As I am a foreign student, Thomas Wosch asked me to share a bit about my intercultural experiences. Coming from another country, I noticed that a different mother tongue can be used as an extra tool. But first I want to tell you how I came to Germany (Magdeburg).
I come from the Flemish part of Belgium. That means that I speak Dutch as my mother tongue. In Leuven (Lemmensinstitute), I studied music therapy for four years. Through projects, we came in contact with music therapists from Israel, Germany, Italy and Denmark. I noticed a real difference in personalities and also in the way that they work with the medium music. I realized that music therapy is a very large field and that there is not one method but almost as many methods as there are music therapists, in which the culture determines a lot the way of working and thinking. To enlarge my view, I decided to go abroad for one year. In October I came to Magdeburg. I got the chance to do practice in a psychosomatic clinic. Here I noticed an interesting phenomenon.
I came in the group as a co-therapist; I only observed at the beginning. Slowly we switched roles. I became the leading music therapist. For me the talking part WAS not so simple. My German isn't perfect and as it becomes neccessary to express very precisely, words sometimes fail. At first I thought it was a negative point in the therapy: the patients are in music therapy to try to put their affects and feelings into words, but how can they do that, if the mother (therapist) doesn't know how to do it in their language? But then I realized that perhaps it could be used as an extra tool.
First of all, music therapy is a nonverbal method. In my case, the difference in language, the nonverbal part, gains importance. I can explain this best with a situation that happened in my practice. A man of 50 started to tell the group something of the relationship with his parents. At first he spoke clearly, but the more he told us, the more he began to speak faster and the less I could follow. As I knew more or less what he was talking about, I focused me on the nonverbal elements. I found anger and disappointment, although he verbally only expressed the anger. Later he told us a story where he expressed his disappointment. As I was hearing the nonverbal elements I could receive more information than what he was telling verbally.
The second advantage comes from what I thought at first was a disadvantage. When I don't know the right words in German, the patients help me to find the right word. We search for the right words together. This means that we in some way have the same goal.
But not everything is an advantage. For me, it is sometimes very difficult to understand what happened in the past, to understand how the people of East Germany lived during GDR times and how that influenced their lives and their way of thinking. It was a different world, a different culture that is still resonating.
Intercultural experiences with music therapy
As I am a foreign student, Thomas Wosch asked me to share a bit about my intercultural experiences. Coming from another country, I noticed that a different mother tongue can be used as an extra tool. But first I want to tell you how I came to Germany (Magdeburg).
I come from the Flemish part of Belgium. That means that I speak Dutch as my mother tongue. In Leuven (Lemmensinstitute), I studied music therapy for four years. Through projects, we came in contact with music therapists from Israel, Germany, Italy and Denmark. I noticed a real difference in personalities and also in the way that they work with the medium music. I realized that music therapy is a very large field and that there is not one method but almost as many methods as there are music therapists, in which the culture determines a lot the way of working and thinking. To enlarge my view, I decided to go abroad for one year. In October I came to Magdeburg. I got the chance to do practice in a psychosomatic clinic. Here I noticed an interesting phenomenon.
I came in the group as a co-therapist; I only observed at the beginning. Slowly we switched roles. I became the leading music therapist. For me the talking part WAS not so simple. My German isn't perfect and as it becomes neccessary to express very precisely, words sometimes fail. At first I thought it was a negative point in the therapy: the patients are in music therapy to try to put their affects and feelings into words, but how can they do that, if the mother (therapist) doesn't know how to do it in their language? But then I realized that perhaps it could be used as an extra tool.
First of all, music therapy is a nonverbal method. In my case, the difference in language, the nonverbal part, gains importance. I can explain this best with a situation that happened in my practice. A man of 50 started to tell the group something of the relationship with his parents. At first he spoke clearly, but the more he told us, the more he began to speak faster and the less I could follow. As I knew more or less what he was talking about, I focused me on the nonverbal elements. I found anger and disappointment, although he verbally only expressed the anger. Later he told us a story where he expressed his disappointment. As I was hearing the nonverbal elements I could receive more information than what he was telling verbally.
The second advantage comes from what I thought at first was a disadvantage. When I don't know the right words in German, the patients help me to find the right word. We search for the right words together. This means that we in some way have the same goal.
But not everything is an advantage. For me, it is sometimes very difficult to understand what happened in the past, to understand how the people of East Germany lived during GDR times and how that influenced their lives and their way of thinking. It was a different world, a different culture that is still resonating.