01Anxiety, adjustment and reverse culture shock

Arriving in Britain, or coming home to it, can unsettle you more than you expected. Internationals navigate subtle social codes; returners find that home no longer fits the way it did. That disorientation often shows up as anxiety or a low, hard-to-name unease. Therapy gives it a place to be understood.

02Loneliness, belonging and the in-between

Many internationals in the UK feel between worlds, no longer fully of the place they left, not yet of the place they are in. Returners can feel like strangers in their own country. That in-between loneliness is real, and naming it is the start of easing it.

03Repatriation: the move nobody warns you about

Some of the loneliest people I work with are British people who have come home. They expected relief, and instead found that home moved on without them. The friendships have re-formed around lives they were not part of. The references have changed. The things that now feel strange to them, the smallness of the talk, the greyness of the light, the queueing politeness that once felt like belonging, are things nobody else around them can see as strange. Reverse culture shock is real, and it is more disorienting than the original move, because this time there is no explanation for feeling foreign.

The internationals who move to Britain carry the mirror image. British social life is famously warm on the surface and hard to read underneath: the indirectness, the humour that carries the actual meaning, the invitations that are politeness rather than plans. You can live here for years, employed and pleasant and included in every round of drinks, without once being asked a question that reaches you. Both groups, the returning and the arriving, describe the same thing in different accents: being surrounded by a life that does not quite have them in it.

If you are also sitting on a long wait for talking therapy, you do not have to hold this alone in the meantime. I am UK-based and BACP registered, I work online across the UK, and there is no waiting list. The in-between place you are living in, between countries, between selves, between the person who left and the person who returned, is a real place, and it is exactly where my work sits.

04When the move strains your relationship

Relocating to the UK can fall unevenly on a couple, especially when one partner has roots here and the other does not, or when the family has moved for one person's work. The relationship carries the weight of resettling. I work with this directly, see relationship crisis abroad and cross-cultural couples therapy.

05Why online

Online therapy means you can work with me wherever you are in the UK, and keep that continuity if life moves you again. Sessions are private and in English, with the cultural fluency that matters when you are between worlds. 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. As a relational therapist who works across cultures, I hold the between-worlds experience as central, not incidental.