Being a foreigner

For those of us who have made the change of living in a country which is not the one in which we were born or grew up,  we recognise that there are thousands of elements of assimilation and adaptation that one must go through to make it in a new culture with new people and circumstances.

Many times, I’m fortunate to be able to say, as in my own situation, this change is the result of a positive choice made to improve quality of life, take an opportunity or fulfil a long-held dream. In 2018, I decided to move my entire life and work to France to move away from what I found to be the stresses of city-living (that I once loved) and a change in political atmosphere in the United Kingdom. And whilst my little corner of rural France is not perfect, I like to think that I am making the most of my decision and enjoying it more than I would enjoy living where and how I used to.

Choosing a different life

Since that date, I’ve met many people who made the same kind of choice as me at different times in their lives. They left their mother-country to try something new, to take up a job, to raise their family differently, or simply to embark upon an adventure, thinking that they will probably one day return “home”, but for now at least, they are enjoying the challenges presented to them.

However, one of the most difficult challenges that those who live away from their friends and family can face is the idea of spending Christmas, New Year’s Eve or another end-of-year celebration far away from the ones that they love.

Christmas can make us question everything

I read post after post of those who find themselves pensive and unclear as to whether the pull to be back with loved ones at Christmas is the sign that they should abandon their changed lifestyle and return to their country of origin. And I get it, it is hard to be away from the familiarities and traditions of our country of origin.

Whenever I have returned to the UK to visit friends or family, I have felt a similar thing. The convenience of having the people that I love and yet rarely have the opportunity to see, so close at hand, has felt wonderful. The busyness and bustle of the UK is a very stark contrast to the slow rural pace of where I now live in la France profonde, and so it’s a pretty heady feeling to be back in an environment where you can order pretty much anything for delivery to your home from the convenience of an app, at almost no cost, when even takeaway or supermarket home delivery doesn't exist where I live.

The combination of familiarity, sentimentality and convenience is a very tempting offer if we are exposed to them early on in our experience of being an immigrant, and I can well see why some of those people I have met and read the forum posts of are angsting about whether or not they should just pack up and go back.

When we decide to return home

Unfortunately, two of the dearest friends that I have made since moving here are in the position of selling their beautiful French home and returning to the UK, not just for sentimentality's sake, but also for work and fulfilment. I both support and grieve their departure equally. And it's not just them, the going rate for immigrants returning to their country of origin, anecdotally, seems to peak at around three years post arrival - once the honeymoon phase of a new life in a new culture wears off (and it definitely does) and the realities of the banality, or even increased difficulty, of beauraucracy in the new country sets in.

So when I meet people in therapy who have the same question, they are often checking in with me as a professional to talk through their decision before committing to go (or stay). Happily, I consider myself well-placed to empathise with this difficult situation, and endeavour to offer a holistic approach as to how to answer the question of “I miss my friends and family terribly, especially at Christmas - should I leave France and go back home?”

My free prompts to help you interrogate your urge to go back

In case you should find yourself asking the same kind of question, allow me to offer you some of the suggestions that I might make if we were to have a conversation on this topic:

• What were your reasons for leaving your country of origin? Have circumstances there changed since you left?
• What are the top two things that you are missing from your home country? Are you able to reasonably create a new version of this where you live now? Have you tried?
• What kind of frequency of contact do you have with those that you are missing at Christmas? Would you like a greater frequency of video calls or trips back to visit?
• How much time have you spent there since you left? Short weekend trips can feel like a gleeful toe-dip back into a familiar and exciting life, but consistent time - weeks, for example - might give a more accurate sense of what everyday life there is like now.
• Remember that if you have been gone for a substantial length of time, then both people and places will have moved on somewhat. Friends and family will be able to prioritise you when visiting on short trips, but when everyone is in the regular flow of their lives, contact will probably be less intense, as it must be. Would that be okay for you?
• How much have you integrated into life in your new country? Are there any things that you would like to try but that you have been holding off doing? Perhaps trying them before you make a decision would help you to know more firmly whether or not there is room for improvement in your current situation.

Pushing back against feeling like we’ve failed

It can feel like there is a stigma around changing our minds, or that going back on a decision is something that we should be ashamed of, and I would like to offer that this is, in fact, nonsense.

If you want to go and are in a position to do so, then I say go! Don’t apologise for it, try not to consider it a failure (I certainly wouldn’t!), and I would encourage you not to feel shame about the idea of saying no to something that you once thought you wanted. It’s okay to change our minds, it’s okay to want something different, and it’s okay to say, “I tried this, and it didn’t bring me as much happiness as I had hoped, so I’m going to try something else”.

