My Journey as an Expat Psychologist
My Personal Journey
Being a psychologist often requires more than solid academic skills; it demands investing your soul, drawing from personal healing experiences, accepting your own life journey, and committing to continuous personal and professional development. Here, you’ll find my personal life journey as I’ve always believed that my path as a psychologist began in my early years, when I became fascinated by the profound differences and remarkable similarities in people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
Motivated by their challenging childhoods, my parents instilled in me the values of becoming a highly skilled and independent individual from an early age, someone both capable and trustworthy – the foundational elements of resilience, which later in life became my saving grace. Primary school teachers recognized in me a charismatic child with high intelligence and a strong character. From my side, I remember having a big heart filled with unconditional love for everyone around me, although my cognitive capacity couldn’t fully comprehend why people often chose to behave differently from what they truly desired or dreamed of.
“Being a psychologist often requires investing in your soul,
drawing from personal healing experiences, accepting your