Here's a 2011 capture of an article mentioned earlier in this thread, the content is no longer available there except through the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110101144858/http://guidancechannel.com/default.aspx?M=a&index=1324&cat=50AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. TERRY TAFOYA ON MULTICULTURAL COUNSELING
By Jennifer Brady for The Guidance Channel
The Guidance Channel: Before we can begin to talk about multicultural counseling issues, we need to establish what culture is. How would you define it?
Dr. Tafoya: Culture shapes how we perceive our world. In other words, our culture teaches us to put our eyes in certain places. This is particularly interesting in terms of working cross-culturally. For example, in the dominant culture in the US, people are taught to not pay attention to the background -- they are taught to pay attention to the foreground. Wherein a number of non-western cultures, African, Native American, and Asian, what goes on in the background is often just as important as what goes on in the foreground. To put it in another way, the North American dominant culture teaches you to pay attention to black ink on paper, where other cultures will also teach you to look at the page itself in terms of what is not there. So, culture is the way you learn to perceive the world around you.
GC: According to Paul Pederson, culture gives us a framework of assumptions for comprehending our world. How do those assumptions influence our behavior?
Dr. Tafoya: It teaches you to pay attention in specific ways. A researcher named Hall noted that some cultures are "high context," while others are considered "low context." In a high context culture, such as an Asian culture, you know exactly what to focus on. If you grow up in a low context culture, such as American culture, one behavior may have a multitude of meanings. In other words, in Japanese culture, which is high context, the act of raising an eyebrow has a specific meaning. But in American culture, the behavior has many different meanings depending on the context.
In general American culture, we often focus on the intention of what we are doing. For example, I saw a friend of mine at a conference in Georgia and said to her, "It's so good to see you again Kathleen. How do you like your new job?" She said, "I really like it. I'm the head of my division which is mostly made up of military men. But right before coming to this conference I was upset because I called my staff together and said 'I'd like to see you have this work done by 5:00 today.' When 5:00 came around, nothing was done, and I was livid. When I called my staff back together and I asked 'How come you didn't do what I told you to do?' They said, 'We didn't think it was that important to you.'"
Her problem was that she had made the request in the standard North American female style. In this culture, women are usually socialized to ask for things indirectly rather than directly. For example, if a husband and wife are driving down the road and the wife turns to the husband and says, "Are you thirsty?" -- she really means that she is thirsty. But if a man is not calibrated to understand this, he will say, "No I am fine, thank you."
In the case of Kathleen asking the military men, she said, "I would really like to see you have this work done before 5:00 today." But she was working with military men who are used to direct commands, and they did not recognize what she said as being a direct command. They interpreted it as meaning, "If you get around to doing this work by 5:00, that would be good, but if you don't get around to it that would be good as well." This is a perfect example of how our culture teaches us to listen and pay attention in a specific way.
GC: What are common barriers caused by cultural differences between clients and counselors?
Dr. Tafoya: One is a sense of expectations. When I teach people to do counseling, I always emphasize that few clients have been trained to be professional clients. They often don't have a script for what they are supposed to do or say. They do have a script for interaction, but it is based on their cultural background.
For example, I am from a reservation that is geographically isolated in Northern New Mexico. If you are from our community and you go to a traditional healer, the healer will not ask you a lot of specific social, sexual, or medical history-based questions. The reason for that is that if you grow up in a small isolated community, the healer will already know the answers to those questions. The healer will know what your grandfather did. But that means that if you grew up in that environment, you are not used to being asked a lot of specific personal questions. If you then go into a counseling session and are asked intimate questions, your internalization will be, "Why are you asking me these invasive questions? What possible connection does this have with healing?" This is because in your experience, you simply aren't asked those kinds of questions.
Another barrier is that in traditionally-based cultures, people are raised to not ask for something directly if they can avoid doing so. This is because asking for something directly is potentially dangerous. If I ask you for something directly it means you can turn me down directly. If you turn me down directly, I lose face. But if I ask for something indirectly, and you turn me down, I don’t lose face because technically I didn't ask for it to begin with. Also, in traditional cultures, people are highly concerned with preserving their extended family's honor. So, if I lose face, I not only bring shame to myself, but I will also bring it to my entire family. Therefore, I will never ask for things directly, not only to protect myself, but to protect my extended family, as well.
