The part nobody warned you about
You sorted the paperwork, the flat, the job, the phone contract. You learnt where to buy bread and which metro line to avoid. You may even be happy, most of the time. And still something is off.
It can be loneliness that does not match how many people you know. Friendships that are warm and then gone, because in an international city people keep leaving. A sense of being less capable, less funny, less articulate than you were at home, because so much of who you are lived in a language and a context that are no longer around you. Guilt about the life back home that carries on without you, and about the edited version of your life that you send back to it. Grief for what you left, mixed with the awkward fact that you chose to leave.
Sometimes the city is not the problem at all. Being away from your usual supports simply makes certain wounds, conflicts or pressures harder to avoid. Things that were manageable at home come to the surface here, where there is less noise and fewer people to hide behind.
Identity, belonging and the person you were
Living abroad unsettles identity in ways that are difficult to anticipate. Professional status may not translate. Family roles are played at a distance. The culture you grew up in is suddenly visible, because it is no longer the water you swim in. You may belong to Barcelona and not belong to it, and the same with home.
Many of the people I work with describe a split: the self they were before, the self they are becoming, and no obvious bridge between them. Therapy can be that bridge for a while, a place where both selves are allowed in the room.
How I work with international clients
I am from here. I know the city, the culture and the two local languages, and I work in English. That combination matters more than it sounds: you do not have to explain Barcelona to me, and you do not have to translate yourself to be understood.
I do not treat living abroad as a problem to be solved, nor as an adventure you should be grateful for. I treat it as a context, one that shapes everything else you bring: anxiety, relationships, grief, work, the body. Migration can be a loss, a liberation and an identity crisis at the same time, and we make room for all of it.
The work is person-centred and Gestalt-informed, with attention to the body and to the social and cultural context you live in. Belonging, class, gender, language and precarity are not background details; they are part of how people suffer and part of how they recover. We look at what you need, what you have lost, what you are building, and what it would take to feel at home in your own life, wherever that life happens to be.
I also write about these themes in Reflections, short pieces on the emotional side of moving here, in case you want to see whether the way I think about it resonates before getting in touch.
When it helps to talk
You do not need a crisis. People come because they have been going through the motions for months, functioning on the outside and flat on the inside. They come because a visit home left them unsettled. They come because they are tired of being the only one who knows how hard this has been. If something in you is asking for attention, that is enough.
