Working with Cross-Cultural Couples: Unexplored Issues in Therapy DVD

Introduction: Working with Cross-Cultural Couples: Unexplored Issues in Therapy (04:03)

Kirsten Lind Seals introduces herself and describes the framework for her presentation. Clients receive negative messages from the outside world.

Clinical Experiences (13:34)
Participants discuss working with different ethnicities including Colombians, Indians, Palestinians, and the Jewish. One woman describes visiting her African Muslim in-laws and being considered his "black-white" wife. Individuals can misinterpret the different culture's nuances.

What Does Cross-Cultural Mean? (05:18)
Culture is shared meanings, beliefs, and traditions that arise as a group shares common history and experiences that provide interpretations of the world. Couples from different cultures need further conversations to create a common sense of identity within and around the relationship. Race is a man-made classification.

What Is Our Culture? (05:00)
One in ten heterosexual marriages is interracial. Seals describes laws prohibiting marriages of different ethnicities until 1967 in the United States. There has been an increase in intolerance and hate crimes within major cities.

Understanding Your Culture: Exercise (14:10)
Participants create a genogram where they explore pride and shame felt by their family history.

Understanding Your Culture: Discussion (23:28)
Participants discuss the experience of performing the genogram exercise. There is a lot of trauma moving from one country to another. Some immigrants repudiate their home country in a desire to appear American.

Interventions to Create Discourse (04:52)
Performing a genogram together can bring up issues that one partner might not know about the other. "The Index of Cultural Inclusion" is 30 questions and is assessed using the Likert scale. Seal describes her clientele in Minnesota.

Adaptation and Relationship Structures (05:57)
Cross-cultural relationship structures include integrated, coexisting, singularly assimilated, and unresolved. Insecurity motivates unaddressed conflicts. Explore clinical issues such as privilege or racism, language, and citizenship. Frequently, psychologists see couples who marry sooner than they should because of immigration status.

Clinical Interventions: Race (11:06)
Validate issues of racism and exclusion. Ask about hot button issues and explore how issues of race affected the relationship.

Clinical Interventions: Language (11:57)
Seal and participants discuss strategies for working with patients who learned English as their second language including increased check-ins, watch for body language, and slow down communication.

Clinical Interventions: Immigration Status (06:22)
Seal and participants discuss strategies working with patients with citizenship problems including denial, create awareness, normalize, and smoothing things over.

Four Tasks for Making Relationships Work (09:32)
Create a "we", frame differences, generate emotional maintenance, and explore position and relationship to familial and societal differences. Patients can choose to coexist or integrate cultural differences. Negotiate potential landmines.