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Raising awareness about multilingualism in psychotherapy

Dewaele and Costa’s award-winning research (Equality and Diversity Research Award from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy in 2013) has led to a number of impacts in the field of counselling and psychotherapy:

  • It improved training materials and influenced changing practices in psychotherapy with patients whose mother tongue is not English.
  • It informed advocacy activities of Mothertongue and the Victoria Climbie Foundation.
  • It inspired the development of an anthology of stories and a play performed in London’s West End.

The project received a special commendation from the Birkbeck Public Engagement and Research Impact committee in the category 'Engaged Practice' (2018).

Summary

  • Jean-Marc Dewaele, Professor in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism and Director of the CMMR, and Dr Beverley Costa, Senior Practioner Fellow in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication and former CEO and clinical director of Mothertongue, a charity offering multi-ethnic counselling, undertook award-winning research on the problems facing patients of other languages seeking psychotherapy or counselling in English, a foreign language.
  • The research considered beliefs, attitudes and practices of monolingual and multilingual therapists with their multilingual patients (cf. Iannaco, 2009). The collaboration started after Beverley Costa read Dewaele (2010) and contacted the author to start a joint research project on multilingualism and emotions in in the context of psychotherapy.
  • Increasing numbers of multilingual people seek counselling and psychotherapy in a system that is rooted in a monolingual ideology. Despite these numbers, there is very little training for therapists and counsellors that equips them to treat multilingual patients. These patients who do not have English as a first (L1) language can find that language barriers get in the way of the help they need. With the ultimate aim of improving the way in which foreign language (LX) users of English can access and receive appropriate therapeutic help, Dewaele and Costa considered the beliefs, attitudes and practices of monolingual and multilingual therapists with their multilingual patients. They explored and compared the way in which monolingual and multilingual therapists work with clients who do not have English as their first language. They found that therapists were anxious about their ability to work with multilingual patients.

Outputs and outcomes

  • The resulting publication (Costa and Dewaele, 2012) won the Equality and Diversity Research Award (2013) from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.
  • Following publications have focused on the patients (Dewaele and Costa, 2013; Rolland et al., 2017) and on ways to overcome the problem by providing adequate training to therapists (Costa, 2017).
  • Further research has provided evidence that awareness raising has significant effects on participants in the training sessions (Bager-Charleson et al., 2017; Costa and Dewaele, 2018). The confidence and multilingual awareness of counsellors and therapists improved and they felt able to use multilingualism as a therapeutic asset in the treatment of trauma and other presenting issues.
  • Further research is ongoing with two PhD dissertations on the topic (Rolland, 2019; Cook, in progress).

References

  • Costa, B. & Dewaele, J.-M. (2018) The talking cure – building the core skills and the confidence of counsellors and psychotherapists to work effectively with multilingual patients through training and supervision. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research. Doi: 10.1002/capr.12187
  • Bager-Charleson, S., Dewaele, J-M., Costa, B. and Kasap, Z. (2017) A Multilingual Outlook: Can Awareness-Raising about Multilingualism Affect Therapists’ Practice? A Mixed-Method Evaluation. Language and Psychoanalysis 6(2), 56-75.
  • Cook, S. (in progress) The impact and functions of a later learned language on survivors of torture in the context of a therapeutic community. PhD dissertation.
  • Costa, B. (2017) Team Effort – Training Therapists to Work with Interpreters as a Collaborative Team. The International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling 39, 56–69.
  • Costa, B. and Dewaele, J.-M. (2012) Psychotherapy across languages: beliefs, attitudes and practices of monolingual and multilingual therapists with their multilingual patients. Language and Psychoanalysis 1, 19-40. After winning the Equality and Diversity Research Award (2013) from the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, it was revised and reprinted in Counselling and Psychotherapy Research 2014, 14 (3), 235-244.
  • Costa, B. and Dewaele, J.-M. (2018) The talking cure – building the core skills and the confidence of counsellors and psychotherapists to work effectively with multilingual patients through training and supervision. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research Doi: 10.1002/capr.12187
  • Dewaele, J.-M. (2010) Emotions in multiple languages. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan (2nd revised edition in paperback in 2013).
  • Dewaele, J.-M. and Costa, B. (2013) Multilingual clients’ experience of psychotherapy. Language and Psychoanalysis 2(2), 31-50.
  • Dewaele, J.-M. and Costa, B. (2014) A cross-disciplinary and multi-method approach of multilingualism in psychotherapy. In S. Bager-Charleson (ed.), A reflexive approach. Doing practice-based research in therapy. London: Sage, pp. 28-37.
  • Iannaco, G. (2009) Wor(l)ds in translation–Mother tongue and foreign language in psychodynamic practice. Psychodynamic Practice, 15(3), 261–274.
  • Rolland, L. (2019) Multilingual selves in psychotherapy: a mixed methods study of multilingual clients’ experiences in relation to language practices. Birkbeck, unpublished PhD dissertation.
  • Rolland, L., Dewaele, J.-M. and Costa, B. (2017) Multilingualism and psychotherapy: Exploring multilingual clients' experiences of language practices in psychotherapy. Special issue Adult multilingualism: processes and practices. International Journal of Multilingualism 14(1), 69-85.