Learning about attributes and traits of groups can be both illuminating. It can help you have more understanding and insight into potential but unseen influences on interactions or outcomes. I can help you have a better understanding of your own assumptions and views. It can provide you with new ways of thinking about health and healing. It can help you refine approaches to be more helpful when working with individuals. It can bring deeper understanding of how systems and institutions can oppress individuals often without acknowledging or recognizing this.

This learning can also be dangerous. It can the increase the likelihood that you will make inaccurate, incomplete, or unhelpful assumptions about individuals and their families. For this reason, even though the principles of “cultural competence” are sound, many people avoid using the term because it implies people become experts in the cultures of others. Every person is an expert on themselves only. They cannot speak for others. They do not represent others. They have a unique story that can only be understood only partially. To understand these stories requires careful and open listening and partnered exploration. Cultural learning is not short-hand to understanding any individual human being.

Learning about group culture can create a belief that people are primarily one thing or another. It can become easy to think that people have certain beliefs, views, or expectations based on their attributes. This approach is an extension of stereotyping. It also ignores the concepts of affiliation and intersectionality. Affiliation is the strength of a conscious connection to cultural attributes and identity. This can include things like a race, ethnicity, gender, age, labeled physical or cognitive differences, or sexual orientation. Intersectionality is the impact of multiple inequities (such as being African-American, female, and physically disabled). This can be much greater together than the total of impact of these inequities if looked at separately. People who experience mental health conditions experience marginalization in our communities. This marginalization can be exponentially enhanced when the condition intersects with other forms of oppression or stigmatization.

Remember, person and family-centered practices require we get to know people uniquely. This requires a certain type of openness. It requires a skilled ability to learn from others about what matters to them most and why. It has to include the context of all their lived experiences. It also includes the context of the communities they live in and the institutions they interact with.

Professionals need ongoing training in diversity and equity issues to be able to effectively work within this context. Training that does not require the practitioner to reflect on their own cultural beliefs and those of the institutions they work for are unlikely to be useful in the long run. It’s important not to believe that that common views of a community or culture are the “correct” views by which everything else will be judged. This can lead to privilege for some groups and oppression for others. It’s important to change the structures in these systems that perpetuate these inequities.

Francesco is a 16 year old boy from a Hispanic family who immigrated from a rural part of Honduras to the Twin Cities Metro 12 years ago. Francesco has been suicidal more than once. He also frequently cuts himself. He blurts out in a session with a therapist at his school that he feels he is not really a boy. The counselor explores this with him and tells him he is not alone. He says: “What does it matter my family will never accept this.” The counselor says: “They love you. They will come around.” Francesco says: “They will literally kill me. This is not going to be acceptable.” The counselor sighs and says: “Francesco, I know drama is part of transgender identify, but that is a little overly dramatic don’t you think?”

What implications do you see for this as far as person and family-centered practice? How does it affect the interaction today? How does it affect each person’s ability to work with professionals in the future or to receive quality person and family-centered services? What could be done differently from your view that might work better, if anything?