The Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC), produced by a board consisting of Manivong J. Ratts, Anneliese A. Singh, Sylvia Nassar-McMillan, S. Kent Butler, and Julian Rafferty McCullough in 2015, seek to manage these problems.
Counselors and clients both get to the therapeutic relationship a constellation of identities, select and marginalized statuses, and cultural values, beliefs, and preferences to which counselors need to attend. Furthermore, clients increasingly bring to counseling problems of injustice that lead to unhealthy risk factors.
Multicultural competence
Sometimes, our large world can feel shorter than it seems. You may perform with co-workers every day who live thousands of miles out from you. You might have studied abroad, moved to a new country for a job, or have friends from all various civilizations in your own city. We all create relationships and foster connections with people from various cultures.
It’s more essential than ever that we understand cultures separate from our own. Part of that understanding calls on us to deepen and make relationships with cultural variety in mind. By understanding what it means to be culturally talented, we can ensure we’re inclusively fostering a sense of belonging in our relationships.
What are Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies or cultural competence?
According to the American Sociological Association, we understand culture as the languages, customs, ideas, rules, arts, knowledge, and collective essences and memories developed by partners of all social groups that create their social environments meaningfully. Culture is made up of all the features that create your personality. In nature, it’s the way we see and do things.
Competence is described as the capacity to do something well. For us to be competent in anything, we want to demonstrate how capable and efficient we are in achieving a specific job or task.
Multicultural competence — or artistic competence — is your capacity to understand, respect, and interact with people who specify with cultures and/or faith systems separate from your own. This Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies guides to improved and effective contact between people that can maintain relationships. After all, relationships are a strong piece of what causes us human.
Based on this definition, it sounds like useful communication skills would suffice. However, cultural competence needs more than strong communication skills.
Understanding the culture wheel
One way to see and look at culture is via something called the culture wheel. As we know, many factors create who we are to help shape our manners and daily actions. The cultural revolution can be a helpful graphic and exercise to understand other individuals’ impacts on us. It can also assist us with who we are. To be culturally brilliant, we require to appreciate and understand people of other cultures.
The culture wheel consists of different parts of cultural diversity that help make up who we are. Here are some samples of some demographics can create your own culture and worldview. Finally, this can help explain our cultural identities.
- Ethnicity or ethnic groups
- Gender
- Race
- Sexual orientation
- Personality
- Religion
Here is an activity you can try utilizing the culture revolution:
- Draw a process in the center and put your name inside it.
- Open three circles from that circle and prefer one item from each layer of the cultural revolution to write in each circle. There is no right or wrong preference, only select the one that resounds with you the most.
- Reflect on how you define your own culture based on those selections and document your insights.
To improve your experience, get out to your coach and share your knowledge to heighten your self-awareness of your own civilization.
Strategies to build multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies competence
Cultivating significant relationships is important to the human experience. This requires intentional actions to provide you are building Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies. However, of where you are in your journey to reach cultural competence, you can use these four strategies to help grow your skills.
Understand your own culture
Many of us can identify with numerous cultural experiences and yet we may not be aware of them. Accepting the time to reconnect with who you are and what shaped your own knowledge can support how you offer up to others.
Show interest in learning and be curious
Showing interest in others’ cultures is important for being culturally intelligent. Understanding is not just about reading books and peeking up information online. Learning is about engaging in new experiences. To learn, you need to give yourself permission to make Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies awareness and competency. It’s about allowing yourself to unlearn what you once learned to permit new learning to connect with you, your body, and your mind.
Have a positive attitude toward other cultures
The way you receive and treat others matters. This speaks to the readiness to receive others who have different cultural backgrounds than you do. It’s about visiting others as naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. People of diverse backgrounds have their way of expressing themselves or others. It’s essential that in your relations, you express an open and welcoming attitude towards them without decision.
Keeping a Code of Ethics
The ACA Code of Ethics outlines mixed ethical procedures for counselors and offers guidelines for driving ethical dilemmas in counseling.1 If you find yourself faced with a delicate situation in your work as a counselor, these guidelines can help you consider how to properly serve your clients and your profession.
The Counseling Relationship
Counselors must keep the welfare of the client in mind and set limits that make the client-counselor relationship clear. This means that clients require to understand the counseling method and have set counseling goals. Records should be safeguarded and recorded in a correct and timely manner. Professional boundaries should always be kept, and a romantic or sexual relationship should never happen between counselors and clients. Session payments should be reasonable for the client, and they should be made evident from the start.
Confidentiality and Privacy
Counselors want to safeguard the personal rights and privacy of their customers. Trust is the base of the counseling relationship, and counselors are dedicated to having reliable collaboration. Customers should be made conscious if information about them has to be shared with others above the counseling relationship, and only basic information should ever be informed to outside parties. Counselors are needed to inform clients of manners that show the possibility of self-harm or harm to others. Lastly, if sessions are to be recorded or kept, counselors must first get the permission of their clients.
Professional Responsibility
All counseling methods and treatments should be declined in research and accepted practice. The ACA also encourages counselors to show pro bono work as a part of their professional activity. In order to stay beside the practice, counselors must understand the need for continued education and support awareness of changing practices and techniques in the field.
Relationships With Other Professionals
How professional counselors interact with their equivalents will affect what services their clients have access to. Counselors must desire to provide clients with the widest clinical and support service available, which means that they should have a basic knowledge of which extra services are available locally. All positive working connections with colleagues should be grounded in respect, even if proficient systems differ.
Facing an Ethical Dilemma
When challenges arise, the way forward may not directly be clear. Start by dividing facts from inferences, bias, hypotheses, or suspicions. Decide if the concern is a moral, professional, clinical, or legal issue (or a combination). Review the professional literature, mainly the ACA Code of Ethics, to see if guidelines for addressing the problem are delivered there. Consult with other experienced counselors to get input on improving the situation. Online resources are also available for getting state and national professional associations.
Remember, your action or inaction in any situation applying ethics will affect all groups applied, so let the foundational principles of counseling guide your decisions:
- Autonomy: Counselors should inspire and help customers to carry control of the direction of their own lives wherever possible
- Nonmaleficence: Counselors’ desired action or inactivity should never intentionally cause harm
- Beneficence: Mental health and well-being should be a focus for the good of the individual and for society more largely
- Justice: Counselors should feast all people relatively and equitably
- Fidelity: Counselors should keep all personal and professional duties, promises, and responsibilities
To help decide if your preferred course of action is the right one, test it according to the directions of justice, publicity, and universality, as removed in the “Practitioner’s Guide to Ethical Decision Making” from the ACA.2 First, would you treat other people in the same issue the same way? Secondly, would you choose your behavior in deciding this situation reported to the press? And finally, would you suggest this solution to another counselor facing an equal ethical dilemma? When you’ve decided on a strategy, be sure and set an appointed time to follow up and consider whether your actions gained their desired effects.
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Conclusion
In an increasingly varied world, Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies and social justice competencies have become essential to effective counseling. Counselors who embrace these competencies can better understand, connect with, and support clients from all walks of life, promoting an environment of inclusivity and license.
