Diversity Counselling

Kou Kunishige

NZROK Friendship Society13th November 12014

Lady Goodfellow Chapel, University of Waikato

Diversity Counselling New Zealand

Charitable Trust, established in 2013

Our Slogan: Professional Counselling Service for Ethnic people, in your Language, with a counsellor who can understand your Culture

Currently DCNZ can provide counselling in English, Chinese, Japanese, Tamil, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Afrikaans, and Korean. We are recruiting more.

DCNZ DCNZ is encouraging each ethnic community to

bring up their own counsellor.

If an ethnic group is reasonably large, like Chinese, Indian or maybe Korean, they may be able to have their own counselling organisation. But if its population is not large, it is impossible for them to start a counselling room.

Then we are loosing an ethnic counsellor one by one, because they cannot find a work here.

DCNZ will play as portal for ethnic counselling and as a professional networking among ethnic counsellors.

Counselling/Therapy? The concept of counselling/therapy

comes from the western world. However, nowadays it has been practiced all over the world.

Counselling/therapy is considered as a very important and useful method to support/help/care people. Even people are suffering from depression, confusion, loss, grief, relationship matters, and so on, counselling could support such people.

What is it like? The most important part of

counselling/therapy is to have a conversation on what you feel, what you think, what causes you to suffer, what hope you hold, who would help you and so on. This kind of conversation help you to understand yourself more. Would we always know ourselves, even if we

are confused?

Talking with someone is so important!

Why is “talking” important?

When you utter words to someone, you will hear what you said at the same time.

When your words are accepted and understood, you can also accept your words and move on to next. “I think…. But is it weird to think so?”

Before you utter words, your thoughts are not clear to you, too. But as soon as you hear your words, sometime you will realize what you are thinking/feeling or what you are suffering from. “I am surprised to know what I was thinking”

Why talking with a counsellor?

Can you talk whatever we want to talk? How much do you worry about how other people think of you when you talk?

Can you talk whatever important for you to talk with your family members or close friends? There are issues you can not share them

because they are too close to you. Some people just go into an website to ask something important. Why people can do this?

Counsellors are bound to adhere the code of conduct – especially “confidentiality”.

Counselling in Japan There has been a strong

movement towards counselling in Japan.

Many people started to understand counselling, and more and more people started to come to see counsellors.

What about other ethnic people?

Working with a young lady who lost her voice

Harumi, 19 years old girl, moved to another city to study art after graduating from her high school. After some time, she stopped contacting Mother, so Mother went to her daughter's flat. She found that Harumi could not eat properly, not going out, not even talking to others. So she took Harumi home. But still she could hardly utter any words to others.

Working with Harumi

Mother took her to my counselling room.

Harumi wanted to have Mother when she had counselling sessions.

How could you work with Harumi and her mother?

Counselling Process

No voices for 3 months, but playing with a computer.

Conversation with a pen and a notepad for another 3 months.

One day she did not bring her notepad and pencil.

She started to have part-time job at a book store. Then after some time, she took another venture.

Why understanding is not easy

Each person has his/her own history/experience. When you say something, those words have to be understood based upon his/her own history/experience.

"neutral dictionary definitions of the words of a language ensure their common features and guarantee that all speakers of a given language will understand one another, but the use of the words in live speech communication is always individual and contextual in nature ... the word is expressive, but, this expression does not inhere in the word itself. ” Bakhtin, 1986, p.88

Counsellor tries hard to understand you

Just Therapy Members of the Family Centre in Lower Hutt, New

Zealand, have described and advocated culturally appropriate ways of working with people (Tamasese & Waldegrave, 1990; Waldegrave, Tamasese, Tuhaka, & Campbell, 2003). Their workshops and writings have influenced therapists worldwide. They make clear how important it is for therapists to be of the same culture as those with whom they work. When that is not possible, they advocate for the therapist to be supervised by a person from the same cultural group as the family. A third choice is for the therapist to become as knowledgeable as possible about the family’s culture of origin.

Bring up your own ethnic counsellor

Invitation DCNZ would like to invite you and your

community to participate in an on-going discussion and practice of how we are able to contribute to the society, and how we are able to support each other, how we are able to prepare for the future.

DCNZ will try to understand in what way our counsellors are able to support Korean people in New Zealand. Please come and join in our venture. The answers and methods still need to be discussed in many ways.