When Moving Countries Reveals What We Really Want: A Psychoanalyst’s Perspective

What really moves when we move countries? In this thoughtful interview, Tommaso Lonquich explores how relocation reshapes identity, relationships, and desire—revealing that wherever we go, we inevitably bring ourselves along.

Tommaso is clinical psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and professional musician. For more, see below.

How does moving to another country affect mental health, identity, and relationships?

Moving countries displaces the coordinates that quietly hold identity in place: language, relationships, humour, small routines. This can be disorienting.

In families, the disruption is immediate. Children lose their social world overnight, while partners discover their roles have shifted in ways neither expected. When one partner moves to the other's country, another layer appears: sacrifice.

A woman moved with her husband for his career. Six months later, she kept thinking, I gave up everything for this. He felt guilty and defensive; she felt unseen. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, "We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love." The question is not whether asymmetry in relations exists—it usually does—but whether it can be spoken and heard, rather than silently converted into resentment.

What is "home," really?

We think of home as a place—a house, a city, a country. But moving reveals something less stable: home is not a location but a position in your world, where your speech carries weight and your gestures are understood without explanation.

I worked with someone who returned to their birth country after years abroad, expecting relief. Instead, they felt like a stranger—the city was familiar, they were not. What they called home no longer recognized them.

Psychoanalysis shifts the question: from Where do I belong? to What do I want, wherever I am?

What happens psychologically when people move countries repeatedly?

For some, each move brings genuine discovery—a new language opens unexpected ways of thinking, different cultural norms free what felt constrained. Real change does happen.

For others, the same conflicts return across borders. After her fourth international move, one client said, 'I thought by now I'd figured this out. But I keep ending up in the same place emotionally—just with a different address.'

The idea of "starting from zero" is very appealing. Does it work that way?

A new language, a new city, a new self—the fantasy is powerful. Yet relocation shows something sobering: certain ways of desiring, avoiding, choosing, or withdrawing persist across contexts.

You bring yourself along.

This can destabilize, especially if identity depended on external anchors like status, fluency, or recognition. But it can also reveal what structures your life. When much falls away, what returns repeatedly may be what matters most.

Starting again confronts you with this question: where have you stepped away from what continues to insist, even when you try to ignore it?

Psychoanalysis brings you face to face with your desire, so that it may orient you, wherever you find yourself.

How does living with constant uncertainty—visas, temporary contracts, unstable plans—affect people?

Uncertainty has two faces. For some, it sharpens flexibility; for others, it produces chronic vigilance or emotional withdrawal. What matters is how you relate to not-knowing.

A man told me, "I stopped unpacking my books after the second move. What's the point?" That small detail revealed a larger stance—the boxes travelled with him flat to flat, always sealed, always waiting for a home that never arrived.

Over time, withdrawal becomes more limiting than uncertainty itself. In avoiding a possible loss, you begin living as if it has already occurred. It is the logic Franz Kafka captures in one of his last short stories,The Burrow. A creature keeps strengthening its underground shelter to feel safe. But the more it protects itself, the more suspicious and watchful it becomes. Eventually, safety turns into imprisonment: the creature has become trapped by the very anxiety it was trying to control.

Many expats ask: should I stay or should I go?

The analyst does not answer for you. They slow the question so you can meet the desire that animates it: what staying has meant, what leaving has avoided, what pattern keeps repeating. The choice becomes less an escape and more a position you take.

What does psychoanalytic work actually offer in this context?

Analysis does not immediately resolve contradictions—it allows them to be articulated. You can say: I wanted this and I regret it. I love them and I resent them. I chose this and I am unsure.

You speak, the analyst listens—attentively, intervening when your speech reveals something you cannot yet hear. What analysis often reveals is that you are foreign to yourself—something at your core remains strange, unknown. For expats, this internal experience often mirrors the external one: neither fully here nor there, never quite at home.

For some expats, this foreignness includes facing discrimination or exclusion based on race, nationality, or religion. These experiences of being othered shape how you position yourself and are addressed in the work.

By voicing that which had been exiled, what seemed confusing begins to show structure. Patterns emerge, repetition becomes less mysterious. The point is not to eliminate it but to recognize your role in it.

Other forms of help offer tools or strategies. Analysis asks why, even when you "know what to do," you keep finding yourself in the same scene. It helps you encounter what in you does not relocate, does not adapt, does not disappear—and to decide what you want to do with it.

What does one speak about in analysis?

There is one fundamental rule in analysis: that you speak freely, saying whatever comes to mind.

In practice, people return—often unexpectedly—to decisive moments in their history: particular words, gestures, relationships. It can feel as though a script was drafted before they knew they were following it, shaped by their parents' stories and by the desire that brought them into the world.

This script becomes a book: the partners you choose, the conflicts you repeat, the position you take—rescuer, outsider, the reliable one.

In analysis, this book is read—but also written. As you speak, what was only lived takes form as text: certain lines lose their inevitability, others appear for the first time. You are no longer only inside the story. So, you begin to write where you once only repeated.

When should someone consider analysis?

There is no checklist.

You might consider it when something persists: a conflict that keeps returning, a dissatisfaction that survives achievement, a question that will not settle, a sense that something in your life, relationships, or work no longer functions as it should. For some, this manifests in the body: insomnia, unexplained tension or pain, digestive issues.

Analysis is for those who suffer from something they do not fully understand and wish to know more about it. The wish to know—not simply to eliminate discomfort but to understand what suffering means— is what sets analysis in motion.

You are an expat yourself. What has that taught you?

I have moved countries multiple times and worked with many others navigating relocation. Each move showed me what belonged to circumstance and what belonged to me. Reinvention has limits; certain questions travel with you. Over time, I became less concerned with perfect stability and more attentive to what can be created within uncertainty.

You work in multiple languages. Does that affect the therapeutic work?

I work in English, Italian, and Spanish. When speaking with a therapist perfect fluency is not required—sometimes a non-native language allows you to approach material too charged in your mother tongue.

Many expats feel torn: their mother tongue brings them closer to family stories but also to old demands and guilt, while another language can feel freer but also less alive. Some find that a second language gives them distance from family myths, while others feel a strange loneliness in it, as if something essential cannot be said.

At times, a single word from your first language—from a dream, a memory—opens an unexpected path. The sound matters, the associations matter. Language is not just a tool; it shapes identity and experience. To move between languages is not simply to translate: it is to shift position.

Do you work only with expats?

Not only. I welcome individuals and couples with a wide range of stories and difficulties: relationship difficulties, anxiety, depression, specific losses, or a persistent sense that something is not right. Crediting my parallel life as a musician, some people also reach out about creative blocks or performance pressure. Disparate symptoms often follow the same logic: something about how you position yourself has become untenable, and the symptom insists until you address what you have been avoiding.

You do not need a diagnosis or complete clarity — just a sense that something needs attention and a wish to speak about it.

About Tommaso

Home (now): Ljubljana

Originally from: Italy

First Language(s): English and Italian

Other languages: Spanish (fluent), Danish (basic), Slovenian (basic)

Moved countries: Italy, USA, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Slovenia

Works mainly with: Expats, internationally mobile individuals and couples, and people engaged in creative work. In person and online.

Special interest: Besides his work as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, Tommaso is also a performing musician, giving concerts worldwide.

To find out more:

For psychoanalysis: www.iclp.si/tommaso-lonquich

For music: www.lonquich.com