The work
The work I do is relational and pattern-focused. I don't run intake checklists. I don't assign homework between sessions. I pay attention to what happens in the room. What you're saying. What you're not saying. The moments when something shifts, goes flat, or speeds up. That's the material we work with.
Most people arrive already knowing their own story. They've told it to themselves a hundred times and always land in the same place. What's missing is a different angle. Someone watching in real time, who can name what you cannot see from inside it. That's what I offer. Not interpretation from a distance. Attention in the room, offered as it happens.
I work with individuals and couples. Individual work is usually about finding the pattern underneath the presenting problem, the thing that keeps recurring in different forms across different circumstances. Couples work is about finding what the argument is really about, which is rarely what it appears to be about. Both come down to the same thing: seeing what you haven't been able to see, and from there, actually being able to do something different.
What couples bring
The arguments couples bring me here usually have something else underneath them: whose career anchored the move, whose family of origin is closer or louder, whose calendar wins on a tired Friday. The standard material also shows up: recurring conflict, distance, infidelity and broken trust, sexlessness, the question of staying together. The work is psychodynamic and pattern-focused.
How couples therapy in English works in Austria
Sessions are online via secure video, 60 minutes, usually weekly. Both partners can be on the same screen or in separate locations across Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Innsbruck, or anywhere else in the country. A free 15-minute call comes first. There is no Austrian health-system involvement, no e-card record from our work. You can pay in any currency, by card or bank transfer.
Finding a therapist in Austria who works in English with real clinical depth takes real effort. Vienna has more options than other cities, but the pool is still small and the waits are often long. The German-language mental health system isn't built for the kind of sustained, exploratory work many English speakers are looking for.
I work with anyone who needs support in English and is living in Austria. Relationship trouble. A low you can't quite name. Something you've been managing for a long time. Something that's just surfaced.
Being in Austria as a couple
Austria has a particular weight on couples that takes time to recognize. The country runs well. The bureaucratic structure is dense but workable. Vienna in particular has the feel of an old European capital that knows what it is and is in no hurry to explain itself to you. For couples that relocated here together, that combination of orderliness and reserve can produce a quiet pressure inside the relationship that is hard to name.
One pattern shows up often. One partner has the job that brought you here. The other has the slower path of finding professional footing in a labor market where German fluency makes a real difference and where the social on-ramps are slow. The recruited partner is integrated through work. The accompanying partner is integrating through a series of administrative friction points and a social culture that prizes formality. Six months in, both of you are tired in different ways and not always able to recognize the other's version of tired.
Austrian social culture itself adds something. The distinction between Sie and Du, the formality of greetings, the gradualness with which Austrians let foreigners into close circles, all of it is real and learnable. While you are learning it, your couple is carrying more of your social life than it was built for.