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Which of these foods contain the recommended daily requirement of Vitamin C: one-half a red pepper, one-quarter of a cantaloupe, 250 millilitres cooked broccoli, 250 millilitres of strawberries or 250 millilitres of orange juice?
Answer: all of the above.
What does vitamin C have to do with the practice of couple and family therapy? In the same way that we might be tempted to undervalue the other choices since orange juice is a common way for folks to get their daily dose, we might be tempted to see a cross-cultural marriage as necessarily being more problematic because of the differences between the spouses.
The topic of cross-cultural couple counselling is of interest to me because I am in an apparent cross-cultural marriage. I write apparent since the visual distinctions between my husband and I seem to be more glaring to others than to us. An example from 1996: My husband drove me to a conference in Niagara-on-the-Lake and then came inside the meeting room briefly to find out what time he should return to pick me up. One of other attendees in the room came over to me and started a conversation about his work with interracial couples. He was facilitating a group for couples in conflict. Having never met this man before, I was at a bit of a loss trying to understand why he was asking me if my husband and I might be interested in this group. At first, since we were colleagues, I thought he was looking for other facilitators. Then it dawned on me: he saw my husband and assumed that we were experiencing conflict and would benefit from a group like his (!!) After I told him that we were actually doing quite well, he seemed disappointed and left.
Now, that story is by no means meant to suggest that cross-cultural counselling is not a valid endeavour. It does however highlight the ways in which we can get caught up with what the problem should be by virtue of visible differences and then begin to act as though we are now in "special" territory. In my case, my husband and I are more similar than different culturally since we have grown up in a similar cultural milieu inside and outside of the home. While our ethnic identities are different, the values and traditions we grew up with are the same. We were raised in suburban communities, share similar religious backgrounds and as children of immigrants, we both grew up with the imperative to make the most of the educational opportunities set before us. As with any couple, we didn't learn everything there is to know about one another by virtue of going through the dating/courting stage. The daily discovery continues as we seek to create a sense of "we-ness" through parenting, career and community involvements and the every day twists and turns of life.
Professionally, I need to understand my clients in their context. I am often frustrated by discussions of culture or ethnicity that seem only to arise when the client is not white skinned and middle-class. Cultural differences arise the moment we leave the house in the morning and interact with the outside world. We all have our ways of doing and being that are in a continual process of being challenged and affirmed. I have found that when the balance tips towards challenge, the couple's skills at working through hurt, rejection, loneliness and anger come to the fore. When the couple identifies the problem as having some source in cultural differences, it has often been due to an inability to speak to the personal losses/hurts they encounter(ed) as a result of not having easy access to the comfort of similarity. It is in those moments of not being able to count on the other "understanding what it's like to always be&", that the couple can be tempted to believe they are somehow incompatible. When understanding is not immediate, one or both partners may believe there is an absence of caring in the relationship, which then calls commitment into question, which then makes the relationship seem like a very precarious place to be.
As a therapist in Toronto, not being aware of the world at my doorstep can only be described as willful ignorance; the range of possible coupling arrangements is vast and the hues that result are astounding. The challenge for any therapist is to invite the whole couple - culturally similar or not- to express their story in ways that are emotionally honest and to allow for a new story about their relationship to emerge.
Sharon Y. Ramsay, MDiv, RMFT
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