If someone tries to make you feel bad for your decision, then I would be inclined to think that there is more going on in their response than perhaps meets the ear, or that perhaps they are simply unkind! Good friends will only ever want the best for us, and if that is making a change that differs from our own choices, then so be it. If their concerns come from a compassionate place, then we will be able to thank them for their care, but reassure them that we have come to the right decision for us for now.

Talk to Someone about it

If you find yourself in this position, I would urge you not to stew on these feelings and ruminate in shame or angst in the period of the year when we usually need the most connection and support to help us through the darker, colder months. Instead, speak to a trusted friend, seek out someone who has done the same or who has talked about their own challenges. Find a therapist or even a trusted group with whom you can share your thoughts, and above all, don’t be alone. Christmas and New Year are often already laden with complex feelings; this one need not bring further distress.

End-of-year expense

As we approach an expensive time of year for everyone - be that in increased heating costs, travel costs or celebrating end-of-year holidays, I, like everyone else, look at my own income as a self-employed person and try to calculate what I’m going to need for the coming months, and whether what I have coming in is going to comfortably meet what I anticipate going out.

Since the arrival of my child two and a half years ago, I have seen my personal outgoings do little else but increase, naturally, and I pay greater attention than ever to my household’s finances to ensure that we can have the kind of lifestyle that we want.

Some years, I have to admit that with health crises and some unexpected periods of being unwell and unable to work, it's all felt a little too close for comfort. However, as someone who came from humble beginnings, I am pleased to have been able to draw on that experience in shaping my expenses according to my situation. I know that I’m not alone in this.

A quiet time

If I look at my diary for the rest of 2025, honestly, it looks a little sparse. I know this is not because people have stopped thinking, feeling, or suffering, sadly. Sometimes it is because the end of the year is a busy time and people are travelling or seeing friends or family in the spaces when they aren’t working or doing their usual routines, and I get that. I do it too.
Some people are cutting back on sessions or letting me know they’ll be able to return to our work in the new year or early spring 2026, when their finances feel more predictable and they can commit to this investment in themselves. Again, totally relatable.

And the message that I have replied to them with, that I am hoping to convey to you and, perhaps above all, to myself, is that this is fine. More than fine. Normal. Expected. Essential.

Because, as much as I see many mental health organisations and practitioners rightly reminding us that counselling and therapy are essentials that we should consider akin to heating, water, and even pension contributions, the fact of the matter is that this year, perhaps more than many years in recent memory, people are struggling. People are having trouble feeding themselves and paying their rent. In this economy, it’s easier and easier to think of the talking therapies as an unnecessary expense to be able to cut back on.

The hungry gap (psychologically speaking)

If I may reassure any counselling clients out there reading this that the only acceptable answer from me or another private therapist is that this is no problem whatsoever, and it is absolutely, completely, wholly the decision of the person paying for the service and that I respect it. I'm not here to dissuade someone from making a decision that is probably a) difficult and b) possibly feels stigmatised (by our culture, not by therapy, I should add).

That said, my suggestions for those who feel the need to cancel private therapy in times of financial hardship would be:

• If it can be, let a lull in therapy be temporary - coming back to anything after a break is usually difficult, and it makes sense that coming back to counselling, the requirement to be reflective, vulnerable, and honest, can feel that much harder to access after a long break from your work. If you can get back to therapy sooner rather than later, there is a chance that your therapy will be that much fresher and more present in your mind to pick up on (with whomsoever that therapist might be).

• If you can, keep your work going to some degree - whether that be making sure that you block out some cost-free time for self-care, self-reflection, a walk to give yourself some solitude and thinking space, a journalling practice to keep your reflections deep and useful, or simply making sure you listen to some music or get the chance to read a few chapters of a comfort book over the busy end of year period. There is so much going on at this time, it’s important not to neglect ourselves.

Let me know your thoughts

I hope that therapists and clients alike find these reflections useful. Money and therapy are famously uncomfortable bedfellows, so if you have any comments, please do share them. I’m always delighted to talk more about the role of money in therapy, as my specialist training with The Trauma of Money betrays!

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent and damaging mental health issues impacting our society today. I have spent my career working with those suffering from anxiety on various levels of the spectrum of suffering, and all humans experience anxiety to some degree.

