Therapy for Expats & Internationals
Washington's international life is enormous — embassies, multilateral institutions, global firms, and the thousands of people who moved here trailing a career, a partner, or a passport's worth of expectations. It can be a strange loneliness: professionally embedded, personally unrooted, fluent in the language and foreign to the code.
Paul El-Meouchy does much of this work — a clinician with a PhD in clinical psychology who spent two decades inside international organizational life before practicing, and who works in English and French. He knows the expat arc from the inside.
What international clients bring
- Relocation grief nobody validates because the move was 'an opportunity'
- Identity split across countries, languages, and versions of yourself
- Trailing-partner dynamics: a life reorganized around someone else's posting
- Cross-cultural marriages negotiating two rulebooks
- Family obligation and guilt operating across time zones
- The recurring question of where — and whether — home is
How we work
Therapy here doesn't require translating your context — the postings, the tenure clocks, the visa precarities, the way an institution can be both a family and a cage are already understood. Sessions are available in English or French, in whichever language the feeling lives.
The work blends practical adjustment support with the deeper themes expat life reliably surfaces: belonging, reinvention, and the identities that got left at previous addresses. For couples spanning two cultures, the practice's Gottman-informed couples work applies with an international accent.
Practical details
55-minute sessions, $215 with sliding scale from $150–194. In person downtown or by telehealth within the District. Note: licensure means we see clients located in DC — ask in the consultation if your situation moves around.
Common questions
Ready to begin?
The 15-minute consult is where most people begin.