I Moved Abroad for My Partner and I've Lost Myself
What follows is how I understand and approach this issue in my work with clients.
Trailing spouse therapy for when the adventure became one person’s life and the other’s sacrifice. An expat couples therapist understands this asymmetry.
You made the decision together. Or maybe your partner got the offer and you agreed to go. Or maybe you didn't really feel like you had a choice, but you told yourself (and everyone else) that you did. However it happened, you're here now. Your partner goes to work every morning with a purpose, a structure, a reason to get dressed. And you wake up in an apartment in a city where you don't speak the language, don't have a job, don't have friends, and increasingly don't recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror.
You've become "the trailing spouse." God, what a term. As if you're being dragged behind a boat.
That's how it feels, though. Isn't it.
What you actually lost
People talk about what you gave up: your career, your friends, your community. And those losses are real and enormous. But there's something underneath all of that, something harder to name, which is that you lost the structure that told you who you are.
Think about it. Before the move, you knew what you did. You had a title, a routine, a role in other people's lives. You were someone's colleague, someone's neighbor, the person who always went to that class on Tuesdays. These aren't trivial things. They're the scaffolding of identity. And when you remove all of it at once, you don't just feel lost. You feel like there's nothing there.
That's frightening. And the terror leads to a question you can barely stand to ask yourself: If I'm not those things, who am I?
What I want you to hear: the fact that this question scares you doesn't mean the answer is bad. It means you've never had to face it before, because the scaffolding was always there. The move didn't take away who you are. It took away the things that were standing in for who you are. And now you're looking at the empty space where those things used to be and mistaking it for emptiness inside you.
The resentment you feel guilty about
Let me say the thing you're probably not saying out loud: you're angry. At your partner. At the situation. Maybe at yourself for agreeing to it.
Your partner comes home from work energized (or exhausted, but productively exhausted) and asks what you did today. And you want to scream. Because what you did today was try to figure out the bus system, or sit in a café alone pretending to read, or scroll job listings in a language you don't speak, or go to an expat meetup where everyone asked what your partner does for a living before they asked anything about you.
The resentment feels unfair. Your partner didn't do this to you. (If the resentment has started to show up in your relationship dynamic, you might recognize what I describe in my relationship is falling apart after moving abroad.) They didn't mean for this to happen. And you love them. So the resentment sits in your chest and turns into guilt, and the guilt turns into silence, and the silence starts to look like withdrawal.
But it is a loss. And until you let yourself feel it as one, the resentment will keep growing, and it will keep finding targets: your partner, this country, yourself.
Why the usual advice doesn't work
"Join a club." "Take a language class." "Volunteer." "Start a blog." You've heard it all. Maybe you've tried some of it. And maybe it helped a little, in the way that putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg helps a little. It's doing something, but it's not addressing what's actually wrong.
What's actually wrong is not that you need hobbies. What's wrong is that you built your identity on a foundation of external structures, and now the structures are gone and the foundation is exposed. The language class doesn't fix that. It just gives you something to do while you avoid looking at it.
I'm not saying don't take the class. Take the class. But know that the class isn't the solution. The solution is looking at what's underneath: the parts of yourself that existed before the career, before the social role, before the identity you built in your old life: the patterns you've been carrying much longer than you realize, and figuring out who you actually are when all of that is stripped away.
Recognize any of this?
If you moved for someone else and something feels off, a conversation can help you see what’s going on.
Schedule a Free ConsultationA brief conversation to see if this feels like the right fit for you. Not therapy.
That's not a small project. And it's not one most people can do alone, especially not in the middle of a major life upheaval in a foreign country where they don't have support.
What this moment is actually offering you
I know this sounds like something a therapist would say, and I am a therapist, so take it for what it's worth: this is an extraordinary opportunity. I mean that without a shred of toxic positivity.
Most people never get to ask "who am I without all my usual scaffolding?" Most people go their whole lives with the scaffolding intact, and they never find out what's underneath it, and they die without ever meeting themselves. You don't have that luxury right now. The scaffolding is gone. You're exposed.
That exposure is painful. But it's also honest. Whatever you find when you look inward right now (the fear, the emptiness, the anger, the grief) that's real. That's you. And the person you build from here, the identity you construct when you're actually choosing rather than defaulting, will be more solid than anything you had before.
But you have to be willing to look. And you have to stop treating your situation as a problem to be solved with activities and start treating it as a reckoning to be moved through.
I work with English-speaking expats, especially trailing spouses, who are going through exactly this. If you want someone to sit with you while you figure out who you are without the scaffolding, I offer therapy for expats and individual therapy online in English worldwide. We start with a brief 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.
What Clients Say
“I came in thinking I knew what my issues were. I’d been over them a hundred times. But those were just the things I could already see. Aaron helped me notice what I couldn’t, and that’s where everything actually started to change.”
“I’d been in and out of therapy for years. Different therapists, different approaches, none of it really stuck. Aaron helped me understand more in a few months than all of them combined. And he talked to me like a normal person, not like all this weird therapy-speak.”
“A few years ago I suddenly developed prolonged panic attacks but couldn’t begin to understand what had caused them. Having been in therapy in the past, and being a counseling intern student, I felt I had exhausted my resources trying to figure out “What is wrong with me?” I can honestly say Aaron provides a form of counseling that is difficult to find anywhere else regarding efficacy. Not only has his approach been effective, but he also has provided me a safe space to explore aspects about myself I may not otherwise have felt able to. I cannot recommend him enough as he has helped me feel more myself than ever before.”