Expatriates
herzlich willkommen! make yourself at home!
Emotional Consulting for expatriates and their families
Enrich the fantastic opportunities related to relocation with a sound emotional basis - handle relocation emotionally
Talk about the soft facts - they are just as important - they’re the ones that support your energy level, your mood, your motivation and the balance in your inner social system – your family.
Gift yourself and your family with a psychotherapeutically trained local life consultant, systemic organisation developer, corporate health promoter and professional organiser, Austrian and expat herself, who will accompany you and your family during your first months in Vienna. Individual coaching sessions, family sessions, partner sessions, creative kids individual or group sessions, showing your partner around Vienna to daily life survival spots, acting as a mediator in conflict situations when different problems accumulate to sort these out step by step. There may also be a few things to check with the school to make life easier for your children.
Support yourself and your family - next to tremendous advantages of living in different countries, there are issues that need to be addressed. It is sometimes easier to be integrated in the given structure of an office than to reorganise the whole domestic life. And what about the social integration into local values, routines and informal information channels? Besides, when changing country, there are shifts in your energy system, your body, mind and soul - your whole system shifts being cut off from your routines and inner programmes, everything has to be rethought, refelt and new programmes implemented. Used to quick daily routines, where everything is automatic and needs no more thinking, it can drive you mad to be reduced to a certain slowness.
Children are very brave, they often keep their problems and sadness to themselves in order not to burden their family system already stressed with the move. It is healthy to have a platform, be invited to speak about all aspects, to find words, to express the feelings in order to integrate what is happening and be open for the new.
Returning home one day expats often experience that – integrating new experiences, cultures, values, habits - they have evolved more than family and friends who stayed home. This issue can be softened with conscious integration and preparation years ahead.In terms of health promotion and prevention, there are expat issues that are good to be addressed for emotional reasons. In times of high stress levels in our lives including hyperactivity, velocity, constant change and sometimes burnout - health promotion analyses the salutogenic factors that keep people in good health.
Why I can support you on a professional levelApart from being a life coach and psychotherapist, I was relocated five times to different countries until the age of 19 due to my parents job as Austrian diplomats. I am familiar with expat issues from the point of view of all family members and my many expat friends. I have made it my job to support expats.
How can we proceed
In a first meeting, you will tell me about the issues you and your family are facing and we will discuss how we can work together.
What is Integrative Psychotherapy
Integrative Psychotherapy embraces an attitude towards the practice of psychotherapy that affirms the inherent value of each individual. It is a unifying psychotherapy that responds appropriately and effectively to the person at the affective, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological levels of functioning, and addresses as well the spiritual dimension of life.
The term "integrative" of Integrative Psychotherapy has a number of meanings. It refers to the process of integrating the personality: taking disowned, unaware, or unresolved aspects of the self and making them part of a cohesive personality, reducing the use of defense mechanisms that inhibit spontaneity and limit flexibility in problem solving, health maintenance, and relating to people, and re-engaging the world with full contact. It is the process of making whole. Through integration, it becomes possible for people to face each moment openly and freshly without the protection of a pre-formed opinion, position, attitude, or expectation.Integrative Psychotherapy also refers to the bringing together of the affective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological systems within a person, with an awareness of the social and transpersonal aspects of the systems surrounding the person. These concepts are utilized within a perspective of human development in which each phase of life presents heightened developmental tasks, need sensitivities, crises, and opportunities for new learning.
Integrative Psychotherapy takes into account many views of human functioning. The psychodynamic, client-centered, behaviorist, cognitive, family therapy, Gestalt therapy, body-psychotherapies, object relations theories, psychoanalytic self psychology, and transactional analysis approaches are all considered within a dynamic systems perspective. Each provides a partial explanation of behavior and each is enhanced when selectively integrated with other aspects of the therapist's approach. The psychotherapy interventions used in Integrative Psychotherapy are based on developmental research and theories describing the self-protective defenses used when there are interruptions in normal development.The aim of an integrative psychotherapy is to facilitate wholeness such that the quality of the person's being and functioning in the intrapsychic, interpersonal and sociopolitical space is maximized with due regard for each individual's own personal limits and external constraints.
Within this framework it is recognized that integration is a process to which therapists also need to commit themselves. Thus, there is a focus on the personal integration of therapists. However, although a focus on personal growth in the therapist is essential, there needs also to be a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge in the area of psychotherapy and its related fields. There is a particular ethical obligation on integrative psychotherapists to dialogue with colleagues of diverse orientations and to remain informed of developments in the field.