International Therapy & Coaching

What Is International Therapy & Coaching, Exactly?

International therapy and coaching is designed to support expats, executives, digital nomads, aid workers, and others on foreign assignments with their mental, emotional, and relational health. As an international therapist, the service I offer is called therapeutic coaching.

Think of it as getting the expertise of a licensed therapist and certified coach, without the paperwork, the diagnosis, or the paper trail. Just private, confidential, effective work on the things that are getting in your way. For those in government roles, security-cleared positions, or any career where a mental health diagnosis could have consequences, that distinction matters more than you might think.

Sessions are held through a secure videoconferencing platform that meets the privacy requirements for therapy in both the United States and Canada.

All you need is an internet connection and a private space. We've worked together from flats in London, hotel rooms in Nairobi, and home offices in Vancouver. Time zones are manageable and scheduling is flexible. And honestly? In my experience, people dealing with trauma actually do better online than they ever did in person.

When you're in your own space, you feel safer. And when you feel safer, the work goes deeper.

Why I'm the Right Person for This

I've lived in four countries on two continents. I know what it feels like to pack up a life, land somewhere unfamiliar, and have to build everything from scratch: the community, the routines, the sense of belonging. I know the particular exhaustion of being a foreigner, the way cultural nuances can make you feel perpetually slightly off, and the strange grief of leaving places and people you've come to love. That's not something I read about in a textbook. It's something I've lived.

Which means when you tell me about it, I get it. Not in a polite, nodding-along way. Actually get it. And for a lot of my international clients, that matters enormously. Many of them have never had a therapist who truly understood the life they're living. Some have never had a consistent therapeutic relationship at all, because the constant moving makes it impossible to stay with anyone long enough for the work to go deep. That's something I can offer that most therapists can't: genuine continuity. I'll know your history, understand your world, and show up the same way every time, whether you're calling from Singapore, Berlin, or your parents' living room back home.

H3 What Getting There Actually Looks Like

Clients come in exhausted, isolated, and running on fumes. What happens over time is harder to describe than a list of outcomes, but here's the best way I can put it: they stop running. Not because the world gets smaller or the work gets less meaningful, but because they finally feel safe enough to be still in it. That constant low-grade anxiety that's been humming in the background for years starts to quiet. Hypervigilance dials down. Sleep, real sleep, becomes something that happens regularly rather than something they chase. And the experiences that used to ambush them at inconvenient moments start to feel like things that happened rather than things that are still happening.

And slowly, the things they've been keeping at arm's length, intimacy, commitment, a place to call home, start to feel less like risks and more like possibilities. Survivor guilt softens. Relentless drive quiets down into something steadier and a lot more sustainable. People who have spent years moving through the world like they're passing through start to feel like they're actually in it. That's not a small thing for someone who has spent years outrunning themselves. For most of my clients, it's everything.

The Part Where It Gets Interesting

Every piece of work I do with international clients is grounded in the same foundation: family systems theory and attachment science. What you grew up with is almost always running the show in your adult life. Most people just don't know it yet. A genogram maps your family history across generations and draws the lines between the patterns of your childhood and the patterns you're living now. It's one of the most powerful tools I use. It takes things that have felt random, shameful, or just inexplicably hard and makes them make sense.

From there, the work gets specific. Many international clients have spent years living in survival mode, functioning from the neck up and completely disconnected from what's happening in their bodies. A significant part of the work involves psychoeducation around dissociation, boundaries, and what it actually means to be present in your body. That's where somatic and energy psychology tools come in. Not to overwhelm, but to get you back into your body in a way that finally feels safe.

H3 The Love Stuff (Yes, We're Going There)

For a lot of international clients, the relational patterns are the last thing they want to look at and the first thing that needs attention. As a therapist for expats, I see this constantly: love addiction, love avoidance, codependency, a string of relationships that start with enormous promise and end the same way every time. These patterns aren't random and they're not a character flaw. They make perfect sense when you understand where they came from. And understanding where they came from is exactly what we do.

The work here draws on the models of Pia Mellody and Terry Real, two of the most respected voices in relational trauma and intimacy work. We look at what you learned about love early on, what you decided it meant about you, and how those decisions have been quietly shaping every significant relationship since. It's some of the most important work I do. And in my experience, it's often the piece that changes everything else.