Couples Therapy for Expats, Online and in English

Couples counseling for expats. Marriage counseling for expats. And relationship therapy for English-speaking international couples. Online, 60-minute sessions, worldwide.

Relocation doesn't create new problems. It amplifies existing ones. Amplified is not the same as new. The move turns the relationship into the whole ecosystem. Whatever was manageable becomes inescapable.

Concretely: at home, after a fight, you could call your sister, he could hit the gym with a friend, and by dinner the edge was off. Here there is no sister, no friend, no buffer. The fight has one room to live in, and so do you.

What couples therapy does here

We identify the cycle you're caught in. The same sequence of triggers, reactions, and repair failures. Then we slow it down and make it conscious. When the cycle is conscious, it stops feeling like fate. Fate becomes choice.

We also talk about the unspoken grief of the move. Lost friendships. Lost family proximity. Lost ease. If grief has no place, it leaks into contempt.

The leak looks like this. She never mourned leaving her job, because the move was "an adventure" and mourning felt ungrateful. Two years later she cannot say "I lost something," but she can say "you never think about anyone but yourself," every week, in a dozen forms. The grief went underground and came back armed.

What this looks like in practice

Most couples come in blaming the move. And the move did do something real. It removed the buffers. It collapsed the social network. It piled all intimacy onto one person, who is also your only adult company in a foreign country. That's a structural problem, not a character flaw in either of you.

But the move also amplified patterns that were already there. The couple where one person always handled the stress and the other always crashed. The couple that never fought because conflict was avoided, and now avoids nothing because there's nowhere to go. The couple that used to be a team and now each feels alone.

My job isn't to tell you what pattern you're in. It's to help both of you see it from outside, in real time, which is the only way it actually changes.

Who this is for

Couples where at least one partner is living outside their home country. Both partners don't need to be expats. Often one partner is the local, one is the foreigner, and the imbalance of that is exactly what's tearing things apart.

Sessions are 60 minutes, online via secure video. Both partners join from wherever they are. If you're in different cities or different countries, that's fine. Before your first session, we have a free 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.