The Process of Cross-Cultural Therapy between White Therapists and Clients of African-Caribbean Descent

Abstract

This study explores clients' and therapists' experiences of cross-cultural psychological therapy with specific reference to issues of race and culture. Three British African-Caribbean psychotherapy clients and their white British therapists took part in one-to-one interviews. A thematic analysis was conducted on their interview transcripts; this drew on social constructionist principles to focus on patterns of meaning in the participants' accounts. Four themes are presented in this article. Each theme relates to the perceived impact of “visible racial difference” on the therapeutic process. The therapists described the demands of having to be vigilant about political incorrectness and balanced this against their positive identification with the client group. The clients described an unspoken rule (“no race talk in therapy”) and outlined their strategies for distancing their “racial” selves from the therapy in order to make sense of their therapeutic experiences. We argue that dominant cultural discourses minimise or prevent race and culture conversations from taking place in therapy. While the strategies used by participants seemed to enable them to maintain a positive therapeutic relationship and attend to the tasks of therapy, the absence of open discussion excluded fundamental aspects of the client's identity from the therapeutic milieu.

Keywords:

• African Caribbean clients
• culture
• ethnicity
• psychotherapy
• psychotherapy process
• race
• white therapists

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the clients and therapist that took part in this study for sharing their intimate moments of therapy with such courage and integrity. In addition, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also wish to thank Michael Larkin for the generosity of his time in offering us useful assistance regarding this article in terms of helping with clarification of its methodological focus and the exposition of the findings. He has also entered into the spirit of the content of the sensitive issues discussed and pointed us towards further relevant research.