Negotiating cultural relevance from within therapy conversations

Abstract

Culturally-laden understandings permeate all social interactions, including therapy conversations, and have been referred to as cultural background(s) providing context to the task-at-hand. Historically, cultural backgrounds have been conceptualized as separated from the individual, in pictorial or essentialized ways. Therapists training for multicultural competence tend to focus solely on using a-priori knowledge of clients’ cultural background as a guide to understand clients’ identities. In this article, we show how therapists can explore, understand, and recognize cultural backgrounds from within therapy conversations. We contend that cultural backgrounds are performed or made evident by clients through their use of language, and are evolving dynamic, and socio-historically situated. We provide examples of a session between a therapist, a mother and her two daughters, showing how they coordinate their talking, turn-by-turn, showing what is relevant to them in regards to aspects/structures of their cultural backgrounds that help them deal with the task-at-hand.