Exploring power in multicultural counselling encounters

Abstract

Power is a central dynamic in multicultural encounters. Yet many people, especially counsellors, are reluctant to discuss their experiences with power and what it means to them. As a result, power remains an often unspoken, disturbing issue in multicultural counselling and counsellor education. This article addresses this silence by: a) clarifying the relationship between power and cultural racism; b) discussing what counsellors need to know about power; c) presenting an experiential "powerlab" that counsellor educators and trainers may use to explore various aspects of power; and d) suggesting a processing format, issues and supportive resources for debriefing this exercise.

Multicultural Counselor Training Experiences: Training Effects and Perceptions of Training Among a Sample of Predominately Hispanic Students

“…Students also reported benefiting from participatory activities that allowed them to experience, within a controlled context, situations of power/powerlessness (Ramsey, 1997), culture clash (Thiagarakan & Thiagarajan, 2006), and privilege (Foss, 2002). The predominately Hispanic sample of students in our study appeared to perceive assignments that promoted introspection and participatory activities as most beneficial, whereas students from the predominately White sample in M. J.…”

A Feminist Multicultural Perspective on Supervision

“…Clearly, a multicultural perspective needs to inform any thorough analysis of situated power. Only recently have discussions of racially or culturally based power imbalances begun to appear in the literature on multicultural counseling, supervision, and training (Hansen & Gama, 1996;Ramsey, 1997). These discussions broaden and deepen the discourse on the examination of cultural oppression that influences not only the psychotherapy relationship but also the training and supervision of counselors and psychotherapists.…”