This small-scale qualitative study explores the role multilingualism plays in in the therapeutic experience of refugee torture survivors, within a supportive community. Fifteen community members were interviewed. The findings reveal that using English, a later-learned language for all of the interviewees, had unintended consequences contributing to positive therapeutic outcomes.
Increasingly interdisciplinary research (Costa & Dewaele, 2012, 2013, 2018; Rolland, Costa & Dewaele, 2017) shows the importance of considering multilingualism in the therapeutic context. However, few studies examine the language experiences of refugees in psychotherapy ( Dewaele & Costa, 2013) and none explore such experiences in group settings. To this end, this research explores the therapeutic implications of multilingualism in a therapeutic community, within a vulnerable population. The 'detachment effect' (Marcos,1976) of a later- learned language or 'disembodied cognition' (Pavlenko, 2012) can be liberating for the individual, facilitating emotional expression and the recall of difficult, traumatic experiences. This has implications for psychotherapy with people who have been traumatised within a particular language context: acquiring another, foreign language may offer a reparative and healing space (Iannaco, 2009; Byford, 2015). The micro-context of the study is a community-based, therapeutic, human rights charity in London, supporting torture survivors. Fifteen members of the community, all sequential multilinguals, took part in semi-structured interviews conducted in English. The interview questions explored the interviewees' language experiences, for example: how it felt to use a later-learned language (LX, Dewaele, 2010) when talking about traumatic experiences in therapy sessions and regarding their sense of self, i.e. if it differed or remained the same, depending on the language being used. Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, 1996) was used to describe, analyse and interpret the data. The findings reveal that during therapy sessions, using the LX, enabled the participants to disclose and bear witness to their traumatic experiences. The findings reveal that during therapy sessions, using the LX, enabled the participants to disclose and bear witness to their traumatic experiences (Cook S.R.& Dewaele J.M., 2021). Moreover, in people who had experienced sexuality-persecution and women who had experienced sex-trafficking, the LX was experienced as a tool with which to [re]invent and 'perform' a new self. Findings speak to the value of bringing awareness of multilingualism into the therapeutic setting and support an embodied perspective (Pavlenko, 2012) of multilingualism.
