Cultural Difference And The Therapeutic Alliance Summary

Summary The article, “Cultural difference and the therapeutic alliance: An evidence- based analysis by Melba J. T. Vasquez seeks to address the issue of unintentional biases in psychotherapy and how the therapeutic alliance, a significant factor in a positive therapeutic outcome, can be either positively or negatively affected by a therapist's decision to overcome such biases. Interference with the therapeutic alliance can cause ethnic minority individuals to cease attending therapy.

It is evident from the abstract that this is not a simple issue, however, the author effectively addresses and explains several significant components of this problem. For instance he begins by giving an explanation as to what psychotherapy is, what it entails and also its effectiveness. He then highlights the concern that ethnic minorities unfortunately underutilize psychotherapy services and those who do utilize it have a higher rate of dropping out. A significant factor contributing to high drop out rates is that there is an unfortunate existence of unintentional biases which can extend to the process of psychotherapy. When unintentional biases are apart of

According to Orlinsky, Ronnestad and Willutzki (as cited in Vasquez, 2007) the therapeutic alliance is defined as the quality of involvement between a therapist and their client and Warner and Greenberg (as cited in Vasquez, 2007) also describe this alliance as being one of the most important factors in the effectiveness of therapy. The author then goes on to discuss the issues that may interfere with the therapeutic alliance of clients who are ethnically different from their counsellor. He states that this inexperience may be due to cultural misunderstandings and miscommunication between counsellor and client. While such issues exist, Vasquez (2007) offers many suggestions to help counsellor prevent experiencing these