EXPLORING SELF-COMPASSION, EMPATHY, AND INTRINSIC SPIRITUALITY AS PREDICTORS OF CULTURAL HUMILITY

Each year in the United States (U.S), one in five adults experience mental illness and one in six youth ages 6-17 experience a mental disorder (NAMI, 2020). While mental illness can affect individuals at similar rates, minority populations suffer from existent disparities in mental healthcare that have been exacerbated by the impact of COVID-19. Help-seeking behaviors of racial and ethnic minorities in the US have historically been influenced by the lack of trust in the medical system. When experiences of prejudice and discrimination are present in the counseling experience, they lead to damaging outcomes for minorities including misdiagnosis, receipt of less preferred forms of treatment, increased rate of premature termination, and overall dissatisfaction with service delivery in minority clients (Ridley et al., 2010; Rutgers University, 2019). Counselors who do not address biases, assumptions, and their own epistemological views risk operating within the oppressive framework of the dominant culture (Katz, 2014; Owen, 2017; Owen et al., 2018; Sue et al., 1992). Despite the growing support of cultural humility as complementary or even an alternative to cultural competence in counselor multicultural pedagogy, little has been examined about the ways in which this perspective can be enhanced in counselor education programs. Therefore, a standard multiple regression was utilized to examine the impact of intrinsic spirituality, common humanity, and affective empathy on cultural humility in counseling students. Results indicated that common humanity contributed significantly to the prediction of cultural humility accounting for 16% of the variance. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.