Globalisation affects all areas of life, including approaches to mental distress. Counselling and individual therapy are now almost universally accepted in Western cultures as effective and appropriate for emotional healing. Counselling has even been described as the new religion!
There have been many attempts to define what is meant by globalisation. Sachs (2003) while defining the process of globalisation as the ‘interconnectedness of the world through new systems of communication’, added ‘Universal cultures have done immense harm’. So is Counselling yet another avenue for the promotion of cultural sameness or does it actively work to sustain and support cultural diversity and the uniqueness of every individual?
The process of socialisation in a culture provides a child with the fundamental assumptions by which s/he makes sense of human experience, and always includes implicit value systems, attitudes, and ways of perceiving and understanding. Each culture also provides its members with a conceptual framework for making sense of illness and emotional distress and suggesting ways of healing which make sense within that cultural framework. Thus, any understanding of emotional distress is always embedded within a particular society’s ways of making sense of the world.
In Western cultures an individualistic view of ‘the self’ values separateness and independence, and emotional maturity is characterised by the capacity to express one’s own views and opinions. Children are socialised to think of and experience themselves as individual and separate – ‘A Child is taught that there is a self that is in control of his/her actions.’
In contrast, other cultural traditions such as ours, socialise children to prioritise connections and interrelationship with others as the basis of psychological well-being. Thus persons are only parts of a greater social whole and cannot be understood separately from it. What dominates the entire life and world view is not the individual just there, but the community, society, family or group to which he/she belongs. It becomes a self-evident truth that the community determines a lot of what life is, of what the individual makes of it, and the values that each individual adopts and realises. The criteria of success are community-determined.
Increasingly, with the migration to the globalised cities, the concurrent decline in traditional social structures, and education curricula which are dominated by European/North American understanding of phenomena and omit traditional history and cultural language, we simultaneously psychologically inhabit ‘two worlds’, i.e. hold both the Western and traditional sets of cultural assumptions about ‘the self’. Socialisation in the two very different notions of self can create a great deal of internal psychological conflict in terms of identity, which we then have to find ways to reconcile.
This might help some of you understand the conflict you may experience while considering your strong individual wants and desires and the equally strong need for familial acceptance and fulfilment of social expectations. And should you need help dealing with this conflict you know where to find me!
Reference: Cultural Imperialism Revisited, Counselling and Globalisation by Jane Gilbert