What Happens when Racial and Cultural Differences Arise during Therapy?

In this article, we explore how racial and cultural differences come into play between a therapist and client in a counseling session, and how those differences are bridged. Samaritan’s African American therapists, Jennifer Edmonds, Lynda Bradley, and Kesha Brake, share their insights and experiences on this topic.

#blackhistorymonth #blacktherapists #racialstereotypes

What experiences have you had where race and cultural differences played a role in counseling a client?

Jennifer: I have counseled numerous individuals of many different races and ethnicities. For the most part, clients are respectful of racial and cultural differences and have not shown that my race was a barrier. However, I have done therapy with individuals who were known to have racial prejudices. One example: I had a client who, in the past, had brutally assaulted individuals of non-Caucasian race, but I treated the therapeutic experience as a place to identify and address prejudice in overcoming racial stereotypes. I pride myself on creating an emotionally safe place for these conversations. As a seasoned therapist, I can confidently approach these difficult, uncomfortable conversations, allowing the client to move past their preconceived belief systems. I have also been recommended to clients seeking an African American therapist because of the comfort of sharing a common cultural background and race.

Lynda: Being an African American woman has provided opportunities throughout my life to educate individuals from predominate US culture through my life experiences. Many of these opportunities created understanding that resulted in better relationships.

Culture influences how people express emotions, describe symptoms, and understand mental health. Being culturally aware helps professionals communicate effectively, minimizing misunderstandings. Clients are more likely to open up and feel understood when their cultural values, beliefs, and practices are acknowledged and respected. This builds a strong therapeutic alliance.

Effective treatment often requires tailoring interventions to align with a client's cultural background. A culturally aware professional can incorporate culturally appropriate strategies and resources.

Kesha: Throughout my career, racial and cultural differences have played a major role with clients. As an African American and a woman, I am able to connect with others not only when it comes to my race but also feeling marginalized. Being an African American woman helps me to have a deeper connection with my clients because it helps me to, ‘see the other side,’ of certain societal norms. However, every person and his or her experiences are different even if they appear similar. For example, I would have a higher chance of sharing a similar perspective or experience with a client who is also an African American woman. However, there could and/or would be differences in our shared experiences.

What insights do you have on bridging racial and cultural differences?

Jennifer: Some African American clients feel that a Caucasian therapist who has had training in cultural diversity and/or multi-cultural therapy still may not have the level of understanding that an African American therapist has, as they do not have the same history or have not faced the same personal challenges. I believe this has a lot to do with our race being leery of the counseling profession and the world of medicine as a whole. Medical professionals have taken advantage of and used black people throughout our history.

I try to bring insight by modeling an open-mindedness to these discussions, a sensitivity to their perspective, and a willingness to clarify and break through these prejudices together.  We all have biases and prejudices.  It is our professional responsibility to question where they originate and address them accordingly for the betterment of our clients.

Lynda: Listen, ask questions, and don’t evaluate someone else’s experiences by comparing them to yours.

Kesha: I often remind myself not to jump to conclusions or assume I know a client's story or experience. It is important to have this understanding with all clients. However, when I am able to connect to a client by race or cultural difference, I have to be more mindful to take a step back and listen and see their world from their experience.

Resolve to Have a Healthier Mind and Spirit for 2025

#newyearsresolutions #holistichealth #mentalhealth #spiritualhealth #mindbodyspirit

What are the most common New Year’s resolutions? To lose weight? Get more fit? Drink less? Something else that has to do with our bodies? Most people don’t commit to being healthier mentally and spiritually. Why? Because committing to a healthier mind and spirit is SO BIG that we don’t know where to start. Still, in the spirit of resolutions I thought I’d share some tips that can help you have a healthier mind and spirt throughout 2025:

1) Become More Balanced: During Thanksgiving, my uncle asked me, “What are you doing to make sure you age well?” I muttered something about exercise. He responded, “All that exercise is good, but you need to do yoga or something like it to strengthen your balance.”

He's right in more ways than one. Stretching ourselves and building better physical balance is important, but building better emotional, mental, and spiritual balance is even more important. Living in an out-of-balance culture, how do we do balance our lives? The following are practices that can bring more balance to your life:

• Get the right amount of sleep—this usually means choosing an earlier bedtime, even if you feel tired and want more time to yourself… go to bed anyway. When we’ve slept well, we feel less burned out and better able to deal with life. Apps like the “Rise” app, can help, but the key is getting more and better sleep. It’s amazing how much it helps.

• Eat a better, more balanced diet—this is hard to do in a culture of fast, processed food, but the more balanced and healthier our diet is, the better we feel and can deal with life. A good app for this is the Noom app, which is less a diet and more a cognitive behavioral approach to healthy eating. 

• Get a healthy amount of exercise—getting a healthy amount of exercise doesn’t mean becoming incredibly fit. It means boosting our health through walking at a relatively high pace several days a week and doing some sort of resistance training—bands, chair exercises, or weightlifting. Having healthier bodies help us deal with life better.

• Moderate social media—spending inordinate amounts of time in front of screens is draining. Social media is all designed with algorithms that hook into our addictive centers. They’re powerful much in the way nicotine is: they addict us while leading us to think, “I can quit if I want to… I just don’t want to.” There are other options for boredom—puzzles (I like jigsaws, my wife likes crosswords), reading, chatting with others, and more. Look for substitute activities that are healthier and less addictive.

2) Look for What’s Good: To me, this is foundational to becoming healthier in all facets of life. We live in critical and cynical times about everything: government, church, the Steelers, the Penguins, the police, schools, medicine, science, facts, the world, and pretty much everything else in life. All that cynicism and skepticism, all that looking for what’s wrong, has a deeply unhealthy impact on our lives. It’s like breathing in toxic air all day long that creeps into every capillary of our system.

