What is multicultural counseling? How important is this approach in today’s society?

          There can be and are numerous and varying difficulties of racial and cultural minorities in regard to mainstream cultures that multicultural counseling is a means of addressing; however, multicultural counseling is an approach of counseling that is more complex and broader than addressing these issues. Ivey, Ivey, and Simek-Morgan (1997), "multicultural counseling as a metatheoretical approach that recognizes that all helping methods ultimately exists within a cultural context (p. 134). The assumptions of mainstream culture discriminatory practices against racial and cultural minorities are what multicultural counseling is based on. Relatively, multicultural counseling is a new approach that offers practical methods developed for enhancing practices that can be integrated into current approaches.

          Multicultural counseling has numerous issues it can address and has numerous goals in regard to clients, such as reconciliation, helping clients to avoid marginalization and further marginalization, addressing cultural and racial discrimination, issues of cultural and racial identity development, attaining higher levels of development, and coping with post-traumatic stress (Nelson-Jones, 2002). As well as assisting clients to manage close cross-cultural relationships and intergenerational conflict, with long-stay transients, expatriates, gender role and gender equality issues, acculturation and assimilation, and assisting with long-stay transients and expatriates (Nelson-Jones, 2002). As the society becomes more interconnected, addressing such issues and achieving such goals makes multicultural counseling increasingly important for society and clients. In today's society new approaches of counseling are of importance because society is continually changing. Therefore, changes that adhere to or go along with the continual changes of society can often be beneficial.

References

Ivey, A.E., Ivey, M.B. & Simek-Morgan, L. (1997). Counselling and Psychotherapy: a Multicultural Perspective, (4th Ed). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Nelson-Jones, R. (2002). Diverse Goals for Multicultural Counselling and Therapy. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 15(2), 133-143.