Counseling The Culturally Diverse Analysis

In the beginning of the video series I watched Dr. Zagelbaum, as he showed the stastical data that our population in the United States is changing daily and that we are no longer the Western European country, however, now we have become a county of the “Cablinasian” or “muticultural” people. This was a term that Tiger Woods used when questioned about his racial identity. There is growth of assimilation of the world population and the old that idea of staying within our own culture are slowly fading away, I believe the book called it acculturation. In the book “Counseling the Culturally Diverse”, the authors state “it is important to individualize the choice of helping skills and avoid a blind application of techniques to all situations and …show more content…
The implications of counseling immigrants will be met with some challenges as they may view this as an extension of the government, therefore reject the necessary assistance needed. In our society, we have seen that we are biased concerning immigrant as they are taking jobs, they add to population growth so that they can stay in the States, and the language barriers are difficult to overcome. Again, language barriers are a constant problem when counseling immigrants, therefore, as suggested by Dr. Sue, there should be trained interpreters present, they should be trained in relationship skills, the clients should feel comfortable with both the counselor and the interpreter, and understand that some of the clients are traumatized, which can cause emotional responses in them and to exercise self-care strategies (Sue D.W, Sue, D. 2013). p. 465. In counseling within this population, trust is most imperative, as some immigrants from Third World countries, have been traumatized and are leery of their surrounding …show more content…
The most profound statement that Dr. Parham made in the video that each of us has a self-healing power inside of us and should be recognized as an aspect to tap into that self-healing idea that the client has and believes. I as an African American female believe that we are bred to be survivors, therefore our strength be overbearing. We as counselors and therapists are called to be healers and we serve as a conduit to ensure that healing takes place. We must identify that the African people are more spiritualists – not the mystical spiritualism but the ancestral type of spirituality and that their spirit is always present, in that they respect the divineness that is from their historical and cultural identity. I must understand that my blackness and my culture may not be identifiable with what they hold sacred. I was impacted by the video as the scene with the young male and the connection the counselor achieved with him, identifying all that he held important and inviting those elements into the self-healing process. This to me was a very interesting concept and I found it to me an element that would be therapeutic in all counseling scenario’s as we counsel the diverse populations. I liked that Dr. Parham noted that African culture considered everything interconnected in the world, the elements in the world are of the