What are common barriers caused by cultural differences between clients and counselors?
Dr. Tafoya: One is a sense of expectations. When I teach people to do counseling, I always emphasize that few clients have been trained to be professional clients. They often don’t have a script for what they are supposed to do or say. They do have a script for interaction, but it is based on their cultural background. For example, I am from a reservation that is geographically isolated in Northern New Mexico. If you are from our community and you go to a traditional healer, the healer will not ask you a lot of specific social, sexual, or medical history-based questions. The reason for that is that if you grow up in a small isolated community, the healer will already know the answers to those questions. The healer will know what your grandfather did. But that means that if you grew up in that environment, you are not used to being asked a lot of specific personal questions. If you then go into a counseling session and are asked intimate questions, your internalization will be, “Why are
