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Breaking up is hard wherever you live. But when a relationship ends while you’re living abroad, the loss can reach far beyond the person you’ve parted from. It can shake your sense of home, belonging, identity, and safety all at once. If you came here for love, built a life in another country, and now find yourself wondering how to go on without the relationship that made this place “home”- you are not alone. Maybe your partner was the person who helped you navigate the burea

There is so much of me that you can’t see because I don’t always have the words. This morning at the gym, a man took weights from the machine I was clearly using. If you go to the gym, you know there is a basic etiquette: don’t take weights from someone else’s machine, put your own weights away, throw away your used tissues. None of this should need explaining. When I protested in French, he waved me off. But I persisted. Eventually, he put the weights back. When I finished,

If you have ever looked for a psychotherapist, you may have encountered the phrase “evidence-based therapy.” It sounds reassuring. We naturally want to know that the therapy we are choosing has been scientifically tested and shown to work. And research is important. Psychotherapy should not be exempt from scientific scrutiny simply because it deals with something as complex and subjective as human experience. But there is an interesting question behind the phrase evidence-bas

In the United States, I always felt like Christmas Day was the moment the world would finally explode from the built-up frenzy of pre-holiday hysteria. Weeks of anticipation, coordinated outfits, school concerts, office parties, shipping deadlines, sugar, lights, and questionable inflatable lawn decorations all seemed to gather force until there was nowhere left for the energy to go. Here in France, it is a bit different. The great national acceleration does not happen in Dec

You may not need a support group. There’s no right way to “expat.” Maybe it’s enough support for you to head to an Irish bar for a pint and watch a game, or to meet up with other English speakers over an apéritif. Those things matter. They help us integrate, laugh, exchange tips, and feel a little less alone. And yet, some parts of living abroad are hard to bring into casual conversation at informal gatherings. It can be difficult to simply say this is really, really hard. It

I am going to attempt to explain this in a way that’s accessible, probably over-generalized, and therefore not in-depth and satisfactory to everyone suffering – but it’s a start. Before diving in, let’s clarify that just because an illness is qualified as psychosomatic, or as having psychosomatic components, it is still absolutely real to the person experiencing it. Nothing about the psychosomatic quality of the problem means that the suffering isn’t real, or that it should b

Recently I had a session with a young man who complained of angry outbursts. He wanted them to stop. When I questioned him further, he explained his very difficult and uncomfortable situation. He had relocated to a new country three years ago as a young adult, following his parents, who had wanted the move. He didn’t speak the language, nor did his family. His current girlfriend, a native of the new country, was unsure about how much she wanted to commit to him and didn’t se

Or how psychoanalytically trained therapists listen… A friend of mine used to tell me how useless therapy was for him, because “all I would do was vent.” He would complain mostly about his spouse, his children, and the unfairness of everything. Perceived snubs, office drama, boring weekends – all of it- would be spooled out in fifty-minute diatribes that he hoped would alleviate… something, somehow. The therapists would offer unworkable solutions… (“let’s bring your wife in a

Why your therapist should not (only) be a screen...