Inland Empire Chapter of CAMFT

Culture or Personality?  Issues with Culturally Diverse Couples

Jon P. Kirby, Ph.D.

Summary:

When working with culturally diverse couples, it is important to understand how communication styles differ from one culture to another as do our response to conflict.  Our Intercultural Conflict Styles (ICS) is our style for dealing with problems, disagreements, and conflicts; and it is learned from our home or native culture.  In this training, we will reach the following objectives. 

Training Objectives:

1. An opportunity to experience some simple action techniques.

2. A glimpse into the usefulness of action methods for their fields.

3. An opportunity to learn that we need to distinguish between cultural issues versus personality issues in couples therapy and in other group therapies.

4. An opportunity to introduce a new action method called "culture-drama", which helps to uncover and deal with complex cultural issues that affect personalities and relationships, before plunging deeper into intra-psychic level.

Bio:

Jon Kirby is a Cambridge-trained anthropologist (PhD) and a pastoral counselor (MDiv), and has been involved with cross-cultural training and fostering interculturality using action methods for 30 years. Under the supervision of Donell Miller (MDiv, PhD, LMFT, TEP), and Shu Gong (PhD, LCSW, TEP), Dr. Kirby is also a certified practitioner of psychodrama, sociometry and group psychotherapy using action methods for intercultural competence building and to foster intercultural and interreligious dialogue.

Review of presentation:

In our May 2013 IE CAMFT meeting, we had the pleasure of hearing from Jon Kirby about issues with culturally diverse couples and how to deal with them. Jon Kirby is a Cambridge trained anthropologist (PhD) and a pastoral counselor (MDiv), and has been involved with cross-cultural training and fostering interculturality for 30 years. Jon is a certified practitioner of psychodrama and has utilized his cultural expertise to develop “culture-drama.” Our Intercultural Conflict Styles (ICS) is our style for dealing with problems, disagreements, and conflicts; and it is learned from our home or native culture.

Even though our ICS will change to adapt to the culture we move to, when emotions run high, we tend to revert to our original ICS. You can see then how couples who come from different cultures can run into some cultural issues when dealing with disagreements. It is necessary then, to understand our own ICS, as well as others in order to be able to resolve conflicts across cultures and facilitate problem solving, mutual understanding, and harmony. And as therapists, it is necessary to understand our client’s ICS to allow us to work with full cultural competency.

Jon educated us about the two fundamental cultural differences in conflict styles. The first is how we express disagreements around problems and issues. We do this either directly or indirectly. The second is how we express emotions around problems and issues. We do this either expressively or restrained. Based on these two main differences, one’s ICS can be placed into one of four styles:

1. Discussion Style

2. Engagement Style Indirect

3. Accommodation Style

4. Dynamic Style Restraint Expressiveness

1. Discussion Style is verbally direct and emotionally restrained. In general, the populations that tend to have this discussion style are Northern Europe, White America, and Canada. Individuals with this ICS value are comfortable with direct language and talk, and base discussions and conversations on facts rather than emotions. They often view intense emotions as threatening, and feel it interferes with conflict resolution.

2. Engagement Style is verbally direct and emotionally expressive. In general, the populations that tend to have this discussion style are African American, Russia, Greece. Individuals with this ICS express sincerity through intense verbal and nonverbal emotion. They have no problems expressing their emotions to the fullest. They are generally ok with direct confrontation, and do not “beat around the bush” to express what they have to say.

3. Accommodation Style is verbally and nonverbally indirect and emotionally restrained. In general, the populations that tend to have this discussion style are Japan, Southeast Asia, and Mexico. Individuals with this ICS believe that being emotionally calm and restrained builds harmony, and that intense expression of emotion is dangerous and interferes with conflict resolution. These individuals often use ambiguity to resolve conflict and use indirect speech, stories, metaphors and third parties rather than direct language.

4. Dynamic Style is verbally and nonverbally indirect and emotionally expressive, often also emotionally intense. In general, the populations that tend to have this discussion style are Arab countries. Individuals with this ICS often use ambiguity, stories, metaphors, associative argument, humor, hyperbole, repetition and third parties to verbally express themselves. They have no problem being emotionally expressive and intense and believe that being emotionally confrontational and expressive assures credibility.

 Of course with all four styles, there are perceived strengths and weaknesses, which are generally determined by one’s own ICS. For example, when viewing the Discussion Style a self-perceived strength is that problems are confronted, while a perceived weakness is they have difficulty “reading between the lines.” When viewing the Adaption Style, a self-perceived strength is that they are able to control emotional outbursts, while a perceived weakness is that they have difficulty voicing their own opinion. With the wide variety of differences in how disagreement and emotions are expressed it is easy to understand the necessity of having cultural competence of the different ICS’s so that conflicts can be resolved between cultures and unnecessary wars are not started based on simple misunderstandings.

Jon Kirby did a great job of educating us about the different types of ICS’s and how they affect understanding, conflict, and harmony between cultures. This article is just a brief summary of the difference between personality and culture. If you would like more information about working with culturally diverse relationships, you can contact Jon Kirby by phone at (323) 402-0249 or by email at zanyeya@gmail.com.