Monolingual therapists’ views and experiences of working with multilingual clients: An exploratory study

Abstract

AbstractAlthough much attention has been paid in recent years to culture and diversity, cross‐lingual issues in the counselling room have not been given the consideration they deserve. This field is under‐researched in the UK, particularly from the monolingual counsellor's perspective, and often focuses on working with interpreters or addressing communication barriers. This brief study sets out to explore the experiences of monolingual therapists in the UK when working with proficient multilingual clients, trying to find out whether interventions such as ‘language switching’ are used therapeutically by monolinguals, and what their views are regarding supervision and training. A qualitative approach was taken, with a semi‐structured questionnaire collecting data from 50 participants. Thematic analysis was used to interpret their answers. The findings revealed that the majority of monolingual therapists had not reflected on the psychological and socio‐political implications of using English exclusively, the diverse roles of language and the specific needs of multilingual clients. The highest awareness was found among the most experienced counsellors, who perceived working with multilingual clients as an opportunity for personal and professional development and who showed as much linguistic empathy as multilingual counsellors. However, most participants placed a strong emphasis on communication barriers, which may indicate that, as counsellors, we could be overlooking the opportunities that cross‐lingual exchanges present therapeutically and, as a result, we may be failing to address the needs of multilinguals in our diverse community. The study concluded that there is a need to include this topic in counselling training and do further research.