Dr. Paul B. Pedersen
No matter how highly skilled, well trained, or intelligent one is as a counselor, if the counselor is making wrong or culturally inappropriate assumptions, he/she will not be accurate in assessment, understanding, or interventions.
It is difficult to know the culture of others until and unless one has an awareness of one’s own culturally learned assumptions as they control one’s life. All behaviors are learned in a cultural context and displayed in a cultural context. It seems likely, the current trend toward increased multicultural awareness among counselors will become a “fourth force ” in the helping professions of the next decade with as profound an impact on counseling as the third force of humanism had on the prevailing psychodynamic and behavioral systems.