Language and culture
Why counselling in your first language is different work
· 4 min read · Ravi Teja, RCC
Describing what happened in a second language and actually being understood are not the same task. For many people in Surrey, being able to speak in the language they think and feel in is the difference between the two.
People who are entirely fluent in English still sometimes find that therapy in English does not quite work. That is not a failure of vocabulary. It is that the language you learned to feel in and the language you learned to explain yourself in are often not the same one, and therapy asks for the first.
Translating costs you something
Working in a second language adds a step between the feeling and the sentence. Most of the time that step is invisible. In a counselling session it is not, because the material that matters most tends to be the least rehearsed — grief, shame, the thing you have never said out loud — and it is exactly that material that arrives in a first language and has to be carried across.
What gets lost in the carrying is rarely the facts. It is the register. The word that has the right weight in Punjabi has a near-equivalent in English that is slightly too mild or slightly too clinical, and the account that comes out is accurate and somehow not true.
The part that is about culture rather than language
There is a second thing, and it is separate from vocabulary. Culture shapes what families talk about and what they do not — around marriage, around duty, around what counts as a problem worth taking to a stranger at all. Explaining that context before you can even begin on the problem is work, and it is work done while already struggling.
Not having to explain why a decision was never only yours to make is not a small convenience. It is a large part of the hour handed back to you.
What this looks like here
Sessions are available in more than one language across this practice, and the list of which is on the about page. It is kept deliberately precise: a language is listed only where a full session can actually be conducted in it, never where it is merely understood. Anything else would be a promise that breaks at the moment it matters.
If you are not sure whether the language you would rather use is available, ask before booking. It costs nothing and it is a reasonable thing to want to know first.