For a long time, I’ve lived by a more positive mantra: “Look for what’s good, not what’s bad. Look for what’s right, not what’s wrong. Focus on what’s possible not what’s impossible. Embrace what gives life, not what takes it away.” How we look at the world is a choice—a choice that has health impact. You know this already. Think of a time when you were caught in a conversation with someone cynical and couldn’t escape. How did that person impact you? Now think of a conversation you had with someone positive and energetic. How did that person impact you? Looking for what’s good doesn’t mean ignoring reality. It means engaging reality in a way that makes it better.

3) Seek Purpose and Meaning: There’s been a tremendous amount of research on the importance of having a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Purpose is the sense that I am alive for this reason. Meaning is felt when we engage in activities that express that purpose. Seeking purpose and meaning helps us live with intention, especially when engaging in activities and actions that make life better for others.

Looking back on my life and those that I’ve known and worked with, the healthiest ones have always been those who sought purpose and meaning. They’ve pursued a life that’s larger than just them. They look for ways to do good for others. Whatever careers they have—investor, teacher, police officer, retail clerk, janitor, and more—they see their lives as unique service to others and the world. T

4) Deal with Anxiety: Most people are much more anxious than they realize, and both general and specific anxiety can accumulate. Pay more attention to your body and mind and ask if you have anxiety. If you do, resolve to deal with it because anxiety can accumulate and lead to worsening relational and physical problems. There are apps to help, practices that help, organizations that help, and of course our therapists are trained to help people deal with anxiety.

5) Create More Time for Quiet: It’s amazing how healing and healthy quiet can be. Whether that’s the quiet of a walk, turning off music/talk in a car, sitting on a back porch, hiking in woods, or more, quiet restores us. We live in a noisy culture, and most of us are uncomfortable with quiet because of the combination of boredom and running thoughts. Still, finding time for quiet brings balance and health to our lives.

6) Pray: Prayer is more than just psychological centering. It connects us with the transcendent, with the “more than,” with God. Praying brings balance to our lives by connecting us with a spiritual realm that wants what’s best for our lives. So, making time for regular prayer and listening is incredibly healing and balancing.

I hope these ideas can help you resolve to live a better 2025! We’re here to help.

Blessings,

The Rev. N. Graham Standish, PhD, MSW, MDiv, MA

Executive Director, Samaritan Counseling, Guidance, Consulting

Learning as Mental Health

#mentalhealth #learninglife #cbt #narrativetherapy #howtolive

With so much access to self-help books, videos, podcasts, TikToks, posts, and more, why doesn’t it seem like our collective mental health is getting better? With so many resources promising to help us become healthier in mind and spirit, why does it seem as though our struggles have become more pervasive? Is it because we still haven’t learned to learn?

I realized long ago that the key to living a healthier life—whether mentally, physically, relationally, or spiritually—requires cultivating a learning life. We live in an “educated” culture, but not necessarily a “learning life” one. What’s the difference?

Fostering a learning life means embracing growth that leads to a healthier, happier life. Being educated means having mastered ideas and concepts related to particular fields of interest. Just because we’re educated doesn’t mean we know how to live life in the healthiest way. I’m not suggesting that education and fostering a learning life are mutually exclusive because they do overlap. The difference, though, is that fostering a learning life is dedicated to “how I am to live,” while being educated is dedicated more to “how can I engage in this vocation or master this field of study.”

Counseling is dedicated to helping people learn how to live. Good therapists help us learn about our lives. They help us learn about our past and its sometimes-unhealthy influence on our present. They help us learn to identify distorted thinking and the causes of impulsive behaviors, while also learning new insights and skills that improve our lives. They help us learn new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us that help us adopt healthier perspectives. They help us learn new ways of interacting with others that promotes healthier relationships.

Therapists become expert in this because they themselves have dedicated their lives to learning how to live. Most therapists have embraced a life of learning, often as a reaction to their own personal struggles. They have learned how to live, and now dedicate their lives to helping others learn to live.

At their core all forms of therapy help us learn. For instance, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a foundational form of therapy all therapists are trained in, helps us learn about the connection between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It helps us identify distorted thinking in response to triggers, and how to nurture different ways of thinking. CBT helps us explore how our distorted thinking can give rise to self-destructive emotions, which lead to dysfunctional behaviors, which then leads to persistently painful consequences. By learning how triggers spark distorted thoughts, how those thoughts provoke troubling emotions, how those emotions lead to problematic behaviors, and how those behaviors give rise to negative consequences, CBT therapists help us learn to change unhealthy patterns into healthier ones.

Another form of therapy, Narrative Therapy, recognizes the positive and negative power of the beliefs and perspectives we have about ourselves and others. It recognizes that we rarely view ourselves and others in an objective way, but instead follow an interpretation, a “narrative” or story, about ourselves and others that trap us in unhealthy loops. For example, if we think everyone is against us, we then interpret most interactions in a negative way. Narrative Therapy helps us to explore our “narratives” about ourselves and others and learn how to develop new narratives that can lead us to healthier living.

Whatever the form of therapy is, it is an attempt to help people learn new perspectives, skills, ways of responding, ways of living, and more. Still, they all require one essential thing: clients who want to learn. Many therapists recognize that overcoming mental health issues requires adopting a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. That means openly embracing growth rather than holding onto a way of thinking that mainly seeks to insulate us from change. In essence, therapists slowly, patiently help us to overcome our resistance to growing by helping us to learn.   

As you’ll see in the rest of this newsletter, learning is the key to healthy living, and we are passionate about helping people learn how to live.

Blessings,

The Rev. N. Graham Standish, PhD, MSW, MDiv, MA