It is highly valued that psycho-therapists should be competent in multicultural issues in counseling process. However there has been a lack of awareness among the counseling professionals regarding cultural differences between various ethnicities since 1960s. Therefore a kind of new counseling approach which was more appropriate to minority clients’ experiences should be developed. Under globalization, more and more women have been migrating into Taiwanese society by marriage. These women, named as “female new immigrants”, mainly come from Mainland China and Southeast Asia countries. Their population grew from almost 8,000 in 1998 to around 556,000 in 2019. These women have been observed encountering multiple difficulties from cultural adjustment to discrimination. Their lives in the new home might be overshadowed by the association of their marriages with commodification, marriage agent’s intervention, negative media images of “foreign brides”, traditional gender norms, and racialization. Hence the welfare of female new immigrants is in urgent need of full attention. They might need help or services from counseling psychologists, but there is not so much discussion of counseling training regarding multicultural counseling competencies in Taiwan. The issue is a matter of concern for counseling professionals, and this paper thus explores the counseling experiences of 7 counseling psychologists with these women. The focus is mainly on the useful principles related to counseling practice with female new immigrant clients. The qualitative data was collected from a multicultural counseling perspective and was analyzed using Thematic Analysis method. First, it is found that it is not easy for female new immigrants to access counseling services mainly because of language barrier. Second, five counseling principles have been generated: (1) Simple and straight forward language should be conducted especially while reflecting emotion and structuring; (2) While understanding these women’s presenting issues, their life context in Taiwan as well as their native culture need to be equally taken into account; (3) Cultural sensitivity is highly recommended to be enhanced by all counseling psychologists. The useful ways may include continuously receiving supervision, taking relative courses, or adapting the systematic approach in counseling; (4) Empowering female new immigrant clients by emphasizing their self-efficacy, recognizing their strength, using their native culture (such as art or language), valuing their learning abilities, and allowing autonomy; and (5) Collaborating with social workers who have expertise in assisting female new immigrant clients to liaison with counseling psychologists, in adopting out-ofoffice strategies to facilitate supportive systems, as well as in benefiting clients by locating more social resources. This paper finally put forward five recommendations of how multicultural counseling practice should be formulated specifically benefit new female immigrants: (1) Cross-professional collaboration between counseling professionals and social welfare systems should be developed so that female new immigrants can have the chance to be referred to the counseling psychologists and receive appropriate services; (2) it is necessary to include multicultural issues (racial and ethnic group should be contained) in the counseling training programs for the sake of increasing counseling psychologists’ competencies and then they can work well with clients from different cultures; (3) counseling psychologists should improve the skill of out-of-office so that they can exercise institutional intervention when necessary; (4) the professional skills of reflection of feelings should be reframed diversely and flexibly in order that counseling psychologists can appropriately show empathy to female new immigrant clients; and (5) it is required to set resources of counseling interpreters so that the female new immigrants who are not fluent in Chinese or Taiwanese can receive counseling services as well.
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