A White Counselor in a Multicultural World: Understanding the Need for a Spiritual, Multicultural Counseling Course

Abstract

Multicultural counseling must be seen a significant factor in today’s multiculturalworld as therapists provide therapeutic services offered to clients, especially clients whohave immigrated from one country to another within the past 50 years. Multiculturalcounseling refers to the preparation and practices that help White counselors learnto integrate multicultural and culture-specific awareness, knowledge, and skills intocounseling interactions into their practice with multicultural clients. White counselorswho work with multicultural clients have the choice to either remain handmaidens of thestatus quo or transmitters of society’s values or become agents of change. Additionally,it has been demonstrated that White counselors who have participated in a multiculturaltraining program have greater therapeutic skill to offer their multicultural clients.Furthermore, when multicultural counseling is incorporated in a spiritually-enrichedtherapeutic relationship, White counselors are able to relate more effectively with theirmulticultural clients. A spiritually-enriched therapeutic relationship offers counselorsthe opportunity to work with their multicultural clients and incorporate the vital aspectof spirituality, because it is universal to human existence.Therefore, through the use of spirituality in multicultural counseling, Whitecounselors must have the desire to understand their multicultural clients’ worldview,which incorporates the view these clients have of their spirituality. Counselors mustunderstand the importance of developing a curiosity to understand how spiritualityinfluences the lives of their multicultural clients and use this new awareness to helpfacilitate healing and wholeness for their clients