For example, in our culture, let's say an elder wants to be taken somewhere and asks you to drive them. If you say no because you don't have gas or time off from work, then the elder will lose face because the elder asked for something directly and was turned down directly. This is why when my grandma Flora was alive on the reservation, if she wanted to go somewhere, she would sit on a suitcase. Except Grandma Flora wouldn't sit on a suitcase in the living room, she would sit on a suitcase in the front yard. Now if we could not take Grandma Flora somewhere because we didn't have gas or time off from work, we would go outside and offer her a cup of tea. We weren't in denial -- we knew she was sitting on a suitcase -- but we also knew how the rules of the game worked. While some of us were outside offering Grandma Flora a cup of tea, other members of our family were inside the house making phone calls to our extended family trying to find someone who could take her somewhere. Then twenty minutes after sitting on her suitcase, someone would pull up in the driveway and offer Grandma Flora a ride.
The point is that as long as everyone knows what the rules of the system are, and everyone follows the rules, there is no difficulty. The difficulty is when the rules of a culture or a family, in this case represented by Grandma Flora, come into conflict with a dominant culture's system of rules.
An example of this can be found in traditional cultures where people are taught to not say no directly because saying no directly can be considered rude and disrespectful. For that reason, if you are working with a client from a traditional culture and you say, "I would really like to see you in my office again on Wednesday at 10am," if the client says, "I will see what I can do, I will do the best that I can" -- the client has not agreed to meet with you. The client has indirectly told you no. If you don’t recognize this as an indirect way of saying no, when the appointment comes around and the client isn't there, you will often incorrectly assume the client is irresponsible or --
GC: --disrespectful?
Dr. Tafoya: Exactly. This comes back to one of first foundations of counseling in general American culture that involves asking what it is a client wants. We always ask our clients to tell us specifically what it is they want and why they have come into therapy. But the reality is that many people from other cultures are raised from childhood not to say exactly what it is they want because it's too dangerous. Counselors will often lose people from the first moment of therapy because they don't realize this.
GC: How does coming from a collective culture, rather than an individualistic culture -- like ours in the U.S. -- influence one's values and behaviors, and why do counselors need to be aware of those differences?
Dr. Tafoya: Therapists who are not used to working with collective cultures will tell clients to do "X." But in some cultures they don’t have the authority to do "X" without consulting with people who are higher in authority in their extended family. You might think about it in terms of the movie, "The Godfather." Clients may have to go to their cultural equivalent of the Godfather to get permission to do this specific thing. If a counselor doesn't realize that this is an important component of behavioral change, then when the counselor doesn't see the client trying to do something, the counselor will think that the client is being passive-aggressive or resistant. Yet in reality, the counselor should be talking to the people with the authority to make such decisions. In fact, it would be useful to bring them into the therapy session because they are a missing component.
A while back, I attended a workshop on Latino culture. The presenter asked for members of the audience to participate in a role play. He asked Latino volunteers to play different members of a family and a white male social worker to play a white male social worker. He explained that the father of that family was not at home when the social worker came to make a home visit. The presenter also arranged it so that only the daughter of the family was able to speak English and the social worker didn't speak any Spanish. During the role play, the social worker entered the home and started speaking to the daughter to convey the information to the rest of the family. Then the facilitator stopped the interaction and turned to the audience members and asked, "What went wrong here?" All of those from the Latino culture knew right away that another male should not enter the household if the male head of the family is not present, as it is considered insulting and invasive. The social worker should have asked in a respectful way, "Where is the head of the household? If he is not here, when will he return so I can make sure I come when he is here?"
GC: ...and that's not being sexist, it's being respectful towards the client's culture. Yet a lot of people would interpret that as sexist...
Dr. Tafoya: Right, but from the client's cultural perspective, it is being protective.
Another mistake of the social worker was using the daughter as an interpreter. Often children who are bilingual are put into the position of being gatekeepers of knowledge for the family. But that puts a tremendous pressure on the children in the sense that they will often have to say things that are unpleasant.
