Beyond Cultural Competency: Understanding Multiple Levels of Culture, Immigration, Social Justice, and a Process Analysis of Collaboration

In this episode, Celia discusses how her experiences of growing up as a child of immigrant parents who fled Eastern Europe to Argentina, and then her own experience of immigration to the United States has lead her into a career in working with systems, both at the family level, as well as the community and large cultural level of systems. Celia discusses how her interest in the family system grew out of her own experience of moving from a couple to a family, and experience in a psychodynamic program that was very pathologizing of the parent and a focus on the attachment and transference with the therapist. She discussed training with some of the most influential family therapists. We discussed a training she had done some years ago, called One Size Doesn’t Fit All, and how important it is to not just transpose a U.S. model of therapy, based a a two parent nuclear family, to all clients. She discussed the tools (1 & 2) she developed using her MECA model, and looking a multigenerational households, siblings raising children, community raising children, and discussed there is great variation within cultures, and needing cultural humility, as well as understanding that social justice is separate from cultural competency in diversity. She discussed her article on Centering the Voice of the Client, which came out of her work at Harvard Medical School, where she did process research on the elements related to collaboration using a Shared Decision Making model. We discussed the elements of collaboration: sharing the agenda setting, balance of talking time, tentativeness rather than absoluteness, collaborative meaning making rather than diagnostic expert labeling, and co-constructing behavioral tasks. Celia Falicov, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and family therapist in San Diego, California. Celia is the Director of Mental Health Services at the Student-Run Free Clinic Project of the Department of Family Medicine at University of California, San Diego. She is also a past president of the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA) and has published numerous books and articles, including: Family Transitions: Continuity and Change Over the Life Cycle, Cultural Perspectives in Family Therapy and Latino Families in Therapy, and Multiculturalism and Diversity in Clinical Supervision with Falender and Shafranske.