Psychotherapy for those between cultures, places or identities
In-person in Huddersfield • Online across the UK and Internationally
Living in a country that isn't where you're from involves a particular kind of disorientation — one that's easy to underestimate, and hard to explain to people who haven't done it.
I've made that move myself, from New York to West Yorkshire, and I work with people navigating versions of the same disorientation. The adjustment that takes longer than expected, the grief for what was left behind, the versions of yourself that don't quite translate.
What often surprises people is how much displacement touches identity. Not just where you belong geographically, but who you are when the usual markers are gone — the friendships, fluency, and the sense of being known. Some people find they've been holding themselves together through familiarity, and without it, older things surface. Grief they thought they'd finished. Questions about their relationship, their work, what they actually want.
The work here isn't about fixing the disorientation or accelerating adjustment. It's about understanding what this particular life is asking of you — what it's stirring up, what it's making harder to avoid, and what it might be opening.
Frequently asked questions
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This question often hides a deeper worry: If I chose this, does that mean something’s wrong with me for struggling? Even the most intentional choices can stir up grief, identity shifts, and layers of stress you weren’t prepared for.
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Yes. The question of staying or returning tends to carry guilt, relief, pressure, and uncertainty.
What makes it complicated is that "home" is often not what it was. The place may have changed. The people in it have moved forward. And you have changed too, in ways that are hard to account for until you're back. Some people return and find they've become a kind of stranger in both places — no longer quite from there, not quite from here either.
That particular disorientation is worth exploring before a decision is made. We can make room for what the return represents, what you're hoping it will resolve, and what it might not.
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This is more common than people expect, and it tends to add a layer of isolation to what's already hard — not just struggling, but struggling alone, in the same house. Sometimes there's also pressure, spoken or not, to catch up.
The gap in adjustment can stir up things that were there before the move: differences in how each of you handles uncertainty, what you each gave up, who the move was really for. Those differences were often there before the move. The move just makes them harder to ignore.
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Encounters with unfamiliar systems — healthcare, immigration, legal, bureaucratic — can be disorienting in ways that go beyond frustration. When something goes wrong inside a system you don't fully understand, in a country that isn't yours, it can leave a particular residue: a wariness, a sense of having been invisible, a distrust that's hard to explain to people who weren't there.
That kind of experience is worth bringing. We can look at what it stirred, what it may have compounded, and how it's sitting in you now.