Practice 18 Pluralism: Collaborating in Health, Healing, and Care

Practice 18 focuses on co-constructing microlevel change with individuals, couples, or families. Many of the culturally responsive and socially just (CRSJ) counselling practices in this book assume that there are multiple, inherently valid, and equally meaningful worldviews and approaches to health, healing, and care. Melissa and Sandra carry forward the lens of decolonizing praxis to disrupt eurocentric discourses and create space for new approaches. They also centre Indigenization to amplify Indigenous and other culture-centred approaches. The practice of Etuaptmumk guides their search for meaningful and helpful approaches that honour clients’ culture-centred views of health and healing. This epistemological pluralism enhances cultural responsivity in theory and practice. The authors return to a question posed earlier in the book: How can my collaboration with this person, facing that challenge, embedded in these contexts, best demonstrate client-centred, culturally affirming, and socially just care? They revisit the WISE Practices framework for responsible and ethical centring of Indigenous and other culture-centred approaches to health and healing (Practice 14). Four WISE Practices approaches are positioned on a continuum to encourage theoretical flexibility and cultural appreciation: (a) Wise Practices are culture-centred approaches to health, healing, and care based on localized ways of knowing, being, and doing; (b) integration applies the practice of Two-Eyed Seeing to construct new healing practices drawing on equally valid worldviews; (c) suitable adaptation requires creative collaboration to meaningfully shape conventional practices to client cultural identities and preferences; and finally (d) eurowestern approaches are offered with careful attention to building bridges across worldview. Embracing pluralism in health, healing, and care is where the art of health, healing, and care comes into play. Sandra and Melissa appreciate the contributions of the following co-authors to opening this chapter: • Ya Xi (Nancy) Lei speaks to her journey toward anti-racist practice, highlighting the gaps in representation and culturally relevant approaches throughout her education. • Marguerite Lengyell, Charlotte Finnigan, and Jason Brown share their reflections on privilege, positionality, and cultural humility, perspectives that shape and inform their work as therapists. Sandra and Melissa are also honoured to feature practice illustrations for each of the WISE Practices approaches by the following co-authors: • Darlene Auger offers an example of how Wise Practices embedded in the ways of knowing, doing, and being of her specific Indigenous heritage shaped her approach to health, healing, and care through the healing swing or Wîwîp’son nurturing therapy. • Adrienne Carter describes the creation of a mental health counselling and support program for refugees in which a team of helping professionals stepped outside of the box to adapt existing approaches to this specific population, creating a wholistic approach to family care. • Judy Chew models client empowerment through gender role analysis by being transparent about the underlying assumptions of feminist therapy and positioning the client as expert in assessing the goodness of fit. • Andrew Estefan recalls his early work with Daniel, a client whose story of life-making was supported through the thoughtful use of various narrative therapy techniques. • Mahdi Qasqas illustrates what it might look like to integrate eurowestern practices with sources of meaning-making and motivations for change from within a client’s Islamic worldview.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.