COUC 504 Week 1 Group DB Forum 1 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread and Replies

COUC 504 Multicultural Counseling, Group Discussion Board Forum 1 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the writer's background and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; the competencies, Scripture, textbooks and studies are real and described from their published sources; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for COUC 504.

Thread

I grew up in a farming town in northwest Ohio where nearly everyone was white, Protestant and connected to agriculture in some way. My parents did not finish college, money was always tight, and church was the center of our week. I am the first in my family to earn a degree. I carry real gifts from that culture, including loyalty, plain speech and a strong work ethic, but this module showed me that my culture is not neutral background. It is a lens.

Three parts of that lens concern me. First, I learned to see asking for help as weakness, which could lead me to misread a reluctant client as resistant rather than as someone carrying the same belief. Second, I may assume that a "normal" family looks like mine, with married parents, several children and grandparents a few miles away, and treat other arrangements as problems to solve. Third, I could treat my own faith as the default and miss how differently a Muslim, Jewish or nonreligious client experiences spirituality.

Ratts et al. (2016) place counselor self-awareness first among the four developmental domains of the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies, ahead of client worldview, the counseling relationship and advocacy interventions. They also describe four quadrants that consider whether counselor and client each hold privileged or marginalized identities. That model helps me see that I hold privilege through race and faith in my region while my class background was marginalized, so I may connect quickly with clients who grew up poor and still miss what race adds to their story.

Self-awareness, in this model, is not a feeling of being open-minded; it is knowledge of my assumptions that I can name and check. Hook et al. (2013) add an attitude to that knowledge. They define cultural humility as an other-oriented stance marked by respect and an absence of superiority, and across four studies, clients who rated their therapists as culturally humble reported stronger working alliances and more improvement. Humility, then, is something clients notice.

Hebrews 13:2 tells believers not to neglect showing hospitality to strangers (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). For me, multicultural counseling begins with that kind of welcome: making room for someone whose world I do not yet understand.

Classmates: which part of your own background do you think a client would notice first?

Reply to Marisol

Marisol, you wrote that growing up bilingual in San Antonio taught you to switch between two cultures, and that you trust yourself to sense when a client feels out of place. That ability will serve you well, and your post made me think about how we judge our own competence. Soto et al. (2018) reported two meta-analyses on this question. Across 99 studies, culturally adapted treatments showed an average effect of d = 0.50, which fell to 0.35 once the authors corrected for publication bias. In the second analysis of 15 studies, clients' ratings of their therapist's cultural competence correlated with outcomes at r = .38, while therapists' ratings of their own competence showed almost no relationship with outcome (r = .06).

That gap is humbling for all of us. Your sensitivity to feeling out of place is real, but the research suggests we should ask clients how well we are understanding them instead of relying on our own sense of it. I wonder whether a brief question at the end of early sessions, such as "Is there anything about your background I am missing?", would give us that client view without making it awkward. Have you seen a counselor ask clients something like that?

Reply to Devon

Devon, you argued that multicultural counseling is not a trend but a correction of the profession's history, since early counseling theories were written mostly by and for white, middle-class Americans. The history supports your point. Sue et al. (1992) issued a formal call to the profession for multicultural competencies and standards, organizing them around counselors' awareness of their own assumptions, understanding of the client's worldview and use of culturally appropriate intervention strategies, and they argued that counselor education should adopt the standards. More than two decades later, Ratts et al. (2016) published the revision now endorsed by the profession, which adds a stronger emphasis on advocacy and on the power differences between counselor and client.

That progression shows the field moving from awareness alone toward action, and it reflects the same concern you raised: a profession that once assumed its methods fit everyone has had to learn, in writing, that they do not. It also suggests that your point about history matters for practice. If our theories carry the assumptions of their authors, then part of competence is knowing which assumptions are built into the methods we learn. I would add one question to your post: which theory from our previous courses do you think most needs that kind of cultural examination before we use it with clients?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Worthington, E. L., Jr., & Utsey, S. O. (2013). Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(3), 353-366. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032595

Ratts, M. J., Singh, A. A., Nassar-McMillan, S., Butler, S. K., & McCullough, J. R. (2016). Multicultural and social justice counseling competencies: Guidelines for the counseling profession. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 44(1), 28-48. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmcd.12035

Soto, A., Smith, T. B., Griner, D., Domenech Rodríguez, M., & Bernal, G. (2018). Cultural adaptations and therapist multicultural competence: Two meta-analytic reviews. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74(11), 1907-1923. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22679

Sue, D. W., Arredondo, P., & McDavis, R. J. (1992). Multicultural counseling competencies and standards: A call to the profession. Journal of Counseling & Development, 70(4), 477-486. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1992.tb01642.x