-
Asking Clients About Racial Stress and Trauma
How to Broach the Topic Appropriately
-
“If you have Black clients, you can assume they have stress or trauma around their experience of race,” explains Monnica Williams, associate professor at the University of Ottawa. For white therapists, then, it’s important to broach the topic appropriately.
That asking about race-based trauma requires such a delicate approach says S. Kent Butler, president-elect of the American Counseling Association, is testament to the fact that, regrettably, conversations about race are considered taboo. “Let’s have that difficult dialogue,” he says. "If we don’t deal with our own understanding of what that is, we can’t find our way to asking those types of questions.”
Read more from this panel in our September/October 2020 issue, here.