Social Justice and the Word: Keeping Diversity Alive in Therapeutic Conversations/La Justice Sociale et le Discours : Assurer la Diversité Dans Les Conversations Thérapeutiques

In recent years, a number of related but distinct threads of therapeutic practice have foregrounded the need for attention to in relation to counselling and psychotherapy. These include feminist therapies (cf. Brown, 1994; Enns, 1997); community and critical psychology (cf. Fox, 2003; Freire, 1972; Prilleltensky, 2009); multicultural counselling (Lewis, Lewis, Daniels, & D'Andrea, 2011; Sue, Ivey, & Pedersen, 1996); and narrative therapy (Combs & Freedman, 2012, Madsen, 2007; White, 2007). What links these various movements is a view of person-in-context, both buffeted and supported by wider forces in society. Reaching beyond traditional humanist individualism (Goodman et ah, 2004; Prilleltensky, 2009; Ratts & Hutchins, 2009), this way of looking locates many key challenges that people face not primarily in the intrapsychic realm, but in various cultural institutions, discourses, and practices.Although there are disparate accounts of what precisely social justice refers to (cf. Arthur & Collins, 2010; Goodman, 2001; Reisch, 2002; Vera & Speight, 2003), one thing is clear: and injustice are features of interaction, which unfolds amid a myriad of power differentials. There is no place to hide from these inequities, certainly not in the practice of counselling and therapy. As Reynolds (2012) writes, Our work occurs in contexts that lack because we have not delivered on a just (p. 19). A concern for in relation to practice is a mindfulness of the backdrop to our therapeutic conversations, where advantages and disadvantages are distributed to individuals in (Miller, 1999, p. 11).This uneven distribution of resources is a key consideration that I will develop further in this article by relating it to what goes on in the therapy room. But for now I'd like to point to the call for further initiatives outside of that room-i.e., advocacy-that is more typically associated with the topic of and counselling.That focus on inequity within the wider society helps to account for why advocacy tends to be a central thrust of a agenda (Fouad, 2001; Fox, 2003; Helms, 2003). In 2002, the American Counseling Association introduced a formalized taxonomy of advocacy competencies (Lewis, Ratts, Paladino, & Toporek, 2011). In Canada, a chapter with a focus on advocacy was formed within the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association in 2009. Generally the focus on advocacy is threaded through a perspective, which portrays the work of counselling as action oriented, socially relevant, and community focused and initiated (Helms, 2003, p. 305). Advocacy centres the work of at the mesa (local community) or meta (national, global) levels, in contrast to the micro level of the consulting room (Goodman et al., 2004).The heightened focus on addressing issues outside of the consulting room is a welcome development; it emphasizes the substantial nature of obstacles to mental health-an important counterpart to the prevalent view of psychological distress as the expression of individual deficit (Kirby & Keon, 2006; Larner, Strong, & Busch, 2013). At the same time, this article will also explore how decisions related to also transpire within face-to-face dialogue with clients-not to refute calls for intervening at mesa and meta levels, but to demonstrate that the risk of reperpetrating the injustices that occur in those domains is always there at the micro level, utterance by utterance, in therapeutic conversations.Justice and injustice are always playing out in interactions. This occurs in the legislative and political arenas where rights are accorded or resources allocated, and also in one-on-one conversations where identities are shaped through meaning making (Gergen, 2012; Gergen & Gergen, 2006). …

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