GC: Because it disrupts the traditional power structure?
Dr. Tafoya: Exactly. In traditional cultures, the ones who have the most knowledge and the most power are the oldest members of the family. Those with the least amount of power and knowledge are the youngest in the family. But in a bilingual situation, that's reversed.
GC: Can that add additional stress to an already problematic situation?
Dr. Tafoya: Absolutely! In some cases, the children will purposely withhold information because they don’t want to upset the adults. For example, in a situation like the role play, when the father comes home to discover a strange white man the house when he’s not there to protect his family, he'll likely say, "Get out of my house!" But it's unlikely that the child will translate that directly to the social worker because she doesn't want to be disrespectful -- as he is an adult.
GC: How can variations in speaking styles due to cultures lead to misunderstandings between clients and counselors?
Dr. Tafoya: We have spoken a lot about indirect versus direct ways of dealing with things, and that is certainly one of the key components.
Another one, in terms of speaking styles, is that in the western approach to counseling if a client speaks in a monotone, it's indicative of low affect -- which we associate with depression. So if you speak in a monotone, then I am probably going to explore the idea of depression in your life. But there are a number of non-western languages called tonal languages in which, if the pitch changes, the meaning of a word changes. For example, in a tonal language like Hopi, if I say a word in one pitch, it means flower. But, if I say the same word in a different pitch, it means intestine! It's not a subtle distinction -- the definition is radically different based on the tone. Therefore, someone whose native language is tonal, who then learns to speak English, will often lock on to a tone and maintain that in a speech pattern. A native speaker of English will think that the person is speaking in a monotone, but it has nothing to do with depression or low affect. It has to do with language interference.
Pause times are also an important consideration. In all languages we have what we call pause times which serve as a way of regulating taking turns in conversation. The idea is that I've stopped speaking for a certain period of time which signals to you that you can say something. But the duration of this silence varies from culture to culture.
For native speakers of English, the pause time has been clocked at .9 seconds long. Some languages have longer pause times than English and some are shorter. For example, Deborah Tannin's research suggests that in some Jewish communities, there is no pause time. In fact, in certain Jewish communities, when people are excited with what you are talking about, they will actually start talking at the same time you are. If you are not from that culture, you may misinterpret this behavior and assume that they are trying to take control of the conversation. But in reality, they are showing enthusiastic support. Tannin refers to this phenomenon as underlining.
Many other languages have a longer pause time than English. The best research we have for Native American languages is with the Athabaskan family of languages which includes Navaho and Apachi. Their pause time is clocked at 1.5 seconds duration. Oftentimes, this additional .6 seconds is just long enough to screw everything up in terms of counseling.
For example, I had a clinical director who came into our office and said, "I have just had the most passive-aggressive, hostile-resistant family of my entire professional career." Since we videotape our sessions, she played a few minutes of the videotape for me. It winds up that the clients were a Native American woman from Alaska and her 19-year-old son. When the woman was explaining the reason why she was coming into therapy, the clinical director asked the woman, "Well, how do you feel about that?" After a one-second pause, she asked, "Do you feel angry?" After another one-second pause she asked, "Are you frustrated?" Since she didn't think she was getting a response from the mother, she shifted to an intervention style and said, "Well, if I were in your situation I would feel angry." With one-second pauses between, she told the client, "I would feel confused," then "I would feel angry." When she still didn't get the response she was looking for, she turned to the son and began to ask him questions -- but still had no luck. Her conclusion was that this was a passive-aggressive, hostile-resistant family, but in reality, the poor family never had a chance to respond to her questions before she interrupted them with another!
This is significant, not only in terms of counseling, but in any interaction. Whether you are having a staff meeting or are in a classroom situation, if you think everybody has an equal opportunity to speak, you are lying to yourself. If you do not have a formal, structured way of taking turns, those people with shortest pause time will tend to dominate all conversation and those with the longest pause time will often never have a chance to say anything at all.
GC: What are the traits of a culturally-skilled counselor?
