Therapy in a second language

[Alonso]

I'm a bilingual Spanish man, I'm fluent in English. I'd like to discuss experiences of having therapy, any kind of therapy, in a second language. I'm using the word therapy in the broadest possible sense here, I'm including things like writing a post in this forum or playing a song that expresses your emotions.

I'll start with a summary of the history of my "formal" therapy:

• Spain 1991-2008: I visited my first therapist when I was 14. Back then my goal was just to overcome my painful shyness, CSA was not even remotely in my mind. I just attended four sessions with that therapist. For the next 16 years I visited an assortment of therapists, including psychiatrists and psychologists, but never very consistently, about one session a month on average. All these sessions were in Spanish.
• Ireland 2008-2013: In 2008 I moved to Ireland and for the first time in my life I attended standard weekly therapy sessions for extended periods. These sessions were in English and lasted about five years, including a period of about four years with the same therapist, who was the first person to whom I told about my CSA.
• Spain 2013-Present: For the last five years I've had several periods of weekly therapy, again with several therapists. Each of these periods lasted a few months, never more than a year. I only started to discuss often my CSA with the last of these therapists.

Intuitively I would say that therapy in my mother tongue is easier, and that the communication flows better when the therapist and I share the same mother tongue. However, I've been wondering if that's really the case. As you can see from my summarized history, I only started "proper" formal therapy after moving to Ireland, when therapy was only available in English. With hindsight I have come to identify serious shortcomings in my Irish therapy, but still, I achieved much more in these five years of therapy in English than in the previous sixteen years of therapy in Spanish. The progress I made in my last stint of therapy in Spanish seems comparable to my stint of therapy in English, but then again, it looks like it was my stint in English the one that opened the way for that progress.

Trying to understand the reason for this I have identified two factors that seem relevant: First, for most of my life English felt like a made up language, a language "out of reality" that for some weird reason they wanted to teach me in school, but nobody needed in real life. Actually, for most of my life English was useless indeed. I didn't travel abroad until I was 28. At that age I was already fluent in English, but I had used that fluency mainly for entertainment purposes, I had barely used it in "real life". The fact that I had never been out of my own country contributed greatly to my feeling that English was "not real". Back then I still associated it only with school lessons, songs, movies, etc., and, to some degree, I'd say I still do.

Second, like so many survivors of CSA, I suffer a serious case of dissociation. That means that I disconnect from my emotions when I talk about abuse and related topics. A former therapist compared the tone I use to describe the abuse I've suffered with the tone others use to discuss the weather. In other words, when I talk about this I dettach from reality.

There seems to be a connection here. It makes sense to use a language (English) that I perceive as dettached from reality to discuss a topic where I myself dettach from reality. Maybe that's the reason why I only dared to start "proper" weekly therapy in English. Maybe I was too scared to discuss CSA in Spanish because if I did it would feel too real, and I needed an "unreal", "made up" language to acquire the courage to talk about it.

This idea is supported by a much more extreme case of using a foreign language to express my feelings about CSA: Rammstein and the German language. Rammstein is a German metal band, almost all of their songs are in German. I discovered them by chance around 2006 and they quickly became my favourite band in spite of the fact that I don't speak German at all. For some reason I would listen to their songs over and over again, to the point that I could almost "sing" them without having the faintest idea of what I was saying. It took me two or three years to look for the lyrics and their translations. When I finally did, I was surprised to discover that many of them were about CSA or similar topics (including one about the extremely triggering Fritzl case). Still, this was years before I managed to acknowledge my own CSA. It looks like a part of me had somehow managed to understand the meaning of the German songs and used them to express all my anger and my grief in a way that nobody, not even myself, could understand.

Note: This topic is a sort of spin off from another topic about resources in Spanish.

 

[PRFL]

Hola, Alonso (nuevamente), Saludos!

My experience is somewhat similar to yours in that I started my therapy due to loneliness, shyness, while still living in PR, I was in my mid twenties, but then I moved to the States, where I continued my therapy in English, it was mostly focused on my unwanted same sex attraction. With time, I explored other areas like growing up in an alcoholic home, co-dependency, and eventually, CSA, I've also been to men's workshops focusing in masculinity in general, with all kinds of issues including CSA, substance abuse, etc. So I became very proficient in using English to do my recovery work. Since I left PR over 30 years ago, my Spanish has become a bit rusty, and I have some difficulty expressing concepts like "recovery" or "healing" in Spanish, it just doesn't sound the same to me, but conversely, sometimes a colloquial expression in the original Spanish hits the spot in a way English can not. I can't recall a specific example right now, but you can understand that to say "camaron que se duerme, se lo lleva la corriente" is not the same as "a crab that falls asleep gets swept away by the current" (English speakers, the expression is simlilar to "you snooze, you lose"). I'm fortunate that I have currently a bilingual counselor, also from the island, so I can easily switch back and forth as needed. This may be significant because I'm being evaluated for possible EMDR treatment, and I suppose I'll have to talk about my original abuse in my original language, something that I find it incredibly difficult to do, hence that's why I need to do it if I want to heal from it.
To me, English is a very useful language, very adaptable and flexible, Spanish is beautiful and can express some emotional things better, but it's somewhat cumbersome as I need to say or write longer, more complicated words to say the same thing. I think I understand your predicament, so I can try helping out. I'm not sure of the etiquette about posting threads in Spanish, because I'm concerned that they would be hard to monitor, besides, here in the US at least, some people feel uncomfortable hearing other languages and think it's rude, so I'll take guidance from the moderators for now.
The more I think about it, the more I think that working in my original language may help me connect with that part of my life that I try to avoid, so I thank you for bringing this up.
Take care, un abrazo fraternal, hermano!

 

[Alonso]

I just sent you a private message. Since the only Spanish speakers so far are just the two of us, I think private messages are the best way of communicating in Spanish for the time being. If other Spanish speakers show up we can consider creating a thread or a subforum in Spanish.

Unlike most Spanish people, I always feel more confident speaking English than Spanish. That applies to all areas of my life, not just therapy. For instance, these days I attend regularly a language exchange in my area where I meet Americans, Spaniards, and people from other countries, and we speak both English and Spanish. As we switch languages I always notice how my self confidence increases when we switch to English and decreases when we switch back to Spanish. The reason seems to be that for me speaking English is a way of dissociating. In English everything feels less real, so I perceive less danger. If something goes wrong in English, it doesn't feel as bad as it does in Spanish because what "happens in English" doesn't feel very real in the first place. I imagine it must be quite different for you after thirty years living in and English speaking environment, though.