0.18 Cognitive perspectives on personality development  (Page 13/30)

Discussion Question: Kelly’s fixed-role therapy requires the client to write a script for how they want to live their life. He found that sometimes it was easier for his clients to act out the opposite of their typical behavior. Would you find it easier to make minor changes in your behavior, or easier to make dramatic changes?

Connections Across Cultures: Understanding Culture’s Effects on

Cognitive Style as a Prerequisite for Effective Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

An essential element of all cognitive therapies is the desire to identify and challenge a client’s underlying dysfunctional cognitions, whether they are mistaken beliefs, schemas, automatic thoughts, cognitive distortions, whatever the case may be. To do so, requires that the therapist knows when cognitions are dysfunctional, and to some extent, what would be a reasonable cognition in the client’s personal situation. While it may seem obvious that any psychologically healthy person, particularly a trained therapist, would be able to recognize the difference between functional and dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, this assumes that the therapist and the client come from similar environments. This may very well NOT be the case when the client and the therapist come from dramatically different cultures. Furthermore, as G. Morris Carstairs noted regarding psychiatric interviews (1961), it makes a significant difference whether it is the therapist or the client who is outside of their familiar culture. For example, when a psychologist conducts research in a foreign country, particularly in small towns or villages, local people may simply fear and avoid strangers.

Kelly discussed culture at length in The Psychology of Personal Constructs (Kelly, 1955a,b). Both the commonality corollary and the sociality corollary are directly influenced by our understanding of culture. We, and by “we” I mean to include therapists, tend to expect that people from similar cultures have experienced basically similar upbringings and environments. We also tend to believe that people from a given culture share their expectations regarding the behavior of others from that culture. Thus, in order for a therapist to gain access to the personal constructs of their client, it is important for the therapist to learn as much as possible about the client’s cultural heritage. Failure to do so may interfere with the therapist’s ability to understand some of the client’s disruptive anxieties about either therapy itself or their life in general. Indeed, Kelly shares an example in which a White therapist (whom Kelly was supervising) found it difficult to help a Black client, because the Black client was overly anxious about discussing racially charged feelings regarding interracial sexual relationships. Since the client had discussed sexual issues before, the White therapist did not readily recognize the discomfort with which the Black client addressed his attraction to White women (remember, this was in the 1950s!).