Hi, I’m Stephanie.
I’m a licensed clinical social worker, and I’ve spent the last few years living abroad full time with no fixed address.
Before we left, my husband and I sold six acres and every animal on it. Six weeks of handing our life to strangers.
The thing that got me worst was the stand mixer. Which sounds ridiculous, except that buying it was the first time I’d felt like a proper adult, and I watched it go into somebody else’s car.
We’ve been moving ever since. Southeast Asia, South America, and a lot of places in between. I still don’t have an address.
I’ve been a therapist for close to twenty years, and I assumed that would make all of this easier. It didn’t, particularly. Knowing exactly how adjustment works did not stop me standing in a grocery store on an ordinary afternoon, unable to find one simple thing, much closer to tears than the situation called for.
What the training gave me was language for it. And what I keep finding is that language is most of what people are missing.
The thing I’m trained in is the thing this is about.
One of my formal areas of clinical focus is shame and self-criticism. I didn’t set out to build anything around that. But almost everyone who writes to me arrives at the same sentence eventually:
I chose this. It looks wonderful from the outside. So what is wrong with me for finding it hard?
That isn’t a character problem. It’s a shame loop, and it’s a well-described one. It keeps people quiet, and quiet is where it gets heavier.
Most of what I make is an attempt to interrupt it. Not with encouragement, which tends to bounce off, but by naming accurately what is happening and why it makes sense.
The work behind it.
Credentials
- Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW)
- Master of Social Work, University of Southern California
- Bachelor of Social Work, Brescia University
- Close to twenty years in practice
Areas of focus
Modalities
Also polyvagal-informed, and a trained Hatha yoga teacher, so the body-based side of this is something I practice rather than only talk about.
My approach is person-centered, which at bottom means I think people already have what they need, and mostly need conditions where it can surface. So a lot of the work is naming things accurately and then getting out of the way.
That’s true of the journals too. They ask questions. They don’t tell you what you found.
What this is, and what it isn’t.
The Grounded Expat is educational. The journals, workbooks, kits and The Circle are self-guided resources. They are not therapy, treatment or diagnosis, and using them doesn’t make us clinician and client.
That isn’t only a technicality. Licensure doesn’t cross borders, which is one of the quieter problems of living abroad: the people best placed to help you are often legally unable to. Building things you can work through on your own is my answer to that.
If you are in crisis, please contact local emergency services or a crisis line where you are.
Elsewhere.
I also built Anchor Point Partners, which does this work for companies moving people around the world. The Grounded Expat is the other half of it, made directly for you.
I write an essay most weeks on Substack, and there are eighteen articles here on the site.
If you want to reach me, [email protected] comes straight to me.