Fluent isn't the same as at home
Why people who speak English well still look for a therapist who speaks Mandarin, and what the language you argue in has to do with it.
If you speak English well and still find yourself wanting a therapist who speaks Mandarin, you might wonder whether that's strange. You work in English, maybe you studied in English, and you may even think in English most of the day. So why does the idea of saying what actually hurts, out loud, to a stranger, pull you back toward Chinese?
I don't think that's a contradiction. I think it's one of the most useful things a person can notice about themselves.
Three different things called "English"
When people talk about someone's English, they usually mean one thing: how well that person speaks it. But at least three different things are hiding in that word.
- Proficiency is what you can do in a language: read a contract, give a presentation, hold your own in a meeting.
- Preference is which language you'd choose if you had the choice.
- Comfort is what it costs you to say something painful in that language. Not whether you can find the words, but whether the words feel like yours when they come out.
These come apart all the time. Someone can be highly proficient in English, prefer English at work, and still find that saying I felt abandoned in English sounds oddly flat, like reading a line from a script. The same sentence in their first language might be much harder to get out, precisely because it lands.
Researchers who study bilingual people, Jean-Marc Dewaele among them, have described this for years: for many people, emotional words carry more weight in the language they grew up with. In therapy, that weight is the point. The moment a feeling actually lands is usually the moment something can change.
Why "is your English good enough?" is the wrong question
When counseling services think about language, they tend to ask about proficiency. Can this student, this employee, this client follow a session in English? If the answer is yes, the problem looks solved.
Proficiency may be the wrong thing to measure. One 2022 study of Chinese international students found that English proficiency explained almost none of the difference in who sought help (Ma, Zhu and Bresnahan, Health Communication). Every proficiency question in that study asked about competence: reading, writing, speaking, understanding. None of them asked what it feels like to talk about distress in English. That gap is the one I'm most interested in, and it's the focus of my doctoral research.
What this can look like in a relationship
This shows up between partners, often without anyone naming it.
Picture a couple who talk to each other in English every day, because it's the language they share most easily. When an argument heats up, one of them switches to Chinese, and the other hears it as a door closing. Or they fight in English and make up in Mandarin, and neither of them has noticed the pattern.
Some feelings are hard to say well in any language, and harder still in a borrowed one. Chinese has words like 委屈, the ache of being wronged with no way to say so, and 心疼, the tender, almost physical hurt of watching someone you love struggle. Neither has a clean English equivalent. A partner who reaches for one of those words and has to settle for "upset" or "sad" has lost something real, and often doesn't know what.
In Emotionally Focused Therapy, much of the work happens in exactly those moments: getting underneath the argument to the feeling that's driving it, and helping one partner say it in a way the other can actually hear. If a feeling only really exists in one language, that's the language the work needs to happen in, at least some of the time.
You don't need a reason
Wanting to do this work in your first language says nothing bad about your English. Usually it means you know which language your feelings are in.
And if you and your partner don't share a first language, couples work can still help. The gap between your languages is often part of what we work on.