As an international trauma therapist offering international therapy and coaching for expats around the world, I've noticed something. Expats are brilliant at connection. They can walk into a room in a new country, make friends in 48 hours, and build an entire life from scratch somewhere they'd never been six months earlier. They're adaptable, resourceful, and often extraordinarily good at reading people quickly. What they're often not as good at is staying. In the relationship, in the city, or in the feeling. And in my experience, that's rarely a coincidence.

The expat lifestyle and relationship avoidance aren't separate things. They're often the same thing, wearing different clothes. The constant movement, the fresh starts, the next assignment always waiting in the wings: it can look like freedom from the outside. And it is, partly. But it can also be one of the most effective ways I've ever seen to avoid the kind of stillness that real intimacy requires. Understanding that is uncomfortable. It's also, in my experience, the beginning of actually doing something about it.

You Didn't End Up Living Abroad by Accident

Not everyone who lives internationally is running from something. Some people genuinely fell in love with a place, followed an opportunity, or married someone from another country and built a beautiful life there. That's real, and it's valid.

But I also work with a significant number of expats who ended up living this way for reasons that go a little deeper than adventure. These are the aid workers, the journalists, the executives on perpetual assignment, and the digital nomads who haven't stayed anywhere longer than six months in a decade. Home never quite felt safe enough to stay in. So they left. And then they kept leaving. Then, somewhere along the way, the leaving became the identity.

Here's What I've Actually Noticed

After 20 years of sitting with people who live this way, I've learned one thing. Keeping busy and staying on the move is a genuinely brilliant strategy for not having to sit with the things you haven't dealt with yet. The constant novelty of expat life offers a thrilling distraction. New cultures, new challenges, and new versions of yourself to try on create a kind of permanent forward momentum. This makes it very hard for anything uncomfortable to catch up with you. It works beautifully, until it doesn't. And when it stops working, it tends to stop working in relationships first.

The Thing About Intimacy When You're Always Leaving

Here's what happens to intimacy when you live a transient life. Not the practical stuff, though the time zones and the assignments ending and the long distance are all genuinely hard. The deeper stuff.

When you grow up learning that people leave, that staying is unsafe, or that the people who were supposed to show up for you didn't, you adapt. Leaving first becomes second nature. Staying just emotionally out of reach feels safer than letting someone all the way in. Falling for people who are unavailable makes perfect sense when you think about it. After all, unavailable people can't disappoint you the way available ones can. And somewhere along the way, intensity starts to feel like intimacy, even when the connection never quite deepens into something real.

In My Practice I Think of These as the Leaver and the Chaser.

The lover is wonderful at the beginning of relationships: exciting, attentive, and fully present. Then, as things start to deepen, something shifts. Suddenly, the timing is wrong, or the circumstances are complicated, or they just feel the familiar urge to go. Often, before the other person can go first. The chaser, on the other hand, falls fast and hard, gives everything, and pursues people who are just out of reach. They then wonder why they keep ending up in the same painful place.

Both patterns show up constantly in expat populations. And that's not a coincidence either. A lifestyle that keeps you moving also keeps you surrounded by a rotating cast of people. It provides a near-endless supply of reasons why now isn't the right time to settle down. This is the perfect environment for both patterns to thrive completely unchallenged. For years. Sometimes decades.

Why Commitment Feels Like a Threat

Commitment requires staying, and staying requires trusting that it's safe. For people whose nervous systems learned early that safety is temporary, that people leave, and that things fall apart, commitment feels scary. But it's more than that. It feels genuinely dangerous at a body level. Not a personality flaw, and not a fear of missing out. A very understandable response to a very specific history.

Convenient reasons to avoid commitment are also something the expat lifestyle provides in almost unlimited supply. An assignment ends. A visa runs out. The timing is wrong. All of these can be completely true. They can also be the perfect cover for an exit strategy that was quietly in place long before the assignment came along.

The question worth sitting with, and I ask this not to be provocative but because it's the question that actually changes things when people are honest about the answer, is this: are you avoiding commitment because the circumstances genuinely don't support it right now, or because some part of you always has one foot out the door?

The Loneliness Nobody Talks About

Here's something that doesn't get said enough about expat life: it can be profoundly lonely. Not in the way people expect. It's not the loneliness of having no one around, but the loneliness of surface-level connections everywhere and deep connections nowhere.

You are always the new person, the one who's about to leave, or the one whose friends might be reassigned next month. This changes how you invest in relationships. Why go deep with someone who'll be gone in a year? Or, why let someone in when you know you'll have to say goodbye? The connections become wide and warm and genuinely enjoyable, and also, somehow, never quite enough.

