Counseling Immigrants

Please read “Counseling Model for Immigrants” in its entirety. It may be helpful to read this document several times before submitting your answers. Imagine that you have an immigrant client who comes from a collectivistic society (collectivism is associated with countries in Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and the Pacific Islands). Write a transcript of an imaginary session with this client (you can choose your client’s gender, name, country of origin, sexual orientation, age and any other cultural factors that you may wish to include in your transcript). During the session, the client’s main problem should be related to his/her difficulty adapting to an individualistic society. For example, your client may be experiencing distress after immigrating to the U.S. because he/she finds difficult or impossible to develop the type of relationships he/she had with others in his/her home country. In order to help your client, you should help him/her create a “Bicultural Identity Table” by asking him/her about the positive and the negative aspects of living in a collectivistic society and by asking him/her about the positive and the negative aspects of living in an individual society.  You should use the information provided in the document “Counseling Model for Immigrants” to understand the immigration experience from an existential perspective and to understand how to apply the dialectical perspective to the development of a bicultural identity. It should be clear in your transcript that you understood how to use the integrative model proposed in the document. Your transcript should have between 2 and 4 pages, single spaced, and look like a transcript verbatim: 

Counselor: blah, blah, blah

Client: blah, blah, blah. 

Please read the information below to understand the meaning of “collectivism” and “individualism”:

A collectivist culture is one in which people tend to view themselves as members of groups (families, work units, tribes, nations), and usually consider the needs of the group to be more important than the needs of individuals. Individualistic societies such as the U.S. and Australia are said to prioritize individual achievement, whereas collectivists are said to place more value on group harmony. In individualistic societies, when there is a conflict between an individual's rights and the collective's rights, there is a tendency to favor the individual over the collective. In collectivistic societies, when there is a conflict between an individual's rights and the collective's rights, there is a tendency to favor the collective over the individual. For example, a man from a collectivistic society would be more likely than one from an individualistic society to give up his own dreams in order to fulfill the needs of his family or community (e.g. deciding to stay in his hometown supporting his family rather than going to an Ivy league school).