Examples Of Cultural Competence In Counseling

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Cultural Competency Guidelines In the American Counseling Association (ACA) Code of Ethics (2014) multiple “core professional values” are emphasized that are essential to becoming an ethical and competent helping professional (p. 3). Of these core values, cultural competency promotes respect for culturally diverse individuals and ensures the practice of a “multicultural approach in support of the worth, dignity, potential, and uniqueness of people within their social and cultural contexts” (ACA, 2014, p. 3). Cultural competency cannot be truly achieved by counselors without awareness and exploration of their own racial and cultural identify and how these may potentially influence the helping relationship as well as the counseling process (Sue …show more content…

Sue and Sue (2016) posited that White helping professionals may bring racism unintentionally into the helping relationship if they “do not have a sense of what their Whiteness means to them” and if they “often perceive themselves as moral, good, decent human beings and find it difficult to see themselves as racist” (p. 395). Through applying the racial identity development model, it became evident that I do not have a full understanding of my own racial identity as a White individual and that I am still in the stage of actively assessing my own racial identity. While I do have a significant amount of difficulty admitting to racism, I am aware that this is something that I will have to accept and acknowledge as I progress in my development as a culturally competent counselor. It will only be through further development of my own racial identity that I can truly achieve cultural competency and ensure that I am not bringing any bias into the helping relationship. After all, the Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development (AMCD) Multicultural Counseling Competencies (1996) emphasized that culturally competent counselors “are constantly seeking to understand themselves as racial and cultural beings and are actively seeking a nonracist identity” (p.

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