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 Uae
For couples in the UAE: the transience is real, the work hours are real, and the social world is largely organized around companies and nationalities in ways that can leave partners isolated from each other as much as from the city. For the partner without a professional life here, the isolation can be significant in ways that don't get named until they've been accumulating for years.
What couples bring to online therapy
Couples I work with come for recurring conflict, communication problems, infidelity and broken trust, emotional distance, codependency, resentment, sexless marriage, attachment issues, and the strain of major life transitions. Online marriage counseling and relationship therapy in English make it possible to do this work without geographic limits, whether you need a couples therapist, a marriage counselor, or relationship counseling that goes deeper than communication exercises.
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 brief 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.