Therapy for Multicultural & Bicultural Individuals
There's a version of you for each world. The one your family sees. The one your colleagues see. The one who shows up when you travel back, smaller and more agreeable than you've been in years, fluent in an older set of rules within an hour of landing.
If you grew up between cultures — an immigrant, a child of immigrants, part of a family that spans continents, or someone whose home simply ran on different rules than the world outside your front door — you already know the specific loneliness of being asked where are you really from in one room and why are you like this in another. You know what it is to be the family's translator in every sense: of language, of paperwork, of feelings. To succeed in ways your family is proud of but doesn't quite understand. To hear "just set boundaries" from well-meaning friends, maybe even a past therapist, and know it's not that simple, because what gets called enmeshment in one culture is called loyalty in yours, and walking away from it costs something real.
Why this is my work
I'm American with French and Tunisian roots — a family story stretched across Europe, North Africa, and the United States. I grew up inside different languages of affection, different religions, different rules about duty and independence, different answers to what a good daughter, a good family member, a good life looks like.
I don't tell you this because my story is yours, it isn't. I tell you because living it is why I pay attention to the layer of identity most therapy skips: the inherited one. The roles, loyalties, and expectations assigned to you before you could choose, still shaping how you love, work, rest, and measure yourself now.
How I approach it
This work is psychodynamic and attachment-focused, which means we go at the pace of understanding, not advice. I will never treat your culture as the problem to be fixed, or your family's way of loving as a pathology with an accent. The goal isn't to pick a side between your worlds. It's to see what you inherited clearly enough to decide — deliberately, with compassion for everyone involved, including you — what to carry forward and what to set down.
What we might work on
The push-pull between honoring your family and becoming yourself — without treating those as enemies
Guilt that follows every boundary, and grief for the versions of you each culture couldn't hold
Feeling "too much" in one room and "not enough" in the other
Perfectionism and over-responsibility that trace straight back to what your family sacrificed
Identity questions that sharpen around the big transitions — marriage, parenthood, loss, migration