Cultural Counseling Theorists

The Impact of History and Counseling Theories on Culturally Diverse Populations
Michelle Harmolin
Walden University

There are many important factors a counselor must keep in mind when counseling clients from various and diverse cultural groups. Clients of these various and diverse cultural groups may find the counselors approach and overall treatment to be unsuccessful due to that the majority of American counselors are trained in the Western approach (Hayes, 2008). In order to prevent this from happening, it is the counselor’s responsibility to keep up with current information regarding the ways for counseling of multicultural clients to be effective as well as for the counselor to gain as much knowledge as they can on the clients ethnicity, culture etc. and how they have been oppressed in America (Sue & Sue, 2013). Many western counseling theories have had the tendency to oppress diverse cultural groups. These theories tend to focus on developing action oriented problem solving techniques, promoting individualism, and advocating for work ethic (Hayes, 2008). A lot of these issues are not relevant or important to some cultures which show why western theories, which
By having more knowledge about the client’s culture and these events, it will allow for the counselor’s questions to be more specific and geared toward the client and their issues/concerns (Hayes, 2008). A client’s personal history is broken up into certain categories for the purpose of gathering information for a mental health assessment. These categories include upbringing, education, significant relationships, work history, but does not include cultural history. If the counselor had an idea of a historical timeline and to when each of the other events have happened, it can provide significant insight about the client to the counselor (Hayes,