Multitheoretical Psychotherapy

Multicultural Skills Training
for Counselors & Psychotherapists

This site describes a catalog of MULTICULTURAL KEY STRATEGIES (MKS) that can be used in training, supervision, and treatment planning.

MULTICULTURAL SKILLS TRAINING (MCST) involves learning, practicing, and utilizing multicultural key strategies as part of a broad repertoire of psychotherapy and counseling skills. MCST can be incorporated into classes, training seminars, or workshops.

MULTICULTURAL TREATMENT PLANNING (MCTP) involves using these key strategies to think about and plan for culture-centered interventions with a specific client. Treatment planning can occur individually or as part of clinical supervision.

Multicultural Key Strategies

The multicultural counseling movement has pointed out the need for culturally-competent counselors to acquire knowledge, awareness, and skills. The multicultural key strategies (MKS) described here focus on specific skills and represent an attempt to operationalize the following ideal: “Culturally skilled counselors are able to engage in a variety of verbal and nonverbal helping responses” (Sue et al., 1998, p. 41). The strategies described here are organized into 11 clusters. Six of the MKS clusters focus directly on culture and five represent culture-centered adaptations of Western psychotherapy skills. Each of these 11 MKS clusters has been specified with five or six specific strategies, resulting in over 60 skills that are described using practice markers and expected consequences that clarify when a particular strategy may be helpful as well as its likely outcome.

Culture-Focused Strategies
The first six MKS clusters focus directly on culture and represent an attempt to describe multicultural interventions that can complement psychotherapy and counseling strategies drawn from other approaches.

Becoming Aware of Your Own Worldview (OW)
Creating a Culturally-Sensitive Therapeutic Relationship (TR)
Understanding the Client's Worldview (CW)
Facilitating Cultural Identity Development (ID)
Responding To Societal Structures and Values (SS)
Utilizing Complementary Roles Beyond Psychotherapy (CR)

The first three of these MKS clusters are used to build a multicultural foundation within psychotherapy (OW, TR, CW). The next three MKS clusters can be used to establish a cultural focus and are more oriented toward change (ID, SS, CR).

Culture-Centered Adaptations of Western Psychotherapy Strategies
The next five MKS clusters are an attempt to operationalize the realization that, “It is not necessary to develop an entirely new repertoire of psychological skills to practice in a culture-centered manner... there will likely be situations where culture-centered adaptations in interventions and practices will be more effective” (APA, 2003, p. 390).

Cognitive-Multicultural Strategies (CM)
Behavioral-Multicultural Strategies (BM)
Experiential-Multicultural Strategies (EM)
Interpersonal-Multicultural Strategies (IM)
Systemic-Multicultural Strategies (SM)

These strategies focus on the interaction between culture and thoughts (CM), actions (BM), feelings (EM), interpersonal patterns (IM), and social systems (SM).