With me it's just my limited knowledge of languages that will result in my mixing them together, e.g. Span-glish.

languages has played an important role in my PTSD too...

In my house my father and his wife would communicate in English.We were living in Mexico.
My mother is Mexican....We were living with my father from Kansas and his wife from Texas.

To us children sometimes they would speak to us in spanish and sometimes in english....

But between them only in enlgish and it was almost used as a way to alienate us.

We went to an american school but of course a lot of the courses were taught in spanish...so we did speak better spanish than english growing up....and the verbal abuse was always done in spanish by my older sister and my step-mother, father.They both had lived in Mexico long enough to be bilingual.

I did not start reading a lot till i moved to NYC the first place where my attempt to create a post-trauma identity started...the first place i did not feel like an alien...i felt like a New Yorker..So my post trauma identity is in English....And although i see the beauty in the spanish language it can remind me of my vicious sisters...

Its been interesting here in Fl because i had not spoken so much spanish since i left Mexico around 15.......Some girls trigger me, they remind me of my sisters....and i can switch to thinking in spanish in a heart beat.

I am glad i speak both but english is my post-trauma language.

I am proud too of how i speak it cause quite frankly my father and step-mother are ranchers and they speak like ranchers (no offense to ranchers)...so i surpassed them in english now too...and it took a lot of effort on my part..lots of reading in english even the spanish writers like Isabel Allende and Garcia Marquez i purposely read them in english to improve my english.

My writing sucks in both. lol...

letitbe
My first Spanish tutor laughed with me (never AT me) every time my German popped up in our Spanish drills. She told me this is normal and encouraged me to let time and practice sort it out. She was a GREAT tutor.

uno
"Post trauma language." I suspect I am going to be chewing on that one for a long while. Thank you.

My childhood speech defect kept me mute until I was near adolescence. When I can trust my emergent memories, I seem to remember feeling I spoke many languages. Bird. Dog. Tree. Etc., etc. I was failing to see where any of the human dialects were worth the trouble of learning.

Writing and reading are what opened my mind to the potential of human language. I learned to write before I learned to speak. I still prefer writing. It doesn't have funny accents or make fun of me when I reach for a dictionary.

And I still see all our languages as human dialects... Humans would communicate much better without the grammatical snobbery.

I'm bilingual, not just at home but at work, too. I teach half the day in English, half in Spanish. Great gig to adapt to me like that.

There's a fiction writers who writes totally in Spanglish, that mix of the 2 lots of us play with living in the US. It's hilarious stuff.

I've found more resources for PTSD recovery in English for me, just because the US has more resources period. But I found more acceptance in Spanish, since so many Latinos themselves are survivors of the Dirty Wars that have taken place south of the border.

It's nice to dream switching back and forth between the two languages.

As an adult I learned French & Portuguese and got to travel solo across both France and Portugal. Lots of fun.

After living in NYC i moved to Honolulu Hi for 21 years...there i learn not to tell the local people not to speak pidgin english in front of me as it was setting me back in my efforts to speaking english properly....good thing i'm a woman and i just got called a "sucking haole" and given a lecture....had i been a man i would hvae gotten my arse kicked..

But that pidgin english is so catchy....but it sounds so bad outside of hawaii....i had to in my head correct people while they're talking so i would not imitate them...or have it get stuck in my brain.

I learned a lil japanese...I love words...That is one of the few things i do love.