I’m not from here…

Recently I heard an interview with Dr. Orna Gurulnik (link: https://youtu.be/apz8B4l4NiI?si=o44o4aEshJqYEMpE) who is the psychotherapist in the television series Couples Therapy. She theorized that she was especially able to provide a therapeutic perspective for clients because she had lived in different cultures. This resonated with me, as someone who has lived between Ireland and the US for my adult life and feel that my experience with travel and especially with living in different cultures has changed the way I see almost everything.

Once you understand, on an experiential level, the ways that culture dictates how we live and what we believe, it becomes easier to see that it is within our power to change our own perspectives from the inside.

I think there are many outsider perspectives that can be useful in this way – queer people, neurodivergent people – any situation where the way you see and experience the world is different than the people around you offers an opportunity to bring a new and different lens to any problem.

I am all of these things – queer, neurodivergent and also an immigrant. My mother once told me that I thought so far outside the box that I had forgotten what shape it was to begin with.

There is an additional skill that is useful in offering good therapy, and that is the ability to take another person’s perspective. A deep and personalized empathy is core to the therapeutic relationship. I can sit with you in the culture that you are living with, with the internal culture you have co-created with your family, personal history, and environment. And help you see what you can choose to change, if you want to.

My approach is informed by my readings and understandings of how people work generally, but each individual needs to choose their own way of being in the world. People come to therapy because something they have been doing isn’t working, and we are often not able to see our own blind spots – where we might be causing parts of our own distress.

My perspective, as an outsider in many different ways who has made a home and built a community here, has a unique gift to offer clients seeking growth and change.