Cultural Self Awareness Essay

Living in the United States as one of the most divers’ countries in the world has made me to recognize the importance of increasing my cultural self-awareness. As Sammers-Flanagan, Sammer-Flanagan in the book, Clinical Interviewing (2014) stated: “The ability to understand how your own thoughts and feelings are influenced by your cultural heritage helps you understand how culture has influenced others. Hopefully, understanding other perspectives will help you avoid imposing your cultural values on your clients.”(p. 367). Increasing cultural knowledge and competence, developing counseling skills, conceptualizing individual and systematic case and recognizing my strengths and growth were the most important area that I have tried to improve them in the Clinical skills’ class. First, increasing my cultural knowledge and competence was one of the important approach of this class for me. Mostly, I am familiar with Asian culture, especially the Middle East and specifically my heritage culture, Persian culture. However none of my cohort is Iranian, I have never felt separated from them. It is the beauty of this country that although I am foreigner, other people are interested to my culture and they show their respect to it. I

Sharing my experience and getting feedback from my classmates helped me to recognize how my thoughts could affect other people and the most important part for me that I could hear how they think about my beliefs. Because of our instructor’s calmness, we all felt free to talk and share our beliefs with each other. Also, getting group support which in my opinion is one of the most powerful support of the world, has been very precious for me since the beginning of the program. My cohort encouraged me to share my opinion even though sometimes it was totally differ than their own. Respecting and freedom of speech were two other things that I have experienced in our discussion as