Listening to what speaks
beneath the surface.
A space to speak freely,
think deeply, and be heard.
Hi there,
You may be here because something in you is searching for steadiness, meaning, or a deeper sense of belonging. Perhaps you’ve moved across countries or cultures, or have spent years adapting to environments that asked you to change parts of yourself in order to fit, succeed, or stay connected.
Living in a new culture — or between cultures — can quietly shape how we relate to ourselves and others. There can be losses that don’t register as losses, ruptures that go unnamed, and questions about home, identity, and safety that linger beneath the surface. Often, these experiences are held alone.
I am a US-trained psychotherapist offering relational attachment-based and psychodynamic therapy. My work is grounded in understanding how early relationships, cultural context, and lived experience shape the ways we attach, protect ourselves, and seek connection. Many people I work with hesitate to use the word trauma, even when their nervous systems tell a different story. Together, we listen to that story — gently, without forcing meaning or labels.
Belonging, Rupture and Repair
Therapy is a place to explore relational rupture: moments of disconnection, misattunement, or not being met as you needed — whether in family, partnerships, communities, or cultural systems. We also attend to the longing that lives alongside rupture: the wish to belong, to feel seen without explanation, to be able to rest in relationship.
If you’re used to adapting, holding things together, or making sense of experiences on your own, having a space that centers you, it may feel unfamiliar at first. We move slowly, at a pace that respects what your system has needed to survive and what it’s ready to explore now.
You don’t have to arrive with clarity or a plan. This is a space to be curious, to notice patterns, and to reconnect with parts of yourself that may have gone quiet while you were finding your way.
Here, the complexity of your experience is welcomed.
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This practice may be a good fit if you:
Live between cultures or have relocated far from home
Feel a persistent sense of disconnection or longing
Notice recurring patterns in relationships
Carry grief that doesn’t feel fully acknowledged
Feel “functional” yet emotionally distant or alone
Are curious about your inner world, even if you don’t know where to begin
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I offer psychoanalytic, attachment-informed psychotherapy for expats and internationally mobile adults living in Portugal or across borders.
This work is rooted in the understanding that we are shaped in relationship — and that what has been ruptured in relationship can be repaired there, too. Early attachments, cultural transitions, and significant losses leave traces. They show up not only in memory, but in the ways we protect ourselves, reach for others, or pull away.
In therapy, we attend to what unfolds between us: the feelings, patterns, silences, and longings that emerge in the room. Together, we listen for what has been carried alone, misattuned to, or left without language.
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I work slowly and collaboratively, with deep respect for the ways your mind and nervous system learned to survive. I am attentive to cultural context, power, and identity — and to how these shape both suffering and resilience.
I do not see symptoms as problems to eliminate, but as communications — signals of something that once made sense and now seeks understanding.
““One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.””