Nowadays the society promotes the idea of diversity, equity and inclusion, many organisations and companies apply this in the recruitment as well. However, that doesn’t mean that discrimination doesn’t exist. It still exists in the workplace, but in a more hidden way. In my previous workplace, I belong to ethnic minority because there’re only two to three Asian staff. Most of the staff were friendly to me, but I can sense that some staff were quite hostile. When we’re working in a project jointly, I noticed that one colleague always criticises my language barrier. He’s aware that I’m not that familiar with popular slang or fashionable vocabularies, and he always explain the meaning to me exaggeratedly. It seems he tried to be friendly to a foreigner, but I though that’s a form of contempt. The tricky thing is that it’s hard to say it’s direct discrimination, but I can sense the unfriendly expression from his facial expression. The above experience enables me to understand the feeling of being treat unfavorably and I wish my client will never face this when we’re in a counselling relationship. It's inevitable that I will meet people that are from other background and they may have belief that completely different with mine. I will remind myself to demonstrate respect and congruence during the sessions, make sure they feel it’s comfortable to share their story and feeling with me. The key point is I don’t have to adopt their view in my own life, but I need to do what I can to listen and understand his ideas throughout the session.
In the next paragraph, I’d like to discuss what kind of personal blocks that will affect me to show empathy when developing a counselling relationship. The first one that I can think of is I’m hard to empathise with people that culturally promote machismo. I know that I should demonstrate underconditioned positive regard during the session, but I can foresee that I will feel very uncomfortable when I hear a male place woman into a lower standard and justify this in his own way. I grow up in a society that empathise gender equity and thus I own the value of treating the others fairly. If I have a chance to work with client that own different value, I guess I need very strong self-discipline to force myself not to argue during the session. Another type of people that I feel I’m hard to deal with are those with strong political views. I believe every people have their own frame of reference to see how the society operate, and people may have contrasting view because of their own experiences. I tried to understand my friend’s political view a few years ago. His sharing not only involved political beliefs, but also include strong negative emotions due to incidents happened in the society. I found that the conversation was very difficult because it’s a mixture of opinion and feeling, it’s difficult to differentiate them clearly during the conversation. When he mentioned some feeling due to a viewpoint that I disagree with, I found that I’m not able to show empathy, I was tempted to initiate the debate of that political point. Now I have more training and knowledge of counseling skills, but I still feel hesitate if I speak with a client with strong political belief. I’m not sure if I can focus on understanding his feeling instead of the political points. I think that’s still challenging to me at this moment.
