There is a particular loneliness in struggling in a country that isn't yours. You can be perfectly happy with your move and still find that when things get hard — a loss, a marriage under strain, an anxiety that followed you through customs — you need to talk about it in your own language, with all its shortcuts and silences, not in the careful second-language version of yourself.
If you have been searching for an English speaking counsellor, you may have found that the options where you live are either not in English, booked solid within the expat community, or priced for a corporate relocation package you don't have. I am a native English speaker, a counsellor in private practice, registered as a social worker with the SACSSP in South Africa, and I see people online wherever in the world they happen to be.
Why the language matters more than people admit
Counselling happens in the space between words — hesitations, half-finished sentences, the thing you almost said. In a second language, or through a counsellor working in their second language, that space narrows. You spend effort on translation that should be going into honesty. Working with an expat counsellor who shares your first language gives you back that effort, and it matters most exactly when things are hardest.
What expat life brings into the room
I work with English speakers across Europe, the Gulf, Africa and plenty of quieter places in between — cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Dubai among them, and certain themes return again and again: grief for someone who died far away, when you couldn't get home in time or the funeral happened without you; marriages carrying the strain of one partner's career move; the flatness that can settle in after the excitement of arrival wears off; and old difficulties — anxiety, family history, past trauma — that a change of country was quietly supposed to fix, and didn't.
Distance makes grief especially complicated, and it is the heart of my work — there is more on my grief counselling page.
A word to South Africans abroad
A good number of my clients are South Africans overseas, and I understand that particular ache from the inside: parents ageing at home while you are eleven thousand kilometres away, the guilt that flares with every WhatsApp from family, homesickness for a place you also chose to leave. If it helps to talk to someone who knows exactly what a Sunday lunch in Johannesburg sounds like, I am here. But to be clear — this page, and my practice, are for all English speakers, not only the homesick South African kind.
How sessions fit your day
Sessions are 60 minutes over video call. I practise from Johannesburg, which shares its time zone with most of Europe in summer and sits an hour ahead in winter — so a lunchtime or evening session where you are is an ordinary working hour for me. For the Gulf, the gap is similarly small. No 5am appointments, no negotiating with a counsellor eight time zones away.
My fee is £40 / €45 a session — a good professional rate in South Africa, and usually well under what English-language counselling costs through local private clinics abroad. I have written more about why on my affordable online counselling page, and there is a page for UK-based clients too.