Multicultural Orientation in Psychotherapy

Name: Multicultural Orientation in Psychotherapy
Price: 109.99 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 978-1-4338-4234-4

With Cynthia de las Fuentes

ISBN: 978-1-4338-4234-4

January 2024

98 minutes

Item # 3842344

DVD

$109.99

for member price

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Alexander Street

Part of the Series V: Multicultural Counseling

Available as part of the APA PsycTherapy database, through your or your institution’s subscription. Questions? Contact Psycdatabases@apa.org.

Description

In Multicultural Orientation in Psychotherapy, Dr. Cynthia de las Fuentes demonstrates and discusses this approach’s key skills.

In multicultural orientation, by using an integrative approach to healing, practitioners accompany their clients (individuals, families, communities, etc.) by bearing witness to the pain of marginalization, helping them recognize the effects of domination and subjugation (e.g., discrimination, colonialism), and embrace the radical notion that health, wellness, and healing is a form of resistance for the betterment of self, family, community, and society. The demonstration in this video is framed by an informative discussion with the therapist hosted by Dr. Lillian Comas-Diaz.

The demonstration in this video features an actor portraying a client on the basis of a composite of cases.

Approach

Multicultural feminism refers to a literature and practice of feminism, developed primarily by women from the global majority, that parallels but also questions liberal feminism, which is largely a product of the west. Like liberal feminism, multicultural feminism seeks the betterment of the lives of women and people of color; but unlike the former, it does not see that the path to it is the same for all women, or that it rests on a strict equality of role or function with men, or that sexism is the root of their oppression without regards to other forms of domination, or that it hinges primarily on the advancement of individual human rights. Instead, multicultural feminism emphasizes empowerment for women within the context of their unique identities and societies.

It is a liberation psychology, practice that specifically addresses, and attempts to heal the harms due to, the oppressive socio-political structures in which we all live by focusing on our interconnectedness (to each other and to systems of oppression) and community harmony. In the psychotherapeutic relationship, psychological distress is not exclusively viewed as intrapsychic, but as a product of our environments and the systems of privilege and oppression in which we all navigate.

By using an integrative approach to healing, practitioners accompany their clients (individuals, families, communities, etc.) by bearing witness to the pain of marginalization, helping them recognize the effects of domination and subjugation (e.g., discrimination, colonialism), and embrace the radical notion that health, wellness, and healing is a form of resistance for the betterment of self, family, community, and society.

Contributor bios

During her graduate school training, Cynthia de las Fuentes, PhD, was awarded a United States Congressional Fellowship through the Women’s Research and Education Institute and another fellowship with the Women’s Program Office of the Public Interest Directorate at APA. She earned a PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994 and subsequently became licensed by the State of Texas in 1996. From 1993-2007, she was a tenured associate professor of psychology at Our Lady of the Lake University, an APA-accredited doctoral program, and held numerous leadership positions within the university and department including serving as training director.

Since 2007, Dr. de las Fuentes has worked in private practice offering sliding-scale consultation, psychotherapy, and forensic evaluations focusing her expert testimony on the victims of hate crimes, racial, gender, and sexual orientation discrimination and immigration evaluations. Her pro bono work includes training bilingual psychologists in her community on the cultural and linguistic competent delivery of forensic evaluation services to the Latiné immigrant community and delivering self-care and stress management workshops to immigration lawyers and their staff. She has dozens of presentations and publications in her areas of scholarship: ethics in psychology, feminist psychology, multicultural and Latiné psychologies.

Dr. de las Fuentes is active in governance of APA where, among other positions, she served as president of the Society for the Psychology of Women, was a member of the Board of Education Affairs, was chair of the Committee for Women in Psychology, served on the APA Council of Representatives representing Division 45, the Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race, was chair of the Council Leadership Team, and as a member of the Policy and Planning Board. She is a founding member of National Latinx Psychological Association and was elected a member and secretary of the Board of Trustees for the Texas Psychological Association. She is currently the 2024 president of APA and the American Psychological Association Services, Inc.

Suggested resources

Comas-Dias, L. & Torres Rivera, E. (2020). Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice and Social Justice. American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.

Comas-Dias, L., Adames, H.Y., & Chaves-Dueñas, N.Y. (2024). Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice. American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.

Vasquez, M.J.T. & Johnson, J.D. (2022). Multicultural Psychology: A Practice Imperative. American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.

Bryant-Davis, T. & Comas-Dias, L. (Eds.). (2016). Womanist and Mujerista Psychologies: Voices of Fire, Acts of Courage. American Psychological Association: Washington, DC.