Cultural difference

Tomorrow I am heading off for a five-day residential (give or take a few hours) in Bournemouth, where around 70 trainee counsellors and psychotherapists will sit around and discuss their feelings, perceptions and thoughts on cultural difference. From experience, this has the potential the generate a highly volatile atmosphere and to tap into deeply rooted resentments, fears, anxieties, anger and prejudices. I am mildly concerned that I am about to walk into an emotional minefield and am positive I will end up offending someone, somewhere down the line. I hope it isn't someone I care about. It's impossible not to offend someone in a timeframe this long. Unless I become mute.

I wonder if I will be one of those that is offended. I wonder if I'll angry. Last time I got very angry when this issue came up, primarily because another girl said she wished life didn't have to be like this - that differences shouldn't matter and she wished everyone got on. I thought she was being naive and that our responsibility as counsellors is to see and recognise these differences. However, part of me agrees with her. Or rather, I wish that differences mattered only in a positive sense - we appreciated individual strengths and perspectives. I wish that we, as humans, were not so quick to judge those who are different to ourselves, or perhaps, just unfamiliar, because familiar difference is not seen as difference so much, or perhaps is not so obvious. We focus on the similarities between ourselves and those that are familiar to us.

Someone said this to me today, and I won't quote who in case he wouldn't want to be named: "...differences are a figment of contemporary cognitions which have no basis in fact and are entirely transient as peoples merge, shift and change. What ever you believe now about cultural differences will be shown to be meaningless in the future as all cultures change."

I like this comment a lot, but I think it might upset a lot of people, because on an individual level, I imagine people would be upset to hear the phrase 'figment of contemporary cognitions', perhaps interpreting the comment as suggested that their experiences are 'made up'. However, it is not that their experiences are made up. No, it is more that the differences our society focuses on are not factually different to those we don't focus on. With changing society and mixing of genetics, races, classes and cultures, at some point in the future, those differences that are key or uppermost in people's minds now, may become meaningless.

Certainly food for thought and I shall be chewing the cud on this one for a few days.