Therapy in English for Expats in Dubai: When Success Feels Like Suffocation
You moved to Dubai for the money. Let's be honest about that. The tax-free salary, the luxury lifestyle, the career acceleration. It all made perfect sense on paper.
So why does everything feel so empty?
The golden handcuffs
You're probably earning more than you ever imagined possible. Nice flat in Marina or Downtown, regular holidays to places you only dreamed about before, savings account that would make your friends back home quietly envious. From the outside, you've won. You've made it.
But there's something underneath that feels rotten.
Dubai promises you can have it all, but what it actually delivers is a life that looks successful from the outside whilst feeling completely hollow from within. You're performing prosperity whilst privately wondering if you've traded something essential for a tax exemption and year-round sunshine.
What nobody admits about expat life in Dubai
The city is designed for people passing through, not people living. Everything is artificial - the temperature controlled, the grass imported, the community manufactured. You're permanently foreign in a place that doesn't really have a culture, just an economy.
The expat hierarchy is brutal and unspoken:
- How long you've been here
- Which company you work for
- Where you live (Marina? Springs? Palm?)
- What car you drive
- Your visa status
It all gets catalogued and measured. Everyone's performing successful integration whilst privately googling "how to leave Dubai without destroying my career."
Your relationship with home becomes complicated in ways that blindside you. Going back feels parochial and small - the weather's grey, salaries are laughable, everyone's complaining about nothing. But Dubai never feels real either. You're caught between a life that feels too limited and one that feels too artificial. Neither place is home anymore.
The particular depression of having everything
This isn't about gratitude or perspective. Sometimes having everything you thought you wanted just makes the emptiness more obvious. When external success doesn't fix internal problems, you're forced to confront the uncomfortable possibility that the problem might be you.
The heat that never lets up. The superficiality of conversations at brunch. The constant performance of happiness, of having made the right choice, of living your best life. It all compounds into a peculiar kind of suffocation.
You're living in a shopping mall pretending to be a city, surrounded by other people who are also pretending everything's amazing. And beneath the Instagram-perfect surface, you're quietly drowning.
When you become your salary
Dubai reduces people to their economic function in ways that feel dehumanising. You become your job title, your salary bracket, your visa status. Everything else about you - your personality, your values, your actual interests - becomes secondary to your professional usefulness.
The conversations at networking events. The way people's eyes glaze over if you're not in finance or real estate. The friends who disappear when you change jobs or companies. The visa that ties you to your employer like an electronic leash.
That works fine until you realise you've spent three years optimising your career whilst your actual self has slowly disappeared. You've become very good at being productive and completely unable to remember what you actually care about beyond the next promotion.
The exhaustion isn't from working hard. It's from performing a version of yourself that's acceptable here - ambitious, relentlessly positive, grateful for the opportunity - whilst the real you suffocates somewhere underneath.
What psychodynamic therapy addresses
This isn't about adjusting to Dubai life or learning to love the city. It's about understanding why success feels suffocating, why money doesn't fix emptiness, and why you feel more trapped now than you did before you had all this supposed freedom.
Psychodynamic therapy looks at what happens when you get everything you thought you wanted and discover it's not enough. We examine:
- Why external success doesn't touch internal emptiness
- The cost of abandoning yourself to maintain your lifestyle
- What you're actually running from (hint: it came with you)
- The pattern of chasing achievement whilst avoiding yourself
Often, Dubai becomes a place where you can run very fast whilst going nowhere meaningful. The work is about understanding what you're running from and why you keep choosing contexts where real intimacy and authenticity feel impossible.
The goal isn't to fix your expat experience. It's to help you stop abandoning yourself in service of maintaining your lifestyle. Sometimes that means finding a way to stay that doesn't require you to disappear. Sometimes it means admitting you need to leave. Often, it means recognising that the problem isn't the location - it's the pattern you keep repeating.
Why therapy in English matters
You need to be able to express the complexity of feeling simultaneously privileged and miserable, successful and suffocated, free and trapped. That requires nuance that's hard to achieve in your second language.
You also need someone who understands that your problems aren't solved by gratitude or perspective. That having everything you thought you wanted and still feeling empty isn't ingratitude - it's information. Sometimes the life that looks perfect from the outside genuinely is killing you from the inside, and pretending otherwise doesn't help.
Practice details & booking
I'm a UK-trained psychodynamic therapist offering online therapy to expats in Dubai and international clients worldwide. This is psychodynamic work, which means we look at patterns rather than just symptoms. Why you chose Dubai. Why success feels like suffocation. Why you keep optimising your external life whilst your internal life withers.
Format:
Weekly online sessions (50 minutes) at the same time each week
Credentials:
BACP registered; currently undertaking advanced training at Tavistock Relationships
Fees:
£65 for individual therapy
£95 for couples therapy
Availability:
Worldwide (excluding USA and Canada)
Time zones:
Sessions available during Dubai-friendly hours
Internet considerations:
Standard video calling platforms work for therapy sessions. If you have concerns about online privacy in the UAE, we can discuss secure connection options that comply with local regulations
You don't need to choose between financial success and emotional honesty. But you might need help figuring out how to have both - or help accepting that you can't have both in your current situation.
Online psychodynamic therapy in English for Dubai expats who have everything they thought they wanted and feel emptier than ever. Available worldwide except USA and Canada.
