ABSTRACT
As a social worker by profession, I (TP) learned from the start of my career the importance of valuing and respecting a person’s culture, gender, developmental stage, sexual orientation, religion, and every other part of a human being that makes up the uniqueness of his or her essence. However, I will never forget that moment in graduate school when I first realized how easy it is, when focused so intently on learning every possible classification of demographic differences, to succumb to the all-too-human trait of generalizing accepted information about a group of people and no longer recognizing or truly valuing the uniqueness of the human being in front of me, undermining the very efforts of understanding and respecting differences. On this occasion we were asked to write a case study about a client from our internship and to include details about how treatment should be modified according to the client’s ethnicity, gender, etc. When I thought about this client, I realized how different she was from the stereotypical information I was learning in school. As I talked to my clients, I realized how unique each one was, and how inaccurate my assumptions would have been had I used the general information about their identified culture as a foundation for understanding them. Although some of what I was learning was accurate for a few of my clients, it began to make more sense to assume nothing and simply ask my clients directly.