Typical anxiety happens to us all, and in the modern world, we usually experience it to some degree every single day in small doses. Sometimes we suffer from longer circumstance-induced bouts of anxiety, and some of us seem to have anxiety written in our genes - it’s the model with which we came to understand the world, and it underpins how we react to the things we find in it.

The human brain is extraordinary

It never ceases to amaze me how human brains find new ways, methods, and behaviours to manifest anxious feelings, and it can be extraordinarily distressing to those who suffer from it when the symptoms begin to become debilitating. This post is not for those who are suffering from the “anxiety impacts my whole day” variety of struggles. For those people, self-managed interventions are, in my experience, more difficult to make work, and I would wholeheartedly suggest seeking and speaking to someone who can offer you direct support and guidance in how to work with your debilitating anxious feelings and behaviours. It doesn’t have to be like this, and there is absolutely no shame in seeking help for it.

For those who feel like their anxious thoughts are more frequent, but perhaps annoying or frustrating, I would like to offer a quick therapy tool that I use with those who are presenting mild anxiety symptoms. It’s a logical question that we use to analyse the thoughts that we are having and make a judgment on how useful it is. An example is:

The situation and the tool

I’m late for a dentist appointment and I’ve just got in my car to realise that I have no fuel. I will definitely need to refill before I get to the clinic, and that will no doubt add extra lateness to my arrival time. My anxiety kicks in, and my heart rate increases. My hands become sweaty, and I get hot. I’m having a physical reaction in the moment to my panic that I’m going to be late for my appointment and maybe admonished or ignored by the dentist. I hate to be late; I find it crushingly embarrassing. What will they think of me? My dad always scolded me for my lateness, and I haven’t changed at all...

Time for analysis, not self-judgement

We look at the circumstances to see if the situation allows for any wiggle room or change in outcome. If I cannot change the outcome - i.e., I’m going to be late no matter what and there’s nothing I can do about it, then we have to accept that these thoughts are “pointless ruminations”. This means that the thoughts and consequent feelings of this event have no impact on the outcome and only serve to encourage us to spiral further into distressing or unpleasant feelings.

It’s at this point we can acknoweldge the thought directly with something like “thanks brain, I can see this is something that I can’t change and I’m going to have to stop ruminating and concentrate on calling ahead to the clinic to let them know I’ll be late, or just getting there as soon as I can, and stop this thought cycle before it takes up any more of my time and peace”.

This allows us to stop spending any further time descending into unnecessary stress and rumination on the perceived consequences. What is the point of spending time grieving something that we can’t do anything about? If something is unchangeable, then perhaps we can permit ourselves to move into pragmatism and cut off the shame spiral before it gets worse.

Adapt, improvise, and overcome

However, what if our analysis concludes that there is something we could do about the situation?

What if I realise my car has no fuel and I’ll be really late if I refill it before getting to the dental clinic, but if I quickly order an Uber or minicab straight there, then I can forget my fuel gauge. Plus, since I will no longer need to find parking, I won’t be as late as I feared and will ultimately be able to keep my appointment.

This kind of response recategorises the initial thought as “useful worry”. It’s the kind of stress that kicks us into the “adapt, improvise, and overcome”* part of our brain. This is the kind of stress that drives us to be extra early for a train, or to make sure we have our passport for our flight, or, as recently happenned to me, have the ability to think quickly and book an alternative form of transport out of a city when trains are cancelled and suddenly hundreds of stranded passengers are looking for a way home (thanks Bla Bla Car!).

If you can sit with your anxiety in the moment, analyse it and reframe it as “pointless rumination” or “useful worry” then you might be able to transform your relationship with your sometimes anxious brain and bring back online the parts of it which allow you to flow through the world and its eventual ups and downs with a little more ease and peace.

Questions to ask yourself

• Is there anything that I can do about this?
• Will continuing to think about this only serve to make me feel worse about the situation?
• If I can do something, will it affect the outcome in a way that makes the situation better?
• Is this worry useful? Is it helping me to be on time or prepared for an event?
• Are these thoughts ruminating? Am I going over the same thing repeatedly without resolution?
• Can I thank my brain for trying to protect me, but push back against the “pointless rumination” and move on to something else? (an activity, a distraction, a task)
• Can I thank my brain for converting the stress of a situation into actionable steps and use the feelings as “useful worry”?

