Therapy in English for Expats in Tokyo: When Success Feels Empty
You moved to Tokyo with purpose. Career opportunity, adventure, escape - whatever brought you here felt intentional. The move made sense. You had reasons.
So why does everything feel so bloody hard?
The peculiar loneliness of Tokyo success
You're probably doing well by external measures. Good job, nice apartment in Shibuya or Meguro, Instagram-worthy weekend trips to Kyoto or Hakone. But there's something underneath - a flatness, a disconnection, a sense that you're performing your life rather than living it.
Tokyo amplifies this in ways that blindside people. The city's relentless efficiency makes your internal chaos feel more obvious. The cultural politeness means you're constantly reading between lines you don't understand. The expectation of harmony when you feel anything but harmonious. And the sheer scale of the place can make you feel simultaneously overstimulated and completely invisible.
What nobody admits about Tokyo life
The city doesn't care about your feelings. That can be liberating or crushing, depending on the day. There's no space for messy emotions in a culture built on collective harmony and not inconveniencing others. So you learn to compress your complexity into socially acceptable shapes.
You smile and bow and apologise for existing whilst internally screaming. You navigate a thousand unspoken rules you'll never fully understand. You're praised for your Japanese whilst knowing you'll always be the foreigner. The isolation isn't just linguistic - it's existential.
Meanwhile, your expat bubble becomes its own kind of prison:
- Everyone's performing successful integration whilst privately struggling
- The competition to be the most culturally adapted becomes exhausting
- Conversations stay surface-level because admitting difficulty feels like failure
- You're all googling "why do I feel so empty in Tokyo" at 2am but nobody talks about it
Your relationship with home gets weird too. Going back feels claustrophobic and small - everyone complaining about nothing, talking about people you no longer know, living lives that feel impossibly provincial. But Tokyo never quite feels like home either. You're in permanent cultural limbo, too foreign for Japan, too changed for where you came from.
The specific patterns Tokyo reveals
You're probably high-functioning and articulate. You've got your shit together on paper. Maybe you came here because you were already good at adapting, at reading rooms, at making yourself acceptable. Tokyo seemed like the ultimate challenge for those skills.
But underneath, something feels off. You might be:
- Going through the motions of expat life whilst feeling emotionally dead inside
- Overthinking every social interaction because you can't read the cultural cues
- Finding that your usual coping strategies aren't working anymore
- More anxious or depressed than you were before, but can't explain why
- Wondering if the person you were before Tokyo was real or just easier to maintain
- Feeling like you're failing at something you can't even name
The problem isn't that you're not adapting well enough. The problem is that moving to Tokyo forced you to confront parts of yourself you've been avoiding for years.
The constant performance of acceptability. The exhaustion of managing everyone else's comfort. The loneliness of never being fully yourself. These weren't created by Tokyo - they were always there. Tokyo just made them impossible to ignore.
What psychodynamic therapy addresses
This isn't about learning to love Tokyo or becoming more grateful for your opportunities. It's about understanding why success feels empty, why connection feels impossible, why you're more anxious or depressed or angry than you were before.
Psychodynamic therapy looks at what Tokyo has revealed about you, not what it's done to you. We examine:
- Why performing acceptability has become your default mode
- The cost of compressing yourself into culturally appropriate shapes
- What you're actually running from (hint: it followed you here)
- Why intimacy feels impossible even when you're surrounded by people
- The patterns that made Tokyo feel necessary in the first place
Often, the things that feel hardest about living here are the things that were always difficult. They're just impossible to ignore now. The city strips away your usual defences and leaves you facing yourself without distraction.
The goal isn't to fix your expat experience. It's to help you stop abandoning yourself in service of fitting in. 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 geography was never the solution.
Why English therapy matters
You need to be able to speak without translating yourself. Not just the language - the emotional references, the cultural context, the shared understanding of what certain experiences mean.
When you're already performing yourself in a foreign language all day - choosing simpler words, flattening your personality, monitoring your tone - therapy needs to be the place where you can drop the performance entirely. Where "I feel knackered" doesn't need explanation. Where you can reference home without having to explain what a proper queue looks like or why British politeness is its own form of violence.
You need someone who understands that your problems aren't solved by trying harder to integrate or being more grateful for the opportunity. That feeling empty whilst living in one of the world's most exciting cities isn't ingratitude - it's information.
Practice details & booking
I'm a UK-trained psychodynamic therapist offering online therapy to expats in Tokyo and international clients worldwide. This is psychodynamic work, which means we look at patterns rather than just symptoms. Why you chose Tokyo. Why success feels empty. Why you keep abandoning yourself to fit in.
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:
Morning slots that work with Tokyo schedules (JST-friendly hours)
You don't need to know what's wrong. You don't need to arrive with the right words for it. You just need to be willing to find out.
Online psychodynamic therapy in English for expats in Tokyo who are tired of pretending everything's fine. Available worldwide except USA and Canada.
