Understanding Personal Biases

Understanding Personal Biases

Racial microaggressions are concise and ordinary daily behavioral, verbal, and environmental disgrace, whether deliberate or unplanned, that converse aggressive, insulting, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group. Morevever, microaggression is extremely detrimental to the counseling setting and occurs quite often. Although usually unintentional and unrealized, white therapists are often guilty of microagressions. When this occurs, therapy becomes ineffective and leads to non self-disclosure of the client, early termination of therapy, and failure of the client to return for future appointments. This is because the clients lose trust in their therapists and feel misunderstood and undervalued. Microaggressions by white therapists are often attributed to their cultural conditioning, their fear in addressing race issues or their lack of racial self-awareness.

In my opinion, the easiest and best short-term solution (on both therapist and client) to the microaggression issues would be to no longer pair up a white therapist with a client of color. If it is such a huge and obvious problem, why continue to throw salt in the gaping wound? Although I realize my proposed solution is not the most politically correct, I believe it would prove to be a quick and extremely effective one. Since I realize this solution would never be put into effect, I guess I would suggest the more realistic approach of addressing the issue with more training of racial awareness. If mental health professionals were trained to understand the causes and consequences of racial microaggressions, perhaps the number of aggressions during therapy would begin to decline.

Researchers have found that experiences of microaggressions are linked to increased risks of depression, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, colds and poor breast cancer survival because of the elevated level of stress caused by such perceived prejudices.Other researchers have shown that women and ...