Gender-informed and multicultural therapies
Treat culture and power as constitutive of the clinical encounter rather than as context.
What you should be able to do afterwards
- 1Explain minority stress and distinguish distal from proximal processes
- 2Recognise and take up a cultural opportunity
- 3Elicit an explanatory model
- 4Distinguish an accurate appraisal of adversity from an anxious inflation of it
The reading
The field moved from cultural competence — a body of knowledge to be acquired, which produced stereotyping and showed no outcome effect — to multicultural orientation: humility, opportunities and comfort as relational qualities. Client-rated humility predicts alliance and outcome; missed cultural opportunities predict dropout. The change is from something you have to something you are doing, in this moment, with this person.
What belongs to this unit
Questions to take away
For a seminar, a supervisor, or an argument with yourself.
- 1What in your own training was presented as universal and is in fact particular?
- 2A client says something about your identity that stings. What do you do in the next ten seconds?
- 3Where does a therapist’s responsibility for structural conditions begin and end?