And It Goes Even Deeper Than That

Something else nobody warns you about is the particular exhaustion that comes with living abroad. You're constantly surrounded by people who don't share your cultural reference points, your humor, or your instinctive understanding of how things work. Of having to translate yourself constantly, in ways that go far beyond language. Then there's the loneliness of not being able to explain any of this to the people back home. They think your life looks extraordinary and can't quite understand why you're not happier.

There's a reason "I love my life but I'm so lonely" is one of the most common things I hear from expat clients. It's not a contradiction. It's just what happens when you've spent years optimizing your life for everything except actually letting people in.

What Changes When You Do the Work

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you that international therapy and coaching fix everything. It doesn't, and I won't pretend otherwise. But here's what it does do.

The work starts with understanding the pattern. Most expats have never connected the dots between what they learned about love and safety as children and how they're showing up in relationships now. Drawing those lines, giving meaning and context to things that have felt random or shameful or just inexplicably hard, can shift something significant on its own.

From there, we get into the actual clearing. We use EMDR and tapping to process the old experiences that set the pattern in motion. These can include attachment wounds, early losses, or environments that never quite felt safe. Parts work helps you access the resources you have now as a grown adult that simply weren't available to you as a child.

The Love Stuff (Yes, We're Going There)

Drawing on the models of Pia Mellody and Terry Real, we get into how love avoidance or love addiction has been quietly running the show in your relationships. Where did the pattern come from? What need is it meeting? And what does it actually look like to do it differently? This is some of the most important work I do with expat clients. And in my experience, it's often the piece that changes everything else.

As an international trauma therapist at Therapy Jane, I work online with clients all over the world. In doing so, I provide something that can be surprisingly rare in a transient international life: genuine continuity. I'm someone who knows your history and understands your world. I show up the same way every time, whether you're calling from Buenos Aires, Beirut, or a hotel room in a city you landed in last Tuesday.

The goal isn't to stop being an expat. It's to stop using the expat lifestyle to outrun the parts of yourself that are ready to be seen.

Ready to Begin International Therapy and Coaching?

You've built a life that takes you everywhere. Now let's build one that actually feels like somewhere. Therapy for expats online is designed for exactly the place you're in right now: capable, self-aware, and ready to do something about the thing that's been following you around the world. It doesn't matter where you're calling from. What matters is that you're calling.

Therapeutic coaching at Therapy Jane begins with a 90-minute discovery session where we map your history, identify the patterns that have been running the show, and build a personalized roadmap for the work ahead. From there, we meet every other week to work through it together. Most clients are with me for six months to a year. Some stay longer. All of them tell me it was worth it.

When you're ready, here's how we begin:

• Book Your Discovery Session: This is where we start. Ninety minutes to map your history, understand what's been driving the patterns, and figure out where we're going together. It's a lot, in the best possible way.
• Get to Know Me First: Not quite ready to commit? Fair enough. Have a look at my about page, read a few more blog posts, and get a feel for who I am and how I think. I'll still be here when you're ready.
• Show Up From Wherever You Are: Singapore, Nairobi, a hotel room in a city you can't quite remember the name of. All you need is an internet connection and a private space. I'll handle everything else.

Other Ways to Work With Me

Relationships and commitment are rarely the only things going on. For most of the expats I work with, the relational patterns are tangled up with burnout, trauma, a loss of meaning or direction, or a sense that the life they've built doesn't quite fit anymore. That's why I offer more than just international therapy and coaching. Whether you're looking for a single focused session to work on one specific issue, a deeper therapeutic coaching process, or professional training and consultation, there's a way in that fits where you are right now.

Other ways we can work together include One-Time Healing Sessions for targeted, single-session work on one issue; Therapeutic Coaching for a deeper, structured healing process; Healing the Birth Story for those exploring early developmental and ancestral patterns; Consulting and Mentoring for therapists, coaches, and healers looking for guidance; and Live and On-Demand Courses for professionals who want to deepen their trauma-informed practice. Whatever you're carrying and however you'd like to work, there's likely something here that fits.

About the Author

Jane McCampbell Stuart is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist, and Certified Professional Co-active Coach based on an island in British Columbia — though her clients are scattered across the globe. With over 20 years of experience as a trauma therapist and having lived in four countries on two continents herself, she has a particular soft spot for the expats, aid workers, executives, and globally mobile humans who are brilliant at everything except sitting still. Her approach is deeply relational, clinically precise, and just a little bit magical. She gets in, gets to the root, and gets to work. And then she teaches you how to do it too.