English-speaking couples therapy in France is difficult to find outside Paris, and even in Paris the options for depth-oriented work are limited. The psychoanalytic tradition here is strong but conducted almost entirely in French.
I work with couples who need to work in English and are living in France. France has a particular effect on couples who moved here together: the person who pushed for the move is often doing better than the person who followed, and neither of them wants to say it. The asymmetry is real and it has weight.
Sometimes one person is thriving, one person is going under, and the relationship is holding the whole thing. Couples work is about making that visible rather than waiting for it to become a crisis.
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.
Being in France as a couple
France produces a specific kind of relational friction for English-speaking couples that the mythology of the country tends to hide. The mythology is the food, the conversation, the philosophical seriousness, the long evenings. The daily life is the bureaucracy, the housing scarcity in Paris, the slowness of forming close friendships, and the particular French social code in which intellectual sparring counts as care. The gap between these is wider than most people expected, and it has weight inside the relationship.
For binational couples, the most common pattern involves cultural-script difference. The French partner has a vocabulary for closeness that runs on irony, indirection, and intellectual play. The non-French partner has spent years calibrating to that, sometimes very successfully, and at some point realizes they have gotten quieter than they used to be. The French partner often feels accused of being emotionally inaccessible. The non-French partner often feels they have to perform a more articulate, more arch version of themselves than the one they were back home. Both partners are right about the asymmetry and neither one is the problem.
For two-foreigner couples in Paris, the dynamic is different. The expat social world is dense but specific. Your French is good enough to function and not good enough to be your inner self in. The friendships you have are often other expats who will leave when the posting ends. The closeness ends up unevenly distributed across your week, and the relationship absorbs more of it than was built into the original arrangement.
What couples bring
The recurring fights usually have a deeper question underneath. Whose family of origin defines normal. Whose career drove the move and whether that conversation ever closed. The bilingual relationship's quiet question about which version of yourself shows up in which language. Couples therapy in English is partly about giving each of you a space where your English-speaking inner life gets to do the talking.
The standard material is here too: recurring conflict, distance, infidelity, sexlessness, the question of staying together. The work is psychodynamic.
How couples therapy in English works in France
Sessions are online via secure video, 60 minutes, usually weekly. Both partners can be on the same screen at home, or in separate locations across Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nice, or anywhere else. There is a free 15-minute call first.
There is no Sécurité Sociale involvement, no Mon Soutien Psy referral required, no French health record generated by our work. Fees are in USD by card or bank transfer.