The Importance Of Cultural Competence In Counseling

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Cultural competence in counseling is very important. As more individuals seek out counseling services, counselors need to be aware of the diverse cultures and their competency level before working with these clients. Counselors who do not posses the necessary skills should not take on clients of cultural diversity. This only makes sessions unproductive which waste both the clients and the counselors time. Diverse clients may present issues including a loss of identity, stereotype threat, oppression, and mixed view of other groups. In providing treatment, counselors should use culturally sensitive strength-based counseling. Culturally sensitive strength based counseling help empower clients from diverse groups overcome negative views of the dominant culture and encourage them to embrace and employ cultural attributes (Grothaus, McAuliffe, & Craigen, 2012). The purpose of the article was to examine the effects of integrating cultural competence into strength-based practice in improving ethical counseling practice. Grothaus et al. (2012) define multicultural counseling competence as “the extent to which counselors possess appropriate levels of self-awareness, knowledge, and skills in working …show more content…
Multicultural self-awareness allows counselors to discover their religious, spiritual, ethics, social class, and many other identifying factors (Grothaus et al., 2012). As they have awareness of these factors, this will prevent them from forming them on clients. The authors suggest counselors engage in activities such as experiential learning, immersion experiences within the community, and active engagement with culturally diverse people (Grothaus et al., 2012). These activities are said to be the most effective awareness building activities when working with diverse clients. Once counselors strengthen their self-awareness and culture identity, then they may do the same with