Do you offer therapy in Rome in person?

No. I work entirely online, which means I can support you anywhere in Rome or beyond, and continue with you if you move. Sessions are in English, on a schedule that fits Italian working hours.

Why do I feel so alone in Rome when the city is full of people?

Because Rome is full of people who are leaving: tourists, students, seasonal expats. Roman social circles are formed early and rarely reopen. Feeling outside of that is a structural experience, not evidence that something is wrong with you.

I moved to Rome for my partner and feel like a guest in their life. Is that workable?

Yes, and it is one of the most common situations I see from Rome. When one person holds all the language, family and local knowledge, dependence quietly replaces partnership. Naming that imbalance, and rebuilding ground of your own, is precisely the work.

Does bureaucracy stress count as something to bring to therapy?

If it is wearing you down, it counts. The circular offices, the admin in a second language with real stakes attached, that chronic friction erodes people slowly. Sessions are in English, and that exhaustion belongs in the room.

English-Speaking Therapist for Expats in Rome

An English-speaking therapist for expats in Rome

Online therapy in English for the homesickness, anxiety and relationship strain beneath la dolce vita.

Italy can be deeply beautiful and quietly hard. The warmth and the food and the light are real, and so are the bureaucracy, the slower systems, the language barrier and the isolation that can settle in once the novelty fades.

I am a BACP-registered relational therapist working online with expats in Rome, Milan and across Italy, in English, in privacy.

01Living in a postcard, and struggling anyway

Rome has a particular cruelty for expats: you are unhappy in a place the whole world dreams of. The gap between the postcard and the permesso queue, between golden light on travertine and the fourth trip to the same office for the same stamp, produces a guilt that keeps people from asking for help. You tell yourself you have no right to struggle here. You do. The noise, the precarious contracts, the bureaucracy that resets itself, the sense that the city is magnificent and utterly indifferent to you, all of it is real, and being surrounded by beauty does not treat any of it.

Therapy gives that split somewhere to go: the life that photographs beautifully and the one you are actually living inside it.

02Lonely in a city of twenty million visitors

Rome is full of people and short on belonging. The visitors churn through and go home. The other expats you meet are often on a season, a sabbatical, a posting, gone by spring. And Roman social life itself runs on circles formed at school and reinforced by family Sundays in the same neighbourhoods for generations. Romans are warm to you and complete without you. You can become a regular at the bar, greeted by name every morning, and still have no one who knows how you actually are.

That is not a failure of charm. It is the structure of an eternal city that has watched foreigners arrive and leave for two thousand years. Belonging here has to be built deliberately, and slowly, and it helps to have one place in English where you do not have to perform the dream.

03You moved for a Roman, and you live in their city

Many of the people who contact me from Rome moved for love. Which means they did not just move to a city, they moved into someone else’s entire world: the mother two streets away, the friends from liceo, the Sunday table where everyone speaks fast and laughs at references from 1998, and you smile a beat late, the foreigner at the table again. Your partner is your translator, your fixer, your social passport. That much dependence is heavy for love to carry, and the capable person you used to be starts to feel like a rumour.

I work with exactly this, individually and as couples work in English: rebuilding ground in Rome that is yours, so the relationship can stop being your visa, your voice and your only address book, and go back to being a relationship.

04When the move strains your relationship

A move to Italy often falls unevenly on a couple, one settled by work, the other isolated by admin and language. The relationship can become your only familiar ground here. I work with this directly, see relationship crisis abroad and trailing partner support.

05Why online

A suitable English-speaking therapist can be hard to find locally in Rome. Online with me gives you consistent English-language support wherever you are and continuity if you move again. Individual GBP70, couples GBP100.

06How I work

We begin 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 online therapy across borders fits, I assess it openly first: suitability.