Online psychodynamic therapy in English for internationals in Berlin: no waitlist, no Kasse paperwork, and a start date measured in days rather than seasons.
The work
The work I do is relational and pattern-focused. I don't run through intake checklists or assign exercises 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 or goes flat or speeds up. That's the material we work with.
Most people arrive already knowing the story of their situation. 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's invisible from inside it. That's what I offer. Not interpretation from a distance, but 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.
The Therapieplatz problem, honestly stated
Berlin has a therapy culture and a therapy shortage at the same time. The public route runs through therapists holding a Kassensitz, the rationed insurance seats, and demand swamps them: getting a regular GKV-covered slot commonly takes four to six months, and the subset of Kassensitz therapists who work in English is small enough that internationals often give up before they start. There is a workaround, the Kostenerstattungsverfahren, where your Kasse reimburses private treatment if you can document that no approved therapist had room, but it is paperwork-heavy and approval is never guaranteed. The structure of the whole German system, including how the protected titles work and where I stand relative to them, is on my Germany page.
So Berlin's actual therapy economy is substantially private. Sessions run about 100 to 150 euros, couples work up to 200, and a sizable share of the city's bilingual therapists practice under arrangements outside the Kasse system precisely because the licensed seats are so scarce. In other words: paying privately for English-language therapy in Berlin is not the exotic option. It is the default behavior of the international city, and my practice is one more version of it, located nine time zones west.
Berlin's particular clientele
The people who write to me from Berlin sort into recognizable streams. The tech and startup arrivals who came for the job and stayed for the city, now three years in, fluent in everything except German bureaucracy and intimacy. The creative class of Neukölln and Kreuzberg, for whom self-examination is practically a civic duty but whose lives keep circling the same relationships and the same ambivalence. The corporate transfers in Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg whose families are absorbing the move at different speeds. And underneath all of them, the long Berlin winter, which has a documented way of turning a manageable melancholy into something that needs a room of its own.
What I offer that the queue does not
A start date this month instead of next spring. Native-English psychodynamic work rather than whatever modality happened to have a seat free. And a structural kind of privacy: I am US-trained, fully outside the German system, and nothing we do creates a diagnosis in your Krankenkasse file, which matters more than people expect when private insurance, Verbeamtung, or simply German data sensibilities are in play. If you want covered care and can wait for it, the Kasse route is real and free, and I will tell you so on the call.
Questions people ask from Berlin
What people bring to online therapy
The people I work with in English come for a wide range of reasons: anxiety, depression, stress and burnout, anger management, grief and loss, relationship difficulties, loneliness, self-esteem issues, procrastination, sleep problems, attachment patterns, self-sabotage, perfectionism, identity questions, and existential concerns. Online counseling makes this work possible from wherever you are, whether you need an English-speaking therapist, a virtual counselor, or simply someone who can work in your language at a depth that matters.
How it works
Sessions are online via secure video call. I work with individuals and couples (60 minutes). Before your first session, we have a free 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.