Race, Culture and Counselling

Can therapy involving a therapist and client from differing cultural, ethnic and racial origins work? What are the main barriers to this relationship working well? What knowledge, skill and attitudes are required by therapists to enhance their work with “different” clients? Therapists are inevitably affected by their own backgrounds, experiences and prejudices, which may manifest negatively within therapeutic relationships with clients of different cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds to their own. This book strives to explore these areas of challenge to successful therapy and to raise awareness of the many facets that may impact upon the relationship.

This substantially revised edition builds upon the foundations laid down in the first edition (which addressed, amongst other subjects, issues of race and power, cultures and their impact upon communication, and a review of the dominant theoretical discourses influencing counselling and psychotherapy and how these might impact upon mixed identity therapeutic relationships,) and includes the following additions: New chapters by black and white writers working within British, American and Canadian contexts Updated information on recent changes and challenges in the field New approaches to the issues of whiteness and power, multiple identities and identity development Race, Culture and Counselling provides key reading for students, therapists, supervisors and teachers of therapists as well as students and professionals in allied professions such as social work, nursing, medicine and teaching.

Contributors: Courtland Lee; Roy Moodley; Gill Tuckwell; Val Watson