Culture or Personality?  Issues with Culturally Diverse Couples

Jon P. Kirby, Ph.D.

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.