Challenge personal issues, fears and prejudices

When talking about prejudices, I noticed how the culture shaped my understanding about the LGBTQ community. And I believe that might be one of my obstacles when I have a chance to work with helpee from this background. I was grown up in a society that mixed with Chinese & Western culture. But in areas related to marriage and sexual orientation, most of the people are heavily affected by Chinese culture. I think that’s because my hometown is a monoethnicity society and most of elder family member shared the same culture, thus it’s quite difficult for people to build another point of view about this topic. Generally speaking, Chinese culture encourage heterosexuality and people that prefer homosexuality are always belongs to minority.  Since the culture is not very friendly to homosexuality and homosexual are always stigmatize by the society, I can only hear comments about homosexuality from the mainstream social values and I rarely met people that are willing to admit they are homosexual. Because of the above culture influence, I’m not sure if I can ignore the prejudices completely if the helpee wish to talk about issue about their sexual orientation. I’m not saying I cannot demonstrate good listening skills or non-verbal communication, but I think the prejudice may affect how I assist helpee to achieve desired outcome based on his/her preferred way. In my point of view, it’s uneasy to change my underneath prejudice, but it’s good that I’m aware of this when I do this self-reflection, so that it won’t become unconscious bias. 

After talking about the prejudices that I obtain from the culture, I’d like to further discuss how it will affect me when having helping sessions. During last week’s triad, we are required to deal with a case regarding a gay helpee that faced family pressure, friends’ rejection and perllexed about the relationship with a charming male. When that’s my turn to act as a helper, I fully respect his freedom of choice about focusing on which aspects, and I worked with helpee to talk about rejection from his friend, which is his preference,  throughout the whole session. Although both helpee and observer mentioned that I handle the case very professionally, I noticed that I intended not to mention the sexual orientation topic unless helpee actively propose he wish to discuss about that area. When I rethink this, I think I’m afraid that I cannot remain neutral, thus I prefer to stand back from this area. It seems like I prevent myself to bring my own agenda to the helping session, which is a good thing. But in some sense, I might pass over the potential advantage of talking about why helpee think a male is his potential target. Considering the scenario did not provide too many information about this, that might be area worth further discussion. After this triad, I have more awareness about how my preference about sexual orientation may hinder myself to work with helpee that wish to talk about this. What I need to work on will be how to work on this area with helpee neutrality but still maintain my own preference about this topic.