Madihin as a culturally embedded community helping practice: developing a provisional Madihin Indigenous Counseling Framework

Indigenous cultural traditions can provide culturally familiar spaces for guidance, reflection, and social connection, yet their potential contribution to community-based helping remains insufficiently explored. This study examines how the Madihin tradition functions as a culturally embedded community helping practice and develops the Madihin Indigenous Counseling Framework (MICF) as a provisional conceptualization of the helping processes observed within this tradition. A qualitative interpretive case study was conducted in Tembilahan, Riau Province, Indonesia, involving pemadihin, community members, cultural practitioners, and local leaders. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis and interpreted using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings identify five themes: respectful communication, the facilitative role of the pemadihin, collective narrative, community participation and shared reflection, and the continuing relevance of messages and reported meaning-making. Participants reported remembering particular messages, relating them to everyday experiences, and sometimes continuing discussions after performances. Field observations showed attentive listening, laughter, verbal responses, shifts in attention, and quieter moments as performances moved from humorous to more reflective parts. These findings informed the development of the Madihin Indigenous Counseling Framework (MICF), which organizes culturally embedded helping-related processes as a provisional and context-specific conceptualization. The framework does not treat Madihin as equivalent to professional counseling or claim established psychological, behavioral, or therapeutic effects.