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 bureaucracy,...

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, I made a small...

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-based psychotherapy:...