Language In Therapeutic Relationship And Communication

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The role of language is crucial to every aspect and interaction in our everyday lives. Language enables us to create principles and schemas to construct reality, reflect identity and circulate subjective experience (Witkins, 2011). The importance of language is also vital in psychotherapy. It is through language that client and therapist connect and communicate. Despite its crucial role, there is still limited research on how language interaction between therapist and client can shape the therapeutic relationship and communication. The struggles of bilingual clients and the implications on therapy often go unnoticed. This study will aim to understand some of the issues in treating bilingual clients from bilingual therapists’ experiences. This …show more content…
Depending on the language(s) a person chooses to communicate in, these experiences are felt and understood differently. It has been argued that individuals who speak in two different languages (bilingual), may have some more advanced cognitive abilities such as adaptation, intellectual elasticity and creativity as they often have to overcome linguistic and cultural obstacles (Lee et al., 2010). As bilingual individuals process two lexicons, they have the ability to feel and think in both languages by developing different organisational skills to cope with each language. Although translation from one language to the other happens automatically for bilingual individuals, this does not mean it is an effortless process as they constantly have to operate in cross culturally informed realities (Panayiotou, 2002). According to Iannaco (2009), translation can challenge early attachment relationships to the mother tongue and lead to unconscious internal conflicts. Different emotional and cognitive experiences are closely linked to words of the language they were acquired in. Therefore, these experiences are stored and more easily accessed from within the language in which they were primarily encoded. This is the case even for individuals who are fluent in two or more languages (Alessi, 2000, Kokaliari, 2011).

In addition, it has been noted that translating an individual’s experience from the language which it occurred to a different language often results in less details and more discrepancies (Schauf, 2002). Research on bilingualism argues that bilingual individuals have a dual sense of self. Each linguistic self within this dual self has different ways of perceiving and interacting with the world (Foster, 1992). Therefore, the use of one or more languages in therapy invites different parts of the self to be
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