Child and Adolescent Therapy by Jeremy P. Shapiro & Robert D. Friedberg & Karen K. Bardenstein

Author:Jeremy P. Shapiro & Robert D. Friedberg & Karen K. Bardenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Therapist’s Style

Conducting culturally responsive therapy means adapting your style to fit the culturally based expectations and preferences of your clients. Just as accommodating to the client’s personality helps to build rapport, adapting to the client’s culture facilitates the development of a positive therapeutic relationship. If taken too far, both types of adaptation become inauthentic and unworkable, but moderate degrees of accommodation are feasible. As in Chapter 1, we suggest a compromise between maintaining an unvarying style across clients and trying to mirror clients in a chameleon-like manner. We recommend against trying to behave as if you are a member of the client’s group, but we suggest being mindful of behaviors that clients might misunderstand or find offensive, and we suggest selectively emphasizing behaviors from within your repertoire that make sense in the client’s cultural framework. For example, with Asian or Native American clients, this would mean talking in the manner that you would use to be tactful, careful about the other person’s feelings, and, possibly, indirect.

Culturally responsive therapy includes appropriate therapist self-identification. This consists of the clinician giving the client basic information about his cultural background. Cultural self-identification by the therapist models open conversation about group identity and tells the client something about who the therapist is. The degree of detail in therapist self-identification should depend largely on the client’s level of curiosity, although counselors should not answer questions they find intrusive, overly personal, or embarrassing.

If the client has beliefs or feelings about the therapist’s ethnocultural group, these should be discussed as openly as possible. Honest, straightforward talk about the therapist’s background and the client’s feelings about her cultural group usually takes care of these issues. Sometimes, clients’ concerns about their counselor’s background reflect worries, which might be conscious or unconscious, about whether the clinician will be able to work effectively with them. If so, it might be useful to offer an interpretation of the transference (e.g., “Maybe you’re wondering if I’m too different from you to be able to understand and help?”).

Sometimes, when clients wonder about the therapist’s ability to understand their ethnic group, it is useful to reframe the issue from a matter of counselor capability to an issue of client-counselor collaboration. For example:

“I’m not ____________ (client’s ethnic group), and there’s probably a lot I don’t know about being ____________ . But I promise to listen carefully to everything you say and to do my best to understand. If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask you questions. And if you think I’m missing something, I want you to let me know—Don’t worry, you won’t hurt my feelings. Then I’ll ask you to explain some more, until I do understand. We’ll work together on this.”

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