Spirituality and Multicultural Counseling
Spirituality and Multicultural Counseling
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Spirituality and Multicultural Counseling
The text demonstrates that spirituality has been integrated into the multicultural counseling theory today and effectively impacts the clients. Counseling theory indicates that spirituality greatly impacts the client since it is a source of critical strength to the clients and serves as a bedrock that gives meaning to life, thus instrumental in promoting recovery and well-being. I agree with the text that probing client spirituality is significant. Since it will help create cultural competence and humility in counseling practice and embed necessary emotions regarding the patient’s race, culture, gender, and other social identity diversities that are openly discussed. Therefore, integrating spirituality in counseling help in dealing with the whole client in all dimensions and help the client create inner balance and incorporate all other dimensions of self (Sue et al., 2022).
Identifying the client’s spirituality is significant at the beginning of the counseling process or practice. It gives clients confidence and willingness to share personal issues that have been bothering them. However, to solicit the client’s spiritual information or identity, I would conduct a spiritual assessment or screening of the client by utilizing a screening tool known as FICA, as described by (Ahmad et al., 2018). This screening tool would help me to identify the client’s faith tradition, how the client’s faith is important to them, be aware of their church and community of faith, and be knowledgeable on how clients would like me to address issues affecting their health (Delgado-Guay & Harding, 2021).
As a professional counselor, I would be comfortable drawing from a client’s spirituality, even if the client’s beliefs are inconsistent with my Christian belief. As indicated by multicultural counseling theory application of cultural diversity is necessary for effective counseling practice. Because failure to draw from the client’s spiritual identity will not be able to openly discuss issues based on social identities like cultural beliefs, which will lead to poor results in the counseling process (Ridley et al., 2021).
References
Ahmad, M., Noor, N. M., & Amat, S. (2018). How and why Muslim counsellors integrate spiritual and religious elements implicitly into counselling practices in Malaysia: A qualitative exploration. Global Journal of Guidance and Counseling in Schools: Current Perspectives, 8(1), 28-37.
Delgado-Guay, M. O., & Harding, A. (2021). Spiritual care. In Textbook of Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care (pp. 735-742). CRC Press.
Ridley, C. R., Sahu, A., Console, K., Surya, S., Tran, V., Xie, S., & Yin, C. (2021). The process model of multicultural counseling competence. The Counseling Psychologist, 49(4), 534-567.
Sue, D. W., Sue, D., Neville, H. A., & Smith, L. (2022). Counseling the culturally diverse: Theory and practice. John Wiley & Sons.
