Challenging Conversations: Deepening Personal and Professional Commitment to Culture-Infused and Socially Just Counseling Practices

Abstract

This in-depth examination of the place of social justice in counseling concludes that issues of social justice can only be grasped by turning the mirror on one’s own social location. The authors describe the dawning realization of social inequities experienced by many practitioners as they deepen exploration of their own privilege. The barriers to social justice are not solely located in external contingencies that provide the backdrop to counseling and psychotherapy conversations; social justice and injustice are also played out through the often unacknowledged power differentials between practitioners and the persons they serve. Drawing on examples from their personal experience and from graduate students in counseling and psychotherapy, the authors illustrate how these inequities operate in a number of contexts. The chapter concludes with the observation that the enactment of social justice entails relinquishing the privileging of our own perspectives, a rigorous and sometimes painful self-examination, en route to socially just practice.