Post #8

I really enjoyed the article this week about Metacognition and Multicultural Competence. I have had both the Ethics course and Multicultural Awareness course at Millersville, and I feel like slowly I have begun to develop more awareness about multiculturalism. I think it is important that counselors begin to become aware of their own biases and how it influences their ability to treat multicultural clients.

The article stated that “the counselor’s ability to generate insights for the client is dependent on the counselor’s understanding of the salient cultural contexts in the client’s life. That understanding is filtered through the counselor’s own cultural lens (Byars-Winston & Fouad, 2006, p. 189). I think this is really important to understand because a counselor may understand a client’s cultural, but the culture is still being understood through the counselor’s own viewpoint. I think a lot of times counselors think they are being understanding, but still end up trying to change the client to fit into the counselor’s own cultural view. For example, an Asian client may want to please his/her family no matter what and the counselor may understand that that is an important aspect of Asian culture, but may still try to make the client more conscientious of their own wants and needs. This leads to the overconfidence effect that the article also discusses where counselors place a great certainty on their clinical assessments being accurate (Byars-Winston & Fouad, 2006, p. 189). So now this counselor not only believes that they understand the Asian culture, but they also believe that they are bettering the client by make them more individualistic, when really they are just trying to make the client fit better into their own culture.

I find that the second part of the article does a really nice job of addressing this issue because most times counselors do this without knowing they are doing it. This is wear metacognition comes into play. I think it is important that the client constantly thinks about what they are doing to help foster their ability to recognize accuracy as well as their errors (Byar-Winston & Fouad, 2006, p. 193). Even for counselors who are well versed in different cultures, their own experiences and biases will always be present so it is important to try not to dismiss one’s own beliefs, but to recognize how they are influencing their work with clients. I know the ability to do this won’t happen to me overnight, but I hope after my training at Millersville and through experience with multicultural clients, I will be able to become more competent with these skills.

References

Byars-Winston, A. M., & Fouad, N. A. (2006). Metacognition and Multicultural Competence: Expanding the Culturally Appropriate Career Counseling Model. The Career Development Quarterly, 54(3), 187-201.