Making Friends with Bias
Introduction
This project aims to offer a framework for working pluralistically with implicit bias, as pluralistic counselling practitioners.
It aims to facilitate practitioners to reduce the potential for harm from implicit bias while finding expansive awareness and compassion for self and others.
Practitioners will find methods for gaining awareness, processing challenging feelings, understanding the wider contexts of bias and the potential effects biases can have on the therapeutic relationship.
There a several pages of text, accessible by the buttons at the bottom of the page, explaining the background theory for this framework, with suggested goal, tasks and methods for working through.
If reading lots of text is not an efficient way for you to learn, there is a video lecture that can be found by clicking the button at the top right of this page, and an explanatory diagram at the bottom of this page.
A Pluralistic Tool for Counsellors
This framework draws from pluralistic principles of client work and uses them to encourage practitioners to draw from their strengths to safely do internal work and find expansive compassion for themselves, their biases and for others. This theory allows practitioners to choose what will work best for them at each stage of the process and to dictate their own outcomes, as one may encourage a client to do when developing goals, tasks and methods in the therapy room (Cooper and Mcleod, 2012).
This theory and framework is built from anthropological, sociological, psychological and philosophical theories and approaches. It is pluralistic in its entirety, encouraging us to allow ideas of multiple truths, various approaches with equal potential, congruency, personal tailoring and diversity in relation to our own ways of thinking and being in the world (Cooper and Mcleod, 2012).
