Culture Therapy: Getting in Touch with Your Inner and Outer Cultures

Everyone who experiences "personal problems" doesn't need a psychologist, even if the problems faced are serious enough to interfere with the individual's ability to function in society or trigger feelings of depression/alienation. The reason is that some subset of those who are experiencing these problems are not doing so because of "psychological" reasons, but rather are experiencing some type of cultural alienation. This is likely to be the case for that minority of individuals whose enculturation is radically different from the culture they inhabit. These individuals need a very good anthropologist more than they need to talk to a "head shrink." But the failure in society to recognize that human beings are programmed by specific cultures is, in and of itself, a source of many social (and personal) ills. People don't recognize where they are coming from or where those other people are coming from, so to speak. We are individuals, yes, but our individual consciousness is connected to a variety of cultural influences, with the strongest likely to be those experienced in our youth. You don't have to be Ishi to experience being drowned in an alien culture and not understanding the way others think or how to clearly communicate with a minimum of misunderstanding. So, I guess what we really need is for some anthropologists to put up their shingles and get the word out. Cultural therapy now available. If you're experiencing alienation and you know you're of a very different culture than the one you're living and/or working within, then you may not need psycho therapy (and certainly not the drugs that most psychiatrists turn to as a first resort!). You need to get in tune with the cultural alienation you're experiencing, figure out how to cope with the dissonance caused by not understanding the dynamics of the culture you're alienated from, and learn some coping mechanisms (which might very well meaning learning how to think a bit more like an anthropologist yourself -- recognize that the natives are not like you and that you are not like them and that's okay).