Impact of client & counsellor culture on the therapeutic process

I have had the privilege of getting my counselling training in a country whose culture is very different from the one I grew up with. It was only when I interacted with people from diverse cultures and backgrounds that I realised the impact culture has on everything we do and think. As long as you are confined to people and places belonging to your ‘home culture’, you tend to assume cultural norms as facts. For example, putting the family or community before oneself is an integral part of a collectivist culture like India. However, assuming that this is the right thing to do for all people is an error. Similarly, a commonly held belief in predominantly white western cultures is that talking about one’s feelings makes one feel better. This again, is a cultural norm and not a universal truth, some cultures place greater value on being able to keep one’s feelings to oneself.

A counsellor needs to be sensitive to minute cultural details such as these. Recent research has focused on the need for cultural competencies as one of the core skills required in counsellors. This does not imply that a counsellor should know everything about every culture, but means that she should not base her interventions and practice on assumptions. As a practitioner of person-centred approach to counselling, I believe that the client is the expert on her life and I try not to make any assumptions about her on the basis of culture, gender or any other group that they belong to. This encourages me to be inquisitive about their life situation and ask clarifying questions whenever needed.

Social psychology research indicates that people generally prefer to associate with persons who they perceive to be similar. This similarity could be on the basis of appearance, worldview or affiliation to a group or culture. The obvious implication of these findings to the field of counselling is that clients would tend to prefer therapists who are from the same ethnicity as them. However, a meta-analysis by Cabral & Smith (2011) reports that despite client preference for counsellors from same background, ethnic matching does not improve therapeutic outcomes.

Reflecting on my prior experience with clients from diverse backgrounds, I think that positive change in a person depends a lot on the therapeutic relationship that develops between the client and the counsellor, and not on how similar they are. Considering the social psychology findings I mentioned earlier, it is natural for clients to want to work with counsellors from similar ethnicity. However, the presumption of similarity on the basis of cultural affiliations can lead to disappointment. For example, despite sharing the same nationality or ethnicity, the counsellor may be very different from the client, and vice versa.

A benefit of working therapeutically with a counsellor from a different country or community is that the counsellor can maintain an open stance of ‘not knowing’, thereby giving the client complete authority to narrate their situation with minimum risk for bias. Differences can promote insight – your counsellor may be able to suggest to you things you overlooked because of your conditioned beliefs. The most important thing is that a counsellor treats you with respect, and does not make stereotypical assumptions about you.