Why You Should Do Therapy in a Foreign Language
On how I healed my relationship with a new country and myself
Culture shock is democratic. It spares no one—not even a psychology student on her first move to Portugal for an exchange program.
On my first day at Universidade de Lisboa in October 2015, I quickly discovered that all my classes would be in Portuguese.
Now, for anyone who has ever listened to European Portuguese—no, it sounds nothing like Spanish or Italian!
To make things more challenging, professors weren’t going to make exceptions for the handful of us Erasmus students in their classrooms.
Let me be clear: I don’t blame them. But there was clearly a logistical issue if students were sent to a foreign university without being required to know the language beforehand, and without classes being offered in English.
(Looking back, I’d later discover that this was also part of the Erasmus experience—which I ended up loving with every inch of my heart!)
Therefore, as soon as I arrived, I threw myself into learning Portuguese.
I enrolled in an intensive course—four hours a day, every day for a month
I started reading books in Portuguese. Tried speaking with local students. Later on, I even took private lessons. All the steps you’d expect a good girl who had long crossed the border into perfectionism would take—I took them all.
Despite all my efforts, my adaptation curve never seemed to go past the slope. Or at least, reach the plateau phase.
My brain was going through an adjustment process that would take far longer than the couple of weeks of the A1 Portuguese course!
There was no way to speed it up1.
Navigating a new educational system added to the overwhelm:
The Portuguese approach—full of group assignments and in-class presentations—was a world apart from the formal Italian system, exclusively based on independent study. Before then, I had never once presented a project in front of a class, and now I was required to do it in Portuguese or English!
Then, there was the stress of finding accommodation (the one I had booked remotely had ended up not working-out), the time needed to form new friendships with other students, the pressure to secure my final-year traineeship, and... and... and!
The blow to my pride as a high-achieving student now struggling to feel competent in a foreign country, had me wondering—as I crunched kilometers on the sidewalks lisboetas—if I had ever been capable at all!
After four months, my anxiety had peaked
I was crying over the phone with my mom after every class, spending long nights in the library trying to figure out what each new assignment required of me, and often dealing with my emotions through food. I will never forget the pipoca doce (sweet popcorn) sold at the main metro stations, which I voraciously devoured to silence my angst while heading home most nights of the week.
Thankfully, as a psychology student, it didn’t take me long to recognize that I could really use support from a therapist.
I went on the internet and, soon enough, found a local therapist who offered sessions in English
Exactly what I needed!
She would see me on Monday afternoons at her studio in a historic building in the heart of Lisbon.
To get there, I had to climb six flights of stairs, and when I arrived at the top, I would often struggle to catch my breath while greeting her with “Olá, tudo bem?” or, more often, “Hi, how are you?”
We had agreed that the sessions would be in English, which I felt more comfortable with than Portuguese—afterall, the latter was the language partly responsible for the situation that had brought me there in the first place!
Those four or five months turned out to be incredibly beneficial.
I learned a lot about myself, my ability to overcome challenges, and I left Portugal feeling absolutely in love with the country—one that would grow to feel like a second home.
Many years later, I found myself holding virtual sessions with my therapist again during another difficult period. By then, my Portuguese had reached a C1 level—especially after moving to Lisbon a second time for my Master’s degree—but when it came to introspective work, my chosen lingua franca had remained English, with occasional bursts of Portuguese and Italian.
Today, I’m the biggest supporter of doing therapy in a foreign language
… Even when you don’t speak it at a high level!
It can be beneficial in so many ways:
First, it allows you to distance yourself from the norms and values typically associated with your culture.
I’ve written before about the values I gained and others I let go of when I started dating my American partner and began spending considerable time in the U.S.
People who live or travel abroad often refer to the therapeutic effect of being catapulted into a place where they are no longer bound by the expectations and assumptions of their home culture.
Doing therapy with someone from a different cultural background amplifies this feeling—you can explain the values tied to your upbringing to your therapist, negotiate new ones, and feel less confined by the norms that shaped you—norms that, for many people, can feel limiting.
As
summarizes in her post:
Second, you can redefine yourself anew.
Living abroad and choosing to do therapy in English gave me the opportunity to create a new version of myself.
Speaking English and Portuguese during that pivotal period of my life allowed me to patch together pieces of my personality that felt more aligned with the person I was becoming in these new cultural contexts.
As
mentions in her experience as an expat in France:“For those who, like me, have lived in different countries and interacted with diverse cultures, multilingualism adds colorful tiles to the identity mosaic.”
Referring to studies such as those by cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, she adds:
“Various studies have shown that each language represents not only a channel of communication but, above all, a way of thinking and seeing the world.”
For me, each language I picked up along my journey carries a distinct emotional and cognitive imprint:
I associate speaking English with confidence and self-empowerment.
Portuguese with romanticism and a mind-wandering quality.
And Italian with humor and straightforwardness.
Finally, it’s a way to reconcile with your new cultural context.
in her article Why Most Expats Fail: Living Abroad Won’t Solve Your Problems shares why, in her opinion, most people who move abroad eventually throw in the towel. She says:“They cannot adapt to their surroundings, letting others' opinions influence what they do. The number one reason is that their internal world is crumbling. They are essentially running from their problems instead of embracing them head-on.
It is never the country; it is always you.”
In my case, speaking English in my therapeutic setting was a way of patching things up with my Portuguese experience. English became the bridge—not my native language, weighed down by solidified norms and habits, and not the language of the brand-new context I was in.
The good news is that one doesn’t necessarily have to speak three languages to experience this!
You can create a language of your own—a blend of your mother tongue and the new language—where you intuitively pull words from either system, choosing those that best capture your current experience.
Regarding this, I found interesting the approach that
proposes in her essay The Myth of Untranslatable Words:“In (my) ideal world, language unites, brings people together, lost-in-translation moments are opportunities to connect, to go beyond the spoken, signed, written word and to simply, communicate. Yes, there is nuance and cultural significance but rather than calling them “untranslatable words” and marvelling about how there is one word for this or that in another language but not our own, perhaps the solution is to start incorporating these words into our every-day vernacular when we are looking for that one, perfect word. Translanguaging!”
Overall, I’m incredibly grateful for the experience of doing therapy in a foreign language.
I truly believe that speaking another language can be a form of therapy in itself—it allows us to step outside the boundaries of our native culture, redefine ourselves and our values, and explore aspects of our identity we didn’t know.
Now, I’m curious to hear from you:
Have you ever tried, or would you consider trying, therapy in a different language?
Or
That’s all from me this week. I’ll see you again next week!
Yours,
Caterina
And beware the YouTube videos that tell you otherwise, i.e., promise you to speak fluently a language in a week!
Oh that must have been quite the experience being thrust into your classes all in Portuguese! Good for you for embracing the moment.
I find this whole third culture concept fascinating, I guess because I have lived it for a long time.
Interesting approach, and I loved reading about your experience and all those recommendations.
I had a bit of a reverse experience once, I had some family related issues and I looked for a therapist in my native tongue (after living for 18 years abroad), thinking I could understand better my native culture, the family members who lived there still, etc. But it wasn't successful at all, I felt like a stranger, the therapist was from a culture I wasn't part of anymore, there were multiple barriers. It's an important topic to think about when you choose your therapist, depending on the situation to solve as well.