Читать книгу Counseling the Culturally Diverse - Laura Smith L. - Страница 49

As we have discussed, values of individualism and psychological mindedness, and the use of rational approaches to solve problems, have much to do with how competence is defined. Many of our colleagues continue to hold firmly to the belief that “good counseling is good counseling,” dismissing in their definitions the centrality of culture. The problem with traditional definitions of counseling, therapy, and mental health practice is that they arose from monocultural and ethnocentric norms that excluded other cultural groups. Mental health professionals must realize that “good counseling” uses White EuroAmerican norms that exclude most of the world's population. In a hard‐hitting article, Arnett (2009) indicates that psychological research, which forms the knowledge base of our profession, focuses on Americans, who constitute only 5% of the world's population. He concludes that the knowledge of human behavior neglects 95% of the world's population and is an inadequate representation of humanity. Discouragingly, a follow up of the original article reveals that very little has changed in the 12 years following those findings (Thalmayer et al., 2021). It is clear to us that good counseling takes into consideration the cultural context in which counseling occurs and the cultural realities of the client and counselor.