Culturally Alert Counseling

Now, for the first time, counselors have access to a comprehensive set of DVDs on working with diverse clients. Culturally Alert Counseling: Demonstrations of Key Practices with African American, Asian, Latino/Latina, Conservative Religious, and Lesbian/Gay Clients is now available in one boxed set.

The videos are guided, explicit demonstrations of how to seamlessly infuse culture into counseling sessions. This is a first-of-a-kind product, one that will be needed as the counseling field embraces all clients from all groups in our society. Above all fields, counseling and psychotherapy require modeling of sessions and skills in realistic settings. Here, eight sessions are conducted with narrative introductions on the central issues for working with each group. Each session has been scripted to highlight the most common topics in each area. Subtitles teach viewers the skills being used, as well as the cultural issues that clients are exhibiting. The vignettes were created in consultation with national experts in each area. As an added bonus, the video Key Practices in Culturally Alert Counseling is included, which demonstrates over 20 overall culturally alert counseling skills that can be used immediately by counselors. Viewers can complement the viewings with readings from accompanying chapters in the book Culturally Alert Counseling: A Comprehensive Introduction.

Culturally Alert Counseling: Working with African American Clients:
Working with ethnically and racially diverse clients presents counselors with a unique set of opportunities and challenges. Understanding a client's worldview offers the opportunity to connect and build trust on a deeper level, but it also presents the counselor with a challenge to develop the right set of skills unique to their client(s). This DVD presents a carefully illustrated counseling session, which brings out many issues common for working with African American clients. A White male counselor works with an African American professional woman on her adjustment to a new workplace and the challenges of being in an ethnic minority. The session brings out five key topics that can be included in counseling with African Americans: spirituality and religion, family, communication, language, and discrimination. The counselor demonstrates four dimensions of culturally alert counseling that may be important, especially for members of other cultural groups who are working with many African American clients: building trust, acknowledging societal bias, including family and ancestors in the work, and advocating. By viewing the session in its entirety, students and clinicians will benefit from seeing first-hand how the counselor managed the session and used opportunities to deepen the therapeutic relationship.

Culturally Alert Counseling: Working with Asian Clients:
Working with ethnically and racially diverse clients presents a unique set of opportunities and challenges. Understanding a client's worldview offers the opportunity to connect and build trust on a deeper level, but it also presents the counselor with a challenge to develop the right set of skills unique to their client(s). In this carefully illustrated session, a White counselor helps an East Asian client to deal with family and relationship dilemmas. Such issues for many Asian-American clients as duty to one's family, conformity to group norms, obedience to parents and deference to authorities, maintenance of interpersonal harmony, which includes avoidance of confrontation and indirect expression of negative feelings or views, and educational and career achievement are highlighted. The counselor demonstrates the following skills that might be important in working with Asian clients: Taking a solution focused approach, showing interest in and knowledge of the client's culture, doing self-disclosure about previous successes, and including the place of the family in discussion of individual concerns. The session is tightly scripted to highlight key elements in culturally alert counseling with this group. By viewing the session in its entirety, students and clinicians will benefit from seeing first-hand how the counselor managed the session and used opportunities to deepen the therapeutic relationship.

Culturally Alert Counseling: Working with Conservative Religious Clients:
For many clients, religion is a central aspect of their lives. Counselors must know how to support and challenge clients in a helpful way by incorporating religion into counseling in a useful way. This breakthrough video illustrates key issues in the important, but often-ignored area of working with religious issues in counseling. In this session, a counselor helps a conservative Christian woman to incorporate her faith into the solution to her family and relationship dilemma. The DVD demonstrates many of the following issues in working with religious clients: showing respect for the client's faith, having some knowledge of that faith tradition, assessing the role and importance of the client's faith, establishing trust, and reinterpreting religious understandings. By viewing the session in its entirety, students and clinicians will benefit from seeing first-hand how the counselor managed the session and used opportunities to deepen the therapeutic relationship.

Culturally Alert Counseling: Working with Latino/Latina Clients:
Latino/Latina clients share many characteristics, while, of course, being diverse among themselves. In this video, a White female counselor works with a Latino/Latina couple with alertness to some issues common to traditional Latino/Latina culture. The counselor sensitively accounts for cultural dimensions such as familismo, respeto, simpatia, and defined gender roles in this session. The video illustrates such culturally alert counseling skills that might be important in working with Latino/Latina clients such as focusing on the present, taking a problem-solving orientation, including family in the process, acknowledging the family hierarchy, and adapting language. The session uses graphics and narrative voiceover to teach counselors to be effective with Latino/Latina clients. By viewing the session in its entirety, students and clinicians will benefit from seeing first hand how the counselor managed the session and used opportunities to deepen the therapeutic relationship. By viewing the session in its entirety, students and clinicians will benefit from seeing first-hand how the counselor managed the session and used opportunities to deepen the therapeutic relationship.

Culturally Alert Counseling: Working with Lesbian and Gay Youth:
The importance of sensitive, proactive counseling work with members of sexual minorities cannot be overemphasized. Counselors must be prepared to work with both the unique and universal issues that lesbian and gay youth face. In these six highly illustrated sessions, counselors gently help clients to become themselves at two stages in the coming out process: coming out to self and coming out to others. The issues of those two stages are presented in graphics, followed by sessions that illustrate each issue. A must-see demonstration for all counselors. By viewing the session in its entirety, students and clinicians will benefit from seeing first-hand how the counselor managed the session and used opportunities to deepen the therapeutic relationship.

Culturally Alert Counseling: Key Practices in Culturally Alert Counseling
For the first time, over twenty key practices for incorporating culture into counseling work are illustrated in one place. The video is organized into the three important topics of culturally alert accessibility, assessment, and intervention. Counselors demonstrate each of the subskills in this highly illustrated, fast-paced video. Narrator voiceover, subtitles, and segments of sessions leave the viewer with a complete view of how to bring culture into the counseling room and beyond. Necessary viewing for ethical practice in the 21st century.