I’m excited to finally share more about my presentation at this year’s World Psychotherapy Congress (WCP)—a particularly meaningful moment, as it took place at my doctoral alma mater, Sigmund Freud University in Vienna.
As my best friend put it so perfectly: 👉 “We were among the people whose books live on our bookshelves.” 📚✨
🔍 My presentation: “Listening Between the Words: Language as a Diagnostic Tool in Psychotherapy”
Here’s the heart of what I shared: I’m working to bridge the world of psychological testing with the deep, process-based work of psychotherapy. While psychologists often rely on tools and assessments, psychotherapists focus on emotional experience, relational patterns, and the unfolding of trauma.
But what if we could understand individual predispositions—not just by test scores, but by tuning into the very quality of language someone uses?
🧠Language holds clues to how our innate traits interact with life experiences—trauma, love, care, rupture. By listening deeply, between the words, we can uncover hidden aspects of personality and unlock more effective, attuned ways of helping people grow.
🌍 I invite you to watch the talk (subtitles translatable into any language), read the transcript, and if this speaks to you—drop a YES in the comments or DM me.
Let’s explore the language of the self—together. 💬💡
TRANSCRIPT
Good morning. Let me start with a question.
What if the words your client uses—not just what they say, but how they say it—could tell you more than any diagnostic manual ever could?
What if language... is not just a tool for therapy, but the diagnosis itself?
A few years ago, I was working with a teenage boy. Let’s call him 'Mark.' He came in with his mother. She spoke—he didn’t. For three sessions, he said maybe 30 words.
But those 30 words told me more than his file ever could.
He spoke in fragments. No subject, no agency—just effects: 'Got in trouble. It was bad. Not going back.'
No 'I.' No verbs of intention. No inner world.
That absence? It wasn’t a silence. It was a signature. A diagnostic signature—etched in language.
I have always been interested in the personality development, and through 30 years of research, one way or another, I came to an understanding that language is a common denominator for personality development.
Language is not just how we express ourselves—it’s how our personality, our emotional history, and our relational blueprint make themselves known.
Moment by moment. Word by word.
Who has children? - Do you remember that young children have this toy, like a small pyramid. Just keep it in mind for now, where the stick of that toy is our core self, all the parts that we are born with, and everything else are the rings that effect how our parts of the self-develop and how will it be expressed. With trauma, with experience, with love, everything that we are exposed to.
First Circle: Attachment Theory—John Bowlby & Peter Fonagy.
What do securely attached children do? They tell stories. Their narratives have characters, motives, feelings. They use mental state terms: 'She thought I was angry.'
Their language mirrors their inner world—because it was mirrored to them.
Fonagy calls this **mentalization**. It’s the bridge between emotion and reflection. And that bridge is made of *language*.
Moreover, attachment theory of John Bowlby and then works of Peter Fonagy speak to this ring on our pyramid. The foundation to our interaction with one another and mentalization of these
Second Circle: *Psycholinguistics*—Vygotsky, Leontiev, Chomsky.
Language doesn’t just reflect thought—it shapes it. Leontiev spoke of speech as 'activity.' A developmental mirror of our agency.
If someone can’t use verbs of feeling… If their syntax breaks when they discuss a parent or partner… That’s not random. That’s where the trauma lives—in how the story collapses.
The way we choose the words, the syntact, the metaphors – all of these reveal personality traits
Our narrative brings us back to our attachment style and further allows us at assess the development and emotional regulation.
Third Circle: *Affective Neuroscience*—Jaak Panksepp.
The SEEKING system, the CARE system, FEAR, RAGE, GRIEF… Each of these primary emotions colors the way we speak.
'People are so dumb.' → RAGE.
'I just want to understand.' → SEEKING and CARE.
Language is the mouthpiece of these circuits.
And if we know what to listen for, we’re not just hearing symptoms. We’re mapping emotion circuits.
Panksepp’s works demonstrate core emotional systems.
The methodology includes implicit language analysis and developmental narrative assessment. We link language use to affect regulation, mentalization, and defense mechanisms.
Fourth Circle: *Multiple Intelligences*—Howard Gardner, Lena Feygin
I integrate this through a methodology I developed with colleagues: **Psy-to-nomics™**.
It captures how intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences show up in language structure, rhythm, metaphor, and coherence.
It’s a human-centered way to read not just behavior—but *being*.
With psy-to-nomics you are able to assess personality through language and see the parts that are coming forth and take center stage during the sessions. Moreover, it becomes an instrument that your patients/clients could walk away with for self-discovery and implementation.
And this transpires through very basic conversations – if you ask someone for directions, one person will tell you everything in great details, another will tell you everything in numbers, and the third will tell you in images. It is the same message wrapped in a different linguistic packaging.
But it tells you something, a lot actually, about the parts that are engaged, that this client has and expresses.
Each intellect in the system with its own
Life Values
Personality traits
Behavioral patterns and
Linguistic abilities.
Each one shaped by the experience, context, trauma, love that was accumulated.
Here’s the model. At the center is language. Surrounding it: emotion, attachment, personality, temperament, defense, and memory.
Language is their meeting point. Their expression point. *The fingerprint of the self.*
Again the poly-dynamic approach integrates psycholingustics, affective neuroscience, attachment theory.
We draw on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and Lenotiev’s activity theory to understand how speech reflects developmental stages.
Speech rhythm, complexity, and metaphor use reveal cognitive-emotional patters and show parts that are present
Let’s go back to Mark. After six sessions of indirect conversation—storytelling, metaphor work—his sentences began to shift.
'I wanted to go... but I thought they'd laugh.'
First time he used 'I.' First time he connected thought and feeling. That wasn’t just progress. It was *diagnosis through evolution.*
This approach works for children (age-appropriate expectation of the language development), teenagers, adults and across family dynamic.
I had the opportunity to work with all the type of clients that I mention. Moreover, it works across different cultures as well.
Imagine this approach scaled up:
- Intake sessions coded for attachment and personality speech - Supervision models for emotional language detection - Diagnostic listening as training standard
We move from checkbox to conversation. From symptom to system. From pathology... to pattern.
I argue for a shift in practice: toward diagnostic listening and language-informed case formulation. It is about tunin into the speech as a live reflection of the therapeutic process and inner world.
So—what are your clients really telling you, when they speak?
And what are they showing you… when they don’t?
Language is not a symptom report. It’s a biography of the self—in motion.
And if we’re quiet enough… If we listen well enough… We’ll hear the whole story. Before they even know how to tell it.