Therapy for Expatriates
Moving to a new country and living abroad can be a remarkably rewarding experience. But it also provides a unique set of challenges. We can all feel overwhelmed at times, and the additional stresses of living abroad can make these issues more difficult to deal with. Issues that we might cope well with when living at home, surrounded by familiar faces and landscapes, become more pressing and difficult to manage when living overseas.
“The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.”
Expatriate therapy can provide the time and space to explore your thoughts and feelings around your experience of moving. I have been working to provide a confidential, supportive, and effective therapeutic service to the English speaking international community worldwide for a number of years. Having lived and worked an expatriate myself, I understand only too well the unique pressures and benefits that are a part of expat lifestyle.
The typical challenges that individuals, couples or families in transition come to therapy to work on include:
Culture shock and adjusting to the culture/language of the new country
Managing change
How to make the move easier on the children
Loss of personal and professional support networks
Difficulties in role transition, for example a travelling spouse may have given up a career and suffered from a loss of income as well as a significant role change, which can affect the dynamic in their marriage
Feeling tired of expat life and wanting to settle down
A lack of a cultural identity "where is home?"
Fear of flying but being faced with the reality of having to travel a lot
Support is Available Worldwide
For those expatriates that would like support but are not located in Norway I also offer online therapy. Working together via video call is the closest experience to face to face therapy that is available online, and for most clients the experience is as rich and rewarding as working together in an office. In the interests of protecting cofidentiality, I prefer to use VSee for webcam rather than similar services such as Skype. VSee is free to use and is encrypted, providing a higher level of security. We can discuss this during our initial contact and I am happy to provide support with using VSee.