A Practice Beyond Cultural Humility

What a refreshing new look at culture and therapy! The model presented in this book is thoroughly relational and thus well-suited to the world of therapy. It's value-based and inspiring, it's field-tested with generations of students, and it's applicable to every clinical encounter within and across cultures. I'm grateful that this team decided to put decades of learning and experience into a book. William J. Doherty, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project, University of Minnesota, USA. He is co-author of Helping Couples on the Brink of Divorce: Discernment Counseling for Troubled Relationships. Reaching out across gaps of culture, language, and power, and having that reaching out welcomed, can be the hardest challenge a therapist faces. A Practice Beyond Cultural Humility answers that challenge with ORCA practices for moving openness, respect, curiosity, and accountability from platitudes to practices, from values to embodied acts, to create a safe space where mutual welcoming can occur. James L. Griffith, M.D., Professor and Chair, George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, USA. He is author of The Body Speaks: Therapeutic Dialogues for Mind-Body Problems and Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy. This timely book offers a welcome alternative to traditional content-oriented cultural competence training. The clinical applications of this novel process approach are wide-ranging, including ethnically diverse clients, body size and health, sexual or spiritual struggles. Practitioners, teachers and students in private practice, or in institutional and community settings, will change how they work with cultural diversity after reading this compassionate and practical book. Celia Jaes Falicov, Ph.D., Clinical Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA. She is author of Latino Families in Therapy, 2nd edition. What a great book! A Practice Beyond Cultural Humility brings together a diverse group of authors to explore how to integrate openness, respect, curiosity, and accountability into their work with clients. This will be a valuable resource for both clinicians and trainees for years to come. Joshua N. Hook, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of North Texas, USA. He is author of Cultural Humility: Engaging Diverse Identities in Therapy. To read this book is to go on a retreat with these authors. First, they invite us into their circle, sharing the values that guide and inform the ORCA-Stance. If you resonate with these values, as I did, and want to embody them in your work, then settle in, for help is here. The authors engage us with challenging, enlightening exercises. Once we are warmed up, the middle chapters show us myriad ways to therapeutically enact this Stance. We are then shown ways to teach the ORCA stance. In the therapy and teaching narratives, the authors allow us to see them stumble and learn, for humility and grace are the heart of this work. Finally, in the campfire time of this retreat, they tell us how they have tried to live ORCA in their personal and family lives. I leave this retreat refreshed, ready to revamp my fall psychotherapy course, equipped to think ORCA when I meet with people who are suffering, and mindful of ways to be a better grandmother. - Melissa Elliott, M.S.N., L.M.F.T, Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Virginia, USA. Family Therapist, Psychiatric Inpatient Unit; co-author of Encountering the Sacred: Talking with People in Therapy about their Spiritual Lives.