01Anxiety, admin and the friction of settling in
The French systems, paperwork and pace can wear down even the most capable newcomer. Anxiety in France often grows out of a hundred small frictions: the form that bounced, the call you could not follow, the sense of always being slightly behind. Therapy is a place to steady yourself.
02Loneliness behind the language barrier
You can adore France and feel deeply alone in it. Until the language flows, social life stays shallow, and the homesickness you feel can be sharp precisely because everyone expects you to be delighted. That loneliness is real and common, not a sign you chose wrong.
03The person you cannot be in French
There is a particular grief that arrives somewhere in the second year in France, once your French is good enough for the boulangerie and the préfecture but not good enough for who you actually are. In your own language you are quick, funny, precise. In French you are simpler, slower, a beat behind every dinner table. People are meeting a reduced version of you, and some part of you starts to worry that the reduced version is what you are becoming.
France sharpens this in its own way. The correction culture is real, the small winces at your grammar, the switch to English that lands like a door closing. The codes of politeness and formality take years to read, so you are never quite sure whether you have been rude or just foreign. And underneath daily life runs the administrative labyrinth, the dossier that is never complete, the appointment that produces another appointment, which wears people down not because any single letter is unbearable but because the drip never stops.
In therapy, in English, you get the full range of yourself back for an hour. That is not an indulgence. For many of my clients in France it is the beginning of remembering that the reduced person at the dinner table is a translation problem, not the truth of them, and of deciding how to build a life here that has room for both languages and both selves.
04When the move strains your relationship
A move to France often lands unevenly, one partner anchored by work, the other adrift in admin and isolation. The relationship can quietly become your only home here, which is heavy. I work with couples and individuals on exactly this, see relationship crisis abroad and trailing partner support.
05Why online
An English-speaking therapist who suits you can be hard to find locally in France. Online with me means consistent English-language support wherever you are, Paris, Lyon, the south, the countryside, and continuity if you move again. Individual GBP70, couples GBP100.
06How I work
We start where it hurts and make sense of it together, integrative and relational, drawing on attachment, parts work and trauma-informed therapy. If you are unsure cross-border online therapy fits, I assess it openly first: suitability.