Michael Salzman (2005) in his article entitled, “Contextualizing the Symptom in Multicultural Consultation; Anger in a Cultural- Historical Context” discusses how anger has become a major focus of counseling services in school settings.
Based at the University of Hawaii, Salzman shares through his research on Native Hawaiians how colonization, disempowerment, cultural oppression and the process of political and psychological decolonization have helped generate an atmosphere that seeds the phenomenon of anger in school settings.
Salzman shares that, in the past, anger problems in schools looked at the locus of causality within the individual while ignoring person-environmental interactions. To Salzman, anger exists in context and like any other phenomenon, it is not accurately interpreted when the context from which the behavior stems from is de-contextualized and ignored.
By investigating the links between the outward expression of anger and the ongoing and historical processes of “colonization, cultural oppression, and decolonization may inform more accurate assessments of observable behavior and the generation of context-congruent interventions, thereby increasing the probability of effective consultation” (p. 224).
[For more of this story, written by Steve Greenman, go to http://pro.psychcentral.com/th...therapy/0013392.html]
Comments (0)