English-Speaking Therapist in Paris.

The work

The work I do is relational and focused on pattern. I don't run intake checklists. I don't assign homework. I pay attention to what happens in the session. The moments when something shifts or goes flat. The pattern that keeps showing up underneath the problem. Most people already know their own story. They still keep landing in the same place. What's missing is someone watching in real time, someone who can name what you cannot see from inside it. More on how I work, and how I work with couples.

Working with me from Paris

I am a US-trained psychodynamic therapist working online and privately. No French registration. No Sécu, no mutuelle paperwork. Nothing enters any French system. Paris evening sessions are easy to schedule across time zones. What I add is native-English depth work with someone whose entire practice is people living outside their home country, including the specific Paris version of it. For medication or French-system care, a psychiatre or a Mon soutien psy psychologist is the right door, and if that is the truer fit, I will point you there on the call.

What people bring to online therapy

People who write from Paris tend to edit themselves first. The acceptable version comes first: work stress, sleep trouble, a vague flatness they cannot pin to anything going wrong. The unedited version follows a few sessions later. Marriages where one partner carries France for both. Anxiety with an administrative trigger and a much older root. The particular exhaustion of being charming all day in a rented language. Grief, sometimes a decade old, for the self that got left at the airport. Depression that hides well under good lighting. My job, at the start, is mostly to make the unedited version speakable. There is always one, eventually.

How it works

Sessions are weekly and last an hour. They run on secure video, for one person or for a couple. Evening hours in French time exist for people whose days are spoken for. There is no dossier, no carte vitale involvement, and no waiting for the anglophone circuit to free up a slot. Before anything else we have a free 15-minute call; that is enough time to know whether you want a second hour.

The Paris caseload

Paris does something specific to foreigners. It makes their unhappiness feel like ingratitude. You are living the postcard, so who are you to be miserable in it? Meanwhile, the actual texture of the life. The apartment that took four months and a dossier as thick as a thesis. The prefecture appointments. The office where your French gets praised in a way that tells you it will never be enough. The Parisian social wall that makes Viennese reserve look warm. Couples take a distinct hit here. One partner is usually living their dream, and the other is hosting it. The work with those couples is described on my couples therapy in France page. And the long-term Anglos. Ten years in, fluent, settled, always slightly outside. They carry a quiet grief with no obvious name. All of it is real material for therapy, whatever the postcard says.

The ingratitude trap

The trap has a shape. You arrive with the story everyone handed you: Paris, lucky you. So the first bad month reads as a personal failing, and you keep it to yourself. The second bad month has the first to hide as well. By the first bad year you are running a full-time public-relations operation on your own life, fluent in the version where the light is beautiful and the market is worth it.

The cost of the performance is that nobody, including you, gets to find out what is actually wrong. Unhappiness you are allowed to have gets examined and moves. Unhappiness you are not allowed to have just circles. That is why the postcard problem is a real clinical problem and never a luxury complaint: the city's glamour works like a gag order, and the gag order, more than the city, is what keeps people stuck. Therapy, bluntly, is the one hour a week where the press release stops. People often apologize in the first session for having a problem in Paris at all. That apology is usually the problem talking.

Who reaches out from Paris

Three groups, mostly. The newer arrivals, one to three years in, still translating themselves at the prefecture and the pharmacy, worn down less by any single thing than by the sum of small frictions that never quite stop. The franco-foreign couples, one partner native here and the other a permanent guest, negotiating whose country, whose language, whose family gets the holidays. And the long-term Anglos, a decade or more in, whose French is genuinely good and whose outsiderness turned out to be permanent anyway. What they carry is closer to grief than to adjustment, and it responds to being treated as grief.

What the three groups share is the need to do this work in English, at depth, without joining the queue for the city's small anglophone circuit. That is the work I do, online, as therapy for people living abroad, from Paris or from wherever France sends you next. The city stays exactly as beautiful once you stop performing for it. That is rather the point.

How therapy works in France, and where English fits

France finally built a public route into psychology: Mon soutien psy, which since its 2024 to 2025 overhaul covers twelve sessions a year with a participating psychologue at a fixed fifty-euro tariff, no referral needed, with the Assurance Maladie paying sixty percent and most mutuelles topping up the rest. It is a genuine improvement and a constrained one: the sessions are short, the frame is mild-to-moderate difficulties, only a few thousand psychologists have signed on nationally, and the work happens overwhelmingly in French. Outside the program, ordinary psychologue sessions are private at seventy to 120 euros in Paris, unreimbursed by the Sécu, while psychiatrists remain the covered route for medication. The full system, titles and all, is on my France page.

Anglophone Paris has its institutions: the American Hospital out in Neuilly, the long-running SOS Help listening line, a circuit of English-speaking therapists clustered around the 6th, 7th, and 16th, and the circuit is small. The therapists internationals most want (trained analytically, genuinely bilingual, taking new clients) fill their books fast in a city that practically invented the couch. For the French rules, the costs and the waits, see my France guide to insurance, cost and waiting lists.

How therapy is paid for in Paris

Three doors, three bills. The first is Mon soutien psy, the public scheme for mild to moderate distress. It covers twelve sessions a year with a partner psychologue at a fixed 50 euros. The Assurance Maladie pays 60 percent and a responsible mutuelle pays the rest, so most people pay nothing. You no longer need a prescription: since June 2024 you book directly with a psychologue from the official directory. The limits are real: the sessions are short, the scheme is for mild to moderate difficulty, and the partner psychologues work almost entirely in French.

The second door is the psychiatre. A psychiatre is a doctor. The visit is reimbursed like any specialist visit, and only a psychiatre can prescribe medication. The public version of this door is the CMP, the centre médico-psychologique. It is free. It also carries the longest waits in the system, often months for adults. And the treatment is set by the center, not by you.

The third door is a private psychologue outside the scheme. The Assurance Maladie pays nothing toward it. Some mutuelles pay a small yearly amount. A 2025 survey put the national average at about 61 euros a session. Paris runs about double the rural rate, so 70 to 120 euros in the capital is normal. The anglophone circuit sits in that range or above it. Its best-known therapists book out for weeks. Most private therapists, in French or English, have room within a few weeks.

My sessions are private and outside the French registers. Neither Mon soutien psy nor the Sécurité sociale applies to them. What I offer starts where the scheme stops. Sustained work in English, for one person or a couple, with no session cap and no waiting list. The full picture, with the sources, is in my guide to insurance, cost and waiting lists in France.

Questions people ask from Paris