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. 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, Instagram-worthy weekend trips. 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. And the sheer scale of the place can make you feel simultaneously overstimulated and completely invisible.
Who This Is For
You're probably high-functioning and articulate. You've got your shit together on paper. But underneath, something feels off. Maybe you're:
- 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
- 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.
What Nobody Tells You About Living in Tokyo
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. So you learn to compress your complexity into socially acceptable shapes.
Meanwhile, your expat bubble becomes its own kind of prison. Everyone's performing successful integration while privately googling "why do I feel so empty" at 2am. The competition to be the most culturally adapted, the most professionally successful, the most "thriving" becomes exhausting.
And your relationship with home gets weird. Going back feels claustrophobic, 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.
Why English-Language 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, therapy needs to be the place where you can drop the performance entirely.
What We Actually Work On
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.
We look at what Tokyo has revealed about you, not what it's done to you. Often, the things that feel hardest about living here are the things that were always difficult - they're just impossible to ignore now.
The goal isn't to fix your expat experience. It's to help you stop abandoning yourself in service of fitting in.
Practical Details
Sessions are online - because the last thing you need is another thing that doesn't work with Tokyo's transport system
UK-trained psychodynamic therapist - which means we dig into patterns, not just symptoms
Japan-friendly time zones - morning and evening slots that actually work with your schedule
No cultural translation required - you can reference home without explaining what a proper queue looks like
Ready to Stop Performing?
If you're tired of pretending Tokyo is amazing whilst feeling dead inside, let's talk.
You don't need to know what's wrong. You just need to be willing to find out.
English-language therapy for expats in Tokyo who are tired of pretending everything's fine.