Experiences of Counselling at MECS: Katia Volodina

Katia joined the team last year and sees clients who speak Russian, her native language. She also works with English speaking clients and is writing about her experiences of working with on particular referral.

I am a migrant and a counsellor at MECS. Behind me – years of studies, training and practice. The tools at my disposal are: three languages to work in, a capacity to adapt and a sense of belonging to every one of three countries I lived in. I think it has something to do with a new identity I form when I move to a different country through language, customs and human interaction. My clients here are migrants too. But their stories and their paths couldn’t be more different. They are young, but the amount of neglect, deprivation and abuse they have experienced in the past is astonishing.

Grace, (not her real name) my Nigerian client in her late thirties, had history of having been trafficked, abused, homeless. When I met her she was withdrawn, mistrustful and hated herself. There were so few positive attachments and positive experiences in her life. The only thing she was keen on at that time was her English course.

We started working around her love for English lessons and story writing. I asked her what kind of story she would like to write and what I heard struck me.

Grace’s story:
“There are three queues: one for normal people, one for depressed people, one for people who don’t belong anywhere. Those people in the last queue are invisible heroes. No one sees them; no one knows what they do.”

I asked what queue would be hers and I think I already knew the answer before I heard it: The third one.

Her words of not belonging anywhere reflected her loneliness, her isolation and her awareness of being unaccepted, excluded from all societies she has lived in. Yet, in a powerful and touching way they conveyed her forbearance, integrity and universal acceptance and also her heroic struggle for her right to be in this world.

I reflected this back to her and expressed my admiration for her talent. It was a shifting point of the therapy. To be heard, prized and acknowledged empowered her and helped her to gain the confidence necessary to change her life for the better. She started cooking, reading, playing pool. She made decision to become a carer after completion of her English course. She began to see her future more optimistically.

It has been a shifting point in our therapeutic relationship too. It helped us to build mutual trust and reinforced our bonding.

We both came from different cultures and English wasn’t our native language for either of us. English was a bridge and, in the beginning, the only way to connect. So, we had to operate with universal values and feelings. My client has been extraordinary capable in finding powerful words, to communicate her struggle and her understanding of her place in this world.

We will never know it for sure, but perhaps the fact she was speaking English enabled her to take a distance from her terrible past experience, a distance necessary to describe her pain and loneliness. Perhaps, English was a safe place for her where she has been able to come to terms with her past and to build her future.