the questions and ate the cake, though it  never stopped me from wondering, partly because of my own growing sense of self, and partly because of fear for her safety, because even as a child I had a clear sense that black and white folks did not get along, which put her, and us, in a pretty tight space.  (McBride, 1996, p. 25)
• 3-4. Immersion/Emersion. Often uncritical idealization of their own racial or cultural group, with a concomitant denigration of the group in power.
• Kind, gentle, Sunday school children who had been taught to say proudly, "I am a Negro," and recite the deeds of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson now turned to Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown and Martin Luther King for inspiration.  Mommy was the wrong color for black pride and black power, which nearly rent my house in two.  (McBride, 1996, p. 96)
• 5. Internalization. Positive commitment to and acceptance of their own group and internally defined racial attributes. Attempt to assess members of the dominant group in a fair and objective manner rather than perceiving all Euro-Americans as the same or bad.
• It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous "white man's world" wasn't as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals' problems surpassed my own, often by a lot....  Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle.  (McBride, 1996, pp. 262)
• 6. Integrative Awareness. Have the capacity to value the collective identity as well as to empathize and collaborate with members of other oppressed groups.
• Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to come from two worlds.  My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul.... [W]hen I hear black "leaders" talking about "Jewish slave holders" I feel angry and disgusted, knowing that they're inflaming people with lies and twisted history...  Those leaders are no better than their Jewish counterparts who spin statistics in marvelous ways to make African-Americans look like savages, criminals, drags on society, and "animals"... (McBride, 1996, pp. 103-104)

Slide 19: A multicultural therapy

• Feminist therapy

Slide 20: An overview of today

1. What do traditional therapies overlook?
2. What does feminist therapy pay attention to?
3. What are its strengths?
4. Review tape of Lenore Walker and Gina

Slide 21: Theme 1: What do traditional therapies overlook?

• Traditional, individually-oriented therapies focus on the individual at the expense of the environment and culture.
• How does being female (or male) affect a woman’s (or man’s) life?
• What happens when we ignore environmental and cultural contributions to problems?
• MCT pays attention to both individual contributions to symptoms and cultural or environmental contributions...
• It pays attention to both individual control and cultural or environmental responsibilities...

Slide 22: Theme 2: What does feminist therapy do well?

• Pays attention to contextual issues including culture
• Acknowledges cultural differences in values
• Personal attacks are conceptualized as political expressions of power (as well as personal)
• Liberates person from inappropriate self-blame
• Much greater educational focus, supportive approach, and politically active
• Relative to other approaches to therapy, the question is, What is healthy for you?  Who are you, rather than what should you be?

Slide 23: When is a feminist approach especially relevant?

• When a woman has been raped
• When a woman is "successful," but wants to slow down and parent -- against the advice of her colleagues
• When a man decides he wants to be "weak" and share power with his partner

Slide 24: Theme 3: What are its tools?

• Egalitarian relationship.
• Because… (Remember the connection between our goals and our interventions?)
• Empowerment.
• Because…
• Support groups.
• Because…
• Education about the roles of culture and gender
• Because…
• Focus on sexism and oppression
• Because…
• Community action against oppressive forces
• Because…

Slide 25: The superordinate goal of feminist therapy???

• To increase choices!

Slide 26: Increase choices how…?

• The woman in the first example has had her choices stolen from her.
• The woman in the second example is "powerful," but feels no choices about whether she wants to exercise that power.
• The man in the third example is “strong,” but is recognizing the ways that gender stereotypes don’t work for him.

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URL= http://psy1.clarion.edu/jms/cptmulticulturalpp.html

Last modified September 24, 2001.