What next

These are some of the ways I encourage my clients to challenge the data that their brain presents them with. Of course, these are innocuous examples, and I hope that your own anxieties are manageable and work with this kind of tool; however, as I said before, if they do not, and you cannot manage them alone, then do not be afraid to talk about them with someone, a friend, a therapist, or a trusted third party. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and there are many ways to work with these difficult feelings; it can just feel really hard to do so from the confines of our own thoughts.

Book a free 30-minute introductory session to talk about these feelings with me, a BACP-accredited counsellor and talking therapist, here.







* Unexpected thanks to Bear Grylls for this phrase!

I work with several people who have chosen to remove themselves from certain family members' lives. This decision has been unilaterally something that these people have considered deeply for long periods of time before doing so, and they have all reported overall improvement in their lives for having done so with these particular people.

After the separation has been in place for a while, this relationship management might require perhaps minimal ongoing maintenance (blocking contact efforts, managing security settings on social media posts, rebuffing phone calls or texts for example), however I have noticed that in almost all cases, these usually strong boundaries that give these clients so much freedom, peace and clarity, can become burdensome and complex as the end of the year approaches.

Setting boundaries in our modern world

Setting a boundary is something that is often talked about in a throwaway fashion these days. I am very glad that we are all talking about managing our relationships and the energy that we put into them, but I am also mindful that the way that we talk about boundaries can sometimes be confusing. It’s a really useful tool for managing our wellbeing around others who can be challenging, but I’m not convinced that what we often see described as “setting boundaries” is really that.

What it is and how to do it

A boundary is a statement that we say to ourselves, and may even share with another person, that describes what we will do in the event of a certain behaviour or communication.

An example of this might be to say “Dad, I don’t feel comfortably talking about my marriage breakup right now. If you ask me about it when I come home for Christmas, then I’m not going to talk about it” or “Mum, I don’t want how my body looks to be a topic of conversation between us anymore. If you mention my body size or shape when I come to see you for New Year, then I will leave the party”. It might even be something like “You’re my sister and I love you, but I do not want to get into politics when we see each other this year. If it happens, I’m not going to engage with it”.

That is to say, boundaries are kind. We let people know that we do not wish to participate in something - a conversation, for example, or maybe an action - and that if they go on to engage with us in the way that we have described, then the consequence will be x. We have given them a structure that tells them that we find something too distressing to engage with, and that we won’t be part of it.

What boundary setting isn’t

It is very important for me to highlight that boundary setting is not about setting rules for other people. Boundary setting is about recognising that most of us have enough agency in the world to behave and speak as we please. It is not for us to demand that someone not talk about a certain topic to us, or ask us a rude or hurtful question. That is control, not boundaries, and it is neither reasonable nor kind to put them on others. It usually sets them up for failure, and it takes the power over the situation away from us.

What boundaries can do for us?

Instead, making these statements - expressed or otherwise - puts us in the position of saying, I cannot control other people, but I can control what I do and how I react, and if they do something that I have told them hurts me, then I will remove myself from the situation. I take care of myself.

Family estrangement as a final straw

Removing family members from our lives usually happens after repeated efforts to maintain a boundary with someone have failed. They either do not care that they hurt us or they are intentionally hurting us. Either way, many individuals find that this kind of repeated distress is just part of a bigger picture as to why they come to the decision to remove an individual from their life. The problem with this, as we approach the end of the year, is that the cultural and societal expectations and assumptions that many people hold over others are that they will joyously and willingly be reuniting with loved ones and those to whom they are related over the end-of-year festivities. We can hardly escape advertising and entertainment based around the idea of the sanctity of family and how integral it is to our happiness, particularly at the end of the year.

Let's say no to forced closeness

I want to push back on these assumptions that my clients report to be so painful. I want us all to try to be a little more tactful in the way that we engage with those who have complicated, nuanced, and usually painful family estrangement stories.
That said, we cannot know what we don’t know, and as someone who has experienced the estrangement of a family member, I know that I would not have minded that someone might initially assume a positive relationship with someone with whom I did not share it. However, once explained, I would expect them to be tactful and thoughtful about the way they might explore that information, and afford me the space not to engage with the topic if preferred.

Your family estrangement experience

If you find family estrangement to be difficult at the end of the year, then know that you are not alone. That this is a time of increased social assumptions, cultural expectations, and commercial sentimentality, and that most people realise that the decision to sever ties with someone to whom we are related is a significant and serious decision that deserves respect and consideration.

If you struggle with your feelings around this topic, please do feel free to contact me and arrange a session to discuss further. These are circumstances in which I have a great deal of experience and empathy for, and I hope to be able to offer my support to those who experience it in a useful way.