Organised by Dr Louise Rolland, 'Engaging with Multilingualism in Psychotherapy', a workshop for mental health practitioners and applied linguistics researchers took place at Birkbeck College, University of London, on 8 January 2020.
Programme
- Jean-Marc Dewaele (Birkbeck, University of London): Multilingualism, intercultural communication and emotion
- Louise Rolland & Sally Cook (Birkbeck, University of London): Client perspectives: the role of multilingualism in the therapeutic journey
- Chrysa Chlomisiou (University of Leicester): Bilingual therapists’ experiences of language switching in therapy
- Leigh Gardner (University of Salford): Counselling in English as an additional language
- Beverley Costa (Birkbeck, University of London & Pasalo): Case examples of psychotherapy across languages
- Panel: future directions for research and practice
Report
The workshop was attended by 22 people – including at least 15 mental health practitioners and four applied linguists – in addition to the five speakers. Feedback was extremely positive, with the workshop rated 9.2 /10 on average in terms of “how useful the session was for [their] work”. Specifically, learning points which attendees planned to use in their future practice, research, or teaching included:
- “the aspects of self in multilingual subjects”
- “to continue applying the open conversations about language”
- “a better client’s perspective”
- “a better understanding of the need to raise awareness about the specificity of cross-language therapy”
- “talk about the talking”
- “resources related to multilinguistic counselors’ perspective”
- “I will be using all of this information and read more in order to highlight importance of the issue to my students and therapist colleagues”
- “being aware of power balance in sessions; giving clients a choice re language”
- “the importance and the irrelevance of language”
- “a lot of stimulation for further research”
- “creative ways to communicate”
- “very useful insights on current approaches to psychotherapy and the role of language”
- “heart and head; importance of being rooted”
Several attendees also volunteered topics which they would like to see at future events:
- “mentioning the aspects of bias and assumptions (conscious and unconscious)”
- “working from a multilingual model in supervision (clinical supervision)
- “the view of monolingual therapists and monolingual ideologies”
- “more about pure identity issues of migrants (not just) language even those are critical [unclear]”
- “more training material”
- “clients’ reflection on their therapeutic experience”
- “AI interference with the therapy cause”, “more cases shown and discussed”
- “more cross-cultural, ethnographic settings”
Asked whether they thought their organisation would benefit from further training in this area, with a view to discussing the possibility of arranging this subject to future funding, eight people agreed and provided contact details, of whom six were from therapeutic services and training organisations.