Couples therapy in English in the UAE is available but the pool for depth-oriented work is small, and many couples here specifically want a therapist outside their local professional and social world. The expat community in Dubai and Abu Dhabi is extensive but tight, and confidentiality has a different meaning in a city where everyone is connected.
I work with couples who need to work in English and are living in the UAE. The golden handcuffs that have kept you here past when you planned to leave, and what that does to a relationship. The material comfort that doesn't translate into relational ease. The life that looks successful and the relationship that feels hollow underneath it.
The UAE has a particular way of deferring things. Real life starts after the next contract. The relationship conversation gets put off until the conditions are right. The conditions keep changing. Couples who've been putting something off for years often arrive in a different place than couples who addressed it early.
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 the UAE as a couple
Couples in the UAE deal with a particular set of pressures the lifestyle hides well. The material comfort is real. The schools are fine. The weather is reliable. The visible quality of life is high enough that the strain showing up inside the relationship can be hard to take seriously, even between you. That gap, between what the life looks like from outside and what it feels like inside, is one of the things couples here end up needing to name.
The most common dynamic involves visa dependency. One partner holds the Employment Pass or work visa. The other is on accompanying status, often without immediate permission to work in their own profession, often dealing with the asymmetric weight of having put a career on pause for a move that was the working partner's recruitment, not theirs. That asymmetry does not stay abstract. It runs through small daily decisions about whose tiredness counts, whose social life sets the calendar, whose plans get deferred to the working partner's hours.
The other recurring pattern involves work hours. The corporate and financial culture in Dubai and Abu Dhabi rewards long days, and many people came to the UAE specifically for a financial window they do not want to close early. The couple ends up running on different clocks. By the time anyone names what is happening, the distance has been building for years.
What couples bring
The material couples bring varies but the deeper question often resolves to the same place. How long do we stay. Whose career did this move serve. Are we postponing some version of our actual life. The arguments about specifics often turn out to be the relationship trying to surface that bigger question without quite being able to.
Beyond that, the standard work: recurring conflict, growing distance, infidelity and trust repair, sexlessness, the question of staying together. The work is psychodynamic and pattern-focused.
How couples therapy in English works in the UAE
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 Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, or the northern emirates. There is a free 15-minute call first.
Working with me means the practice is entirely offshore. There is no UAE healthcare-system involvement, no record at DHA, DOH, or MOHAP, no insurance code generated. For couples with employer-sponsored visas, security clearance considerations, or simply a preference to keep this work outside the local system, that structural separation is part of what makes the work possible.
Fees are in USD by card or bank transfer.