You have lived in the Algarve for years. You order coffee in Portuguese, handle the bank, joke with your neighbours. Your English-speaking friends think of you as fluent. So when you consider therapy, you assume the language of the session does not matter.
It does. There is a difference between the language you function in and the language you feel in. Most people who moved here as adults still process their deepest emotions in the language they grew up with. Therapy lives in that deeper layer, not the functional one.
The second language tax
Speaking a second language costs effort, even when you are good at it. Your brain works harder to find words, track grammar and read the other person. Researchers call this cognitive load. In everyday life you barely notice it. In therapy it gets in the way.
Therapy asks you to feel and speak at the same time. If part of your attention is busy translating, there is less left for the feeling. You end up describing your experience from a distance, in simpler words than you would choose at home. The rawest, most useful material stays behind because you cannot reach it in time.
"The language you think in is the language your feelings speak. Ask them to translate, and something is always lost on the way."
Emotion lives in your first language
There is a reason a second language can feel like a shield. Studies on bilingual speakers show that swear words, painful memories and shame carry less charge in a language learned later in life. The words are accurate, but they do not burn.
That distance sounds convenient. In therapy it works against you. The point is to get close to what hurts, not to hold it at arm's length. When you speak your first language, the memory arrives with its full weight, and that is exactly what you came to work with.
The opposite is also true. Comfort, tenderness and the small phrases a parent once used to soothe you live in your mother tongue. A therapist who shares that language can meet you there, in the register where care actually lands.
Culture is part of the language
Language is never only words. It carries the assumptions of a whole culture: how families argue, what counts as success, when you are allowed to complain, what you are supposed to keep to yourself. A therapist who only speaks your words but not your culture will miss half of what you mean.
This matters even more for expats. Living between two cultures creates its own strain. You explain yourself constantly. You translate not just words but jokes, values and ways of being. A therapist who understands both worlds saves you that labour and sees the split you are actually living with.
- You spend the session working, not translating.
- Painful memories arrive with their real weight, so you can process them.
- Comfort reaches you in the register you first learned it in.
- Cultural context is understood, not explained from scratch.
- The exhaustion of living between two languages has somewhere to go.
What this means in practice
I spent nearly twenty years working in the United Kingdom. I know what it is to live far from home and to build a life in a language that is not the one you dream in. I work in both English and Portuguese, and I move between them as the session needs.
Sometimes a client starts a sentence in one language and finishes it in another. Often the switch itself is the important moment. It usually means we have arrived somewhere real.
If you have been putting off therapy because the idea of explaining your inner life in a borrowed language feels like too much, that instinct is worth listening to. You do not have to do the hardest work of your life in your second language. You are allowed to be understood in your own.
Andreia Teles is a clinical psychologist, certified coach and art therapist based in the Algarve. She works with English-speaking expats and locals in English and Portuguese, in Albufeira, Portimão and online.