Therapeutic Specialties
Intercultural Relationships & Cross-Cultural Identity
For individuals and couples navigating life, love, and identity across cultures.
Your cultural identity may feel layered, conflicted, or still evolving.
Living across cultures can shape your sense of self in ways that are difficult to explain. You may feel more like yourself in one language than another, feel differently connected to each side of your family, or notice that different parts of you emerge depending on where you are and who you are with. Your identity may also carry the history of migration, diaspora, displacement, assimilation, or generations of starting over. Sometimes the question becomes less āWhere am I from?ā and more āWhich parts of all of this are actually mine?ā
Therapy can offer a place to explore these layers without asking you to choose one culture, one country, or one version of yourself.
Do you recognize yourself?
Identity may carry more than one place, language, and historyAn expat or someone living outside your country of origin
A third-culture kid or adult
Bicultural or multicultural
An immigrant or child of immigrants
Someone who has moved between countries or cultures throughout life
In an intercultural or cross-cultural relationship
Returning āhomeā and realizing it no longer feels entirely like home
Someone who feels like a different version of yourself in different places
Someone who feels connected to multiple cultures, but fully claimed by none
Questioning which cultural values feel genuinely yours versus inherited
Navigating family expectations that conflict with the life you want to build
When Two Cultures Meet in a Relationship
Every relationship is a meeting of two different worlds. We each bring our own ways of communicating, handling conflict, expressing love, relating to family, and understanding what partnership should look like. These patterns are shaped by our families, histories, communities, and cultures.
I have a particular passion for working with intercultural and international couples. My research thesis, The Globalization of Love: Identity, Culture, and the Future of Mating, explored how culture, identity, family systems, and broader social forces shape the way we form relationships and understand love.
In our work, we stay curious about how those influences show up between youāincluding the ones that may be operating outside of conscious awareness. Rather than deciding whose way is āright,ā we work to understand what each partner brings and intentionally create a shared relationship culture that feels authentic to both.
Communication
What feels direct and honest in one culture may feel harsh or disrespectful in another. Even the meaning of silence, disagreement, or emotional expression can differ.
Family & Boundaries
Cultures carry different expectations around family involvement, loyalty, privacy, caregiving, and where boundaries between the couple and extended family should sit.
Love & Intimacy
How we express affection, closeness, independence, sexuality, and commitment is shaped by more than personality. We also bring the cultural expectations and relationship models we grew up with.
Creating a Microculture
Rather than choosing one culture over the other, couples can create a shared culture that blends both backgrounds while making space for something uniquely their own.
Welcome, Iām Stef.
As a third-culture kid raised in New York, growing up in a multilingual home, and later living abroad as an adult, I have spent much of my life between cultures. Across the last four generations, each family member was born in a new country, giving me a family lineage shaped by migration, relocation, and starting over. I have also traveled extensively, built a life across countries, and am in a cross-cultural partnership myself.
I understand firsthand how layered questions of identity, belonging, home, family, and relationships can become.
Drawing on psychodynamic, relational, and depth-oriented perspectives, I help individuals and couples explore cultural identity, relationships, transitions, family history, and the ways different worlds can shape who we become.