Expat Services

Cultural adaptation – Displacement trauma – Finding home inside

Therapy specific to immigration/life abroad: Support navigating the waves of immigration.

Twenty percent of your fees go towards my charity work and services supporting displaced peoples

“Everything is hard before it is easy” ― Goethe J.W.

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned” ― Maya Angelou

Some things could only be written in a foreign language; they are not lost in translation, but conceived by it. Foreign verbs of motion could be the only ways of transporting the ashes of familial memory. After all, a foreign language is like art—an alternative reality, a potential world. Once it is discovered, one can no longer go back to monolinguistic existence – Svetlana Boym

Hiraeth (def): doesn’t have a single, perfect English translation. It is usually translated as “homesickness” but It has a greater meaning. It captures a deep, bittersweet feeling of longing and nostalgia that goes beyond simply missing a place or person. It encompasses a sense of melancholy and wistfulness for a past that can’t be recaptured.

I work with expats and immigrants experiencing some or all of the highs and lows of moving countries. Challenges to our inner state and physical and mental health can come with both the positive and the negative experiences and changes that relocation brings. 

I help clients give space to challenging feelings and re-find their centre, stability and joy in a new way….As well as navigate the practicalities and settle into a new place and social network in their new country. Everything is important; from mirco to macro; from where to buy batteries –  to how to charge our own metaphorical batteries in a tottaly different country and culture.

“Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery.”- Amy Chua 

….and other common experiences that we can each encounter when moving to a different country (forcibly or choicefuly). 

Whatever you are going through, you are not alone. With the right support, the expat experience can, (instead of a crumbling lessening of oursleves and our lives) – reveal what is the most core, the most real, the most alive, the most essential, whole, fulfilling and central to who we are, how we want to engage and live and what we choose to contribute. 

This change, that can feel so uncomfortable, multilayered and complex can reveal a vibrant simplicty that can hold life’s complexity with congruence, order and love. It can help us unlearn and discard habits, conditioning and awaken more and more to a pure and unfiltered aliveness of our being.

 It’s all about finding the right container, the right frame, nutrients and support so that this process can help you flower in unknown and unthought of ways! 

“So, here you are: too foreign for home, too foreign for here.  Never enough for both.” ― Ijeoma Umebinyuo

“Your true home is in the here and the now.”  – Thich Nhat Hanh

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” ― Azar Nafisi

You can find more about the modalities I work with and practicalities such as fees and getting started on the following pages. Wherever you are  in your readjustment adventure, if you feel I could be of help to you, please reach out to book a free initial consultation. 

Warm wishes, 

Elise