The Golden Key to “The World of Emotions”: Language

Habibe Aykan, Psychotherapist, Psychotherapy Institute, Turkey

When people experience something, they develop a narrative over it. During the process of making sense of and verbalize emotion experiences, a subjective narrative comes out. This subjective narrative is similar to the language. The words of this brand-new language represent more than their denotation (lexical meanings). The narratives of the verbalized experience are created and colored by the life experiences. Thus, the words function as the key to the client’s world of emotions beyond their lexical meanings.

The emotion-focused therapy is based on the recognition, acceptance, expression, use and regulation of the emotion. The goals of the therapy are following: To strengthen the self, regulate emotions and create new meanings. To achieve these therapeutic goals, the now-and-here emotion must have its place within the experience. The emotion is brought into the experience with the help of enactment interventions. The therapist needs proper keys to access the client’s experience of emotion and unlock the emotion schemes that are still locked. In clinical cases, the therapist often witnesses that the keys which have not matched with or overlaid on the emotions in the client’s experience cannot unlock these emotions. 

In the case we will present, we see a client whose mother-tongue is Azerbaijani (from another group of Turkish language family) and a therapist whose mother-tongue is Turkish as we know in emotion-focused therapy sessions. While using chair dialogues during these sessions, the client had some difficulties in the enactment of the emotions as she spoke Turkish. After realizing her difficulties, the client was invited to keep speaking in her mother-tongue while working on unfinished tasks using empty chair dialogue. During the empty chair speaking in Azerbaijani, the emotion arrived at the experience in a faster, deeper and more shattering way even though the therapist speaks no Azerbaijani. The psychotherapeutic healing is only possible when the lexical meanings of the words are left behind and their meanings in the client’s subjective world are accessed. The words of the client are the keys to his/her subjective experience. So, these words are more important than when the therapist and the client speak the same language while trying to bring the emotion to the now-and-here experience. Throughout this study, the effect of the subjectivity of the language on the processes of enacting the emotion and bringing it to the experience will be examined through clinical cases.

Keywords: emotion-focused therapy, subjectivity, language, enactment of the emotions