Therapy in your mother tongue — more than a comfort

A patient who speaks fluent German and has lived in Berlin for twenty years once said to me: “I can talk about my father in German, but I can’t feel him in German.” We switched into Turkish. Within two minutes we were in a different place.

Language isn’t just information

Psycholinguistic research is fairly unambiguous here: emotionally loaded memories — especially from childhood and adolescence — are often encoded in the language in which they happened. If your father shouted at you in Turkish or Arabic or Russian, then anger, fear and shame live in that language. You can talk about it in English — as a report. But the memory itself lives elsewhere.

For therapy this means: when we work in a second language, you translate. You’re constantly in a mini-mode of “what’s the word for that in English?”, “how do I explain my family to this person?”, “does she even understand?”. That costs cognitive resources which are actually needed in therapy for other things: for feeling, for remembering, for the slow unpacking.

What the mother tongue makes different

In the mother tongue this translation layer falls away. Patients who work in their first language often arrive faster at emotional core points. Some cry for the first time in a session. Some say things they have never said in their second language, because they simply lacked the vocabulary. Others laugh — because humour is easier in the mother tongue and laughter in therapy is an important tool.

This doesn’t mean that therapy in a second language is “worse” for multilingual people. It is different. Nor does it mean everything always has to happen in the mother tongue. With many of my patients we switch by topic: work, identity in a German context, discrimination — these can often be discussed better in German because they are lived there. But family, childhood, death, loss, shame — these often live in the first language.

What you can clarify for yourself

• In which language do I dream? That’s a good indicator of where your emotional centre lies.
• In which language do I swear when I’m alone? If the answer is different from the therapy language, it’s worth talking about.
• Do I feel I need to explain myself? In good cross-cultural therapy you should feel that your world doesn’t have to be translated first before it arrives.

What this looks like in practice

In my practice we speak German, English, Turkish, and Arabic conversationally (or with an interpreter for deeper topics). My impression after ten years in practice: multilingualism in therapy isn’t a comfort, it is often the difference between “I talked about it” and “I worked it through”.

If you are unsure whether your themes would be better held in your mother tongue — say so in the first consultation. We can try both, you will quickly notice the difference yourself.