Dr. Tafoya: One trait is to be able to ask questions. There is no way that you can have all the answers across all cultures. It's just too complex in terms of dealing with situations. Cultural competence is being able to ask the right questions in an effective way. Questions such as, "What would happen if you do this?"
For example, in Native American culture, there is a constant flow of gift giving and this helps regulate the culture. When there has been a death in the family, the immediate family will start gathering things that belonged to the deceased to give them away. Things that the deceased touched on a regular basis such as towels, pots and pans, and glasses will all be given away after the funeral. In our family, because I come from a chief's family, we not only give away the pots and pans, but the living room furniture, as well. Thanks to this tradition, there is no way that we can be in denial that the death has taken place. Then over the next few days, neighbors and extended family will come and they will bring new pots, pans, glasses, and furniture. This is why if you come to visit us in our homes, nothing matches! It's because we have such little regard for physical possessions because we know that we are just going to give them away when there has been a death in the family.
If you are not from a Native family and you see us giving these things away, it looks like crazy behavior. This is because you don't know that a few days later these things are going to come back to us in a different form. It's just our way of expressing grief in a ritualistic way. A culturally skilled counselor may not know about this tradition, but will know to ask questions to understand our behavior.
Culturally skilled counselors also recognize how differences in culture can contribute to their clients' conflicts. For example, there was a family I worked with whose son was diagnosed with ADHD. The father was a Native American from an Alaskan community that was a matriarchal culture in which the women had the power in the family -- including the role of disciplinarians. The wife, on the other hand, was from the Deep South where the cultural attitude in terms of child discipline was, "Just wait until your father gets home!" Whenever the child misbehaved, the father felt it was the mother's role to discipline the child, and the mother's attitude, due to her cultural background, was that it was the father's responsibility.
GC: So the child was never disciplined?
Dr. Tafoya: No, because the parents would always get into fights with each over who was responsible. A culturally skilled counselor needs to recognize these dynamics.
You also need to realize and respect that different cultures deal with emotions in different ways. For example, in many Native American nations, you are not supposed to display anger directly because that is considered to be too dangerous. But most mental health professionals coming from a western counseling background who focus on anger management will try to teach people to deal with anger directly. However, for people from certain cultures this is a violation of something fundamental for them. Yet the counselor may view such clients as being hostile and resistant, when in reality, they are asking them to do something that is unthinkable in their culture.
It's not that Native people don't have anger, it's rather that, in many cases, they have been taught to deal with the anger in a ritualistic or ceremonial way. For example, according to the Blackfeet elders from Montana, if you become angry, you're taught to leave the situation, find a body of water that reflects back your face (such as a pond), and pound the water until you're exhausted. Then you wait until the water gives your face back to you in its calm state. This is a culturally appropriate way of being able to physically act out the anger in a way that doesn't injure anyone else.
Not only should counselors respect these traditions, they should also recognize when their clients are in therapy because they cannot address their problems in the traditional way. You will often find clients in therapy precisely for that reason -- that they might have had a way of solving the problems within the context of their community, but if they are removed from that context they often don't have a script available to them in terms of how to solve problems anymore.
GC: What can a counselor do for an individual in that kind of a position?
Dr. Tafoya: First, you need to find out what the original script is and if that is no longer viable, work together to explore culturally appropriate alternatives.
GC: What resources are available to counselors who wish to learn more about becoming a culturally skilled counselor?
Dr. Tafoya: If they want to contact me they can do so at tamanawit@aol.com.
ABOUT TERRY TAFOYA, PH.D.
Terry Tafoya is a Native American of the Taos Pueblo and Warm Springs Nations, a clinical psychologist and traditional storyteller. Dr. Tafoya is the executive director of Tamanawit, Unlted., an international, multicultural consulting company that specializes in bilingual education, cross-cultural competence and communication, gender and sexuality, grief and loss, Native American heritage, and spiritual healing. Dr. Tafoya is well versed in the arts of Native American and other indigenous healing rituals. He has directed the training efforts of a national program for AIDS awareness and prevention, and serves as a national consultant for the U.S. Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. His work in the areas of cultural diversity, educational methodology and philosophy, community healing, and cross-cultural communication is professionally recognized worldwide.
