Bilingual clients keep describing the same experience to me, each in their own way. They can talk about a divorce, a diagnosis, or the death of a parent perfectly well in English, and yet something is missing. The words are right, but the feeling is not in them.
California has more of these clients than anywhere else in the country. The US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey puts the share of Californians aged five and over who speak Spanish at home at 28.8%, about 10.8 million people, and 39.4% of them say they speak English less than “very well”. I work as a private pay therapist in California, seeing clients online in English and Spanish, so a large part of my week is spent in the space between the two languages. That space matters more than most people assume, and studies showing that bilinguals become less creative when they think in a second language hint at how much quietly changes when someone swaps one language for another.
The second language works like a pair of oven gloves
Bilingual speakers have been describing this for decades, and researchers have taken them seriously. Aneta Pavlenko’s work on emotion and multilingualism documents speakers who find their first language more emotionally charged and their second more distant. In 2012, Boaz Keysar and colleagues at the University of Chicago reported that people reasoning in a foreign language were less swayed by framing biases, an effect they put down to greater emotional distance.
In the consulting room, that distance cuts both ways. A client who learnt English at school can describe the worst year of her life in English with remarkable composure. The composure is real, but it also works like a pair of oven gloves: she can pick up the hot thing without feeling it. A clinician who mistakes that composure for resolution will close a door that never opened.
The client who translates is doing three jobs at once
A client who translates themselves in session is feeling something, converting it, and watching how the converted version lands, all at once. The third job crowds out the first. What reaches the clinician is a tidy summary, written by the part of the client that is most practised at being understood.
Some words never survive the trip. Aguantar means something closer to enduring with dignity than to putting up with, and a whole family history can sit inside it. Desahogarse names the relief of finally letting something out, and English needs a full sentence to say the same thing. By the time a client has stopped to explain words like these, they have already stepped back from them.
This is the whole case for therapy in Spanish with the same clinician rather than therapy through an interpreter: nobody translates, so nothing gets smoothed out. Clients who search for terapia en español en Los Ángeles are rarely looking for a translator. They want someone who already knows what aguantar costs.
Code-switching is clinical information, not noise
Language switches in session carry meaning. Many of my bilingual clients begin in English, the language of work and competence, and move into Spanish when the subject turns to family, faith, or shame. The switch often marks the moment a conversation stops being a report and becomes an experience. I note where it happens and what the client was talking about just before it, because that is usually where the work is.
Bilingual couples show the same pattern in a sharper form. One partner argues in the language of the office, the other answers in the language of the kitchen, and each hears the other as either cold or overwhelming. Neither is wrong about what they hear. They are listening to two different registers, and a third person who follows both can slow the conversation down enough for each of them to be understood.
Monolingual clinicians can still close most of the gap
Clinicians who work in one language can still do a great deal. Asking which language a client counts in, prays in, and swears in tells you where the feeling lives. Inviting the original word, and watching the pause before the explanation, often reveals more than the explanation itself.
Fluent composure about a painful subject deserves to be treated as a question rather than an answer. A sudden switch into another language in the middle of a sentence deserves a gentle enquiry, not a polite move past it. And when the work keeps stalling in the same place, referring the client to a clinician who works in their first language may be the most useful intervention available.
The first language holds the first wounds
Childhood happens in the language of home. The criticism that still stings, the nickname that still warms, and the phrase a grandmother used at the worst possible moment were all learnt before the second language arrived. Therapy carried out entirely in a second language can make real progress on adult problems while leaving the oldest material untouched, simply because it was never spoken in the room.
Clients rarely notice this themselves. They report that therapy helped, that they understand themselves better, and that one particular ache has not moved. When we return to that ache in Spanish, the account changes. Details appear that were never mentioned before, the tone drops, and the story is suddenly being told by the person who lived it rather than by the person who learnt to explain it.
FAQs
- Why do emotions feel weaker in a second language? A language learnt later in life, often at school, tends to carry less emotional charge than the language of childhood. Research on emotion and multilingualism shows that many bilingual speakers feel more distant from painful material when they describe it in their second language.
- What is code-switching in therapy? It is when a client moves between languages during a session. The switch often happens when the subject turns to family, faith, or shame, and it can show the clinician where the most important material lies.
- Why can therapy through an interpreter miss things? Every translation smooths something out, and some words, such as aguantar or desahogarse, carry meanings that English needs a whole sentence to explain. Working with a clinician who speaks the client’s first language means nothing has to be converted on the way.
- How can a monolingual therapist help a bilingual client? They can ask which language the client counts, prays, and swears in, invite the original word for important feelings, and gently explore any switch of language. If the work keeps stalling, a referral to a clinician who works in the client’s first language may help.
- Can therapy in a second language still work? Yes. It can make real progress on adult problems, but the oldest childhood material may stay untouched because it was first experienced, and first put into words, in the language of home.
