Cultural Resonance, Competence, and Relational Collaboration with Indigenous
Populations
Joseph E. Trimble, PhD
Center for Cross-Cultural Research
Department of Psychology
Western Washington University
Indigenous people tend to extend their family experiences, customs, traditions,
ways of knowing, and being to other groups. Relationships are at the core of
daily life and thus they matter in promoting positive relations with others.
Relationships matter more than individualism. Yet contemporary approaches to
counseling psychology place an emphasis on nurturing individual growth,
change, and development often ignoring the individual’s significant relationships
with others and community.
In striving to promote change the counselor often concentrates efforts on
fostering empathy through an exclusively individual focus. Empathy is predicated
on the shared understanding of emotions, thoughts, and actions of one person by
another. Most of the research on empathy has been predicated on a definition of
empathy as occurring when one person vicariously experiences the feelings,
perceptions, and thoughts of another.
In Western cultures, the study of empathy focuses exclusively on the
individual, whereas in traditional non-Western cultures, empathy more typically
involves an inclusive perspective focusing on the individual and significant others
in the societal context. This workshop explores the reframing of “empathy,”
based on an individualistic perspective, into “inclusive cultural relational
empathy,” based on a more relationship-centered perspective, as an alternative
interpretation of the empathic process. The workshop’s objectives are: 1).
Provide an overview of the significance and importance of inclusive cultural
empathy; 2). Reframe the counseling concept of “individualistic empathy” into
inclusive cultural empathy; and 3). Develop a more relationship-centered
alternative based on indigenous ways of knowing and healing. Within this
framework the task is to construct a complex and dynamic balance of tendencies
that a competent counselor or psychotherapist can manage without distorting the
truth in either an Asian or a Western context. The task of being culturally
inclusive is to acknowledge the value of a complex and dynamic balance of
tendencies that a competent counselor or psychotherapist can manage in order
to promote cultural competence.