Not Quite a Mother Tongue: Thinking, Feeling, and Healing in English

A Gap

“I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one.” 

- Kamala Das in An Introduction

It often begins with a circle.
The “feelings wheel” you might have seen in therapy infographics - brightly colored slices labeling emotions like joy, sadness, fear, anger. A tidy chart meant to map what we carry inside.

And yet, every time I look at it, I feel a gap. Some words don’t sit right. Others feel too flat for what’s happening in my chest. In Hindi, there are shades of longing, irritation, or tenderness that don’t appear on the wheel at all - viraha for the ache of separation, ghabrahat for that restless anxiety in the chest, sukoon for the soft quiet of relief. Even these words come from blended legacies - they carry the threads of Sanskrit, Nepali, Arabic. They carry culture, weight, rhythm, even bodily texture, in ways the neat English categories sometimes miss.

But when I actually talk about how I feel, I still end up reaching for English.

For many of us, English has become the language of our inner lives. We say we’re “anxious,” “burnt out,” or “numb” more easily than we might in our mother tongues. And maybe that’s because English gives us a particular kind of articulation - and a certain safety. Like holding something sharp through cloth, it lets us touch our feelings with just enough distance.

A Language We Borrow, A Language We Feel In

It’s a strange kind of intimacy - thinking and feeling in a language that isn’t technically ours. Many of us switch between tongues without noticing: scolding in Hindi, joking in Punjabi, texting in Hinglish. But when it comes to naming the harder things - panic, loneliness, grief - English often feels easier.

Psychologists call this the “foreign language effect”: using a second language often reduces emotional intensity, creating distance that makes difficult feelings easier to articulate (Pavlenko, 2012; Dewaele, 2010). In other words, the very thing that feels slightly artificial - confessing pain in English - can also be what makes it possible.

When I spoke to friends about this, one said:

“It’s easier to be angry in Hindi, but telling someone you love them somehow feels easier in English. With new people we almost automatically switch to English, as if our mother tongues are something to be hidden.”

This isn’t just an Indian quirk. Research has found similar patterns globally: Spanish-English bilinguals report feeling less emotionally overwhelmed when describing painful experiences in English, while Chinese-English speakers say they can think more pragmatically about distress when they switch tongues (Caldwell-Harris, 2015).

The Colonial Inheritance

Of course, this is not a neutral story. English didn’t arrive here gently. It was enforced as the language of power, law, and knowledge during colonial rule (Nandy, 1983). Over time, it became the medium for universities, medicine, and yes - psychology.

That legacy matters. Indigenous vocabularies of emotion - viraha, ghabrahat, sukoon - were often sidelined in favor of English categories. Even today, global psychology journals, training programs, and therapy manuals are overwhelmingly English-dominant (Sinha, 2014).

Another friend told me:

“Since moving away from a Hindi-dominated area, I’ve lost touch with it. I use English more by default, and sometimes even blank out on Hindi words. The more I talk about my feelings in English, the more natural it becomes.”

Which leaves us with a curious tension: when I say I’m “anxious,” am I speaking with the precision of a global vocabulary, or am I losing the nuance my grandmother might have used?

The Hybrid Mind

Maybe it’s both. Maybe English is not just a borrowed tool, but also a language that has seeped into how we actually feel.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - the idea that language shapes thought - has long been debated in psychology. But recent research suggests that at least in the realm of emotions, it holds true: the language we use doesn’t just describe feelings, it shapes how we perceive, categorize, and regulate them (Athanasopoulos, 2015; Lindquist et al., 2016). For bilinguals, a feeling described in one language can land differently in another.

One of my friends, who is training as a counsellor, described the same tension:
“As a therapist, I find myself thinking in English - it feels natural in that role. But as a client, I can open up in Hindi. It’s like my mind switches codes depending on which part of me is speaking.”

It shows up in popular culture too. Fleabag’s painfully awkward therapy scene - half silence, half accidental revelation - has become part of how we imagine talking to a therapist. BoJack Horseman gave us one of the most searing lines about emptiness: “I feel like I was born with a leak, and any goodness I started with just slowly spilled out of me.”

And it shows up in everyday life. Many Bollywood songs hold emotions English can’t quite match - songs like Channa Mereya or Kabira capture viraha in ways no translation could. Yet we’ll still scroll Netflix for therapy storylines that shape how we talk about ourselves.

English, then, is not just a colonial imposition. It’s also a lived emotional vocabulary, one we’ve remixed with our own accents, metaphors, and memes.

Perhaps

Perhaps English is not my “mother tongue.” But it has become the tongue I mother my mind with - the one I turn to when I need to hold difficult feelings without being overwhelmed.

And maybe the question isn’t whether this is authentic enough, but whether language - any language- can ever fully capture what we feel.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What language do you think with? Love with? Dream with?