Language matters in counselling diversity

The paper presents a personal view of some issues around therapeutic conversations involving difference and minority experience. Language, discourse and mother-tongue are explored from different theoretical standpoints and considered alongside concepts of difference, otherness and the unvoiced. Intercultural counselling offers a framework for unpacking the meaning of decolonising practice in conversations with clients or counsellors from ethnic or other minorities undertaking counselling or supervision. I discuss possibilities for practice informed by existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, including gestalt therapy interventions to bring in the body alongside discourse, and phenomenological empathy as a non-colonising resource in working across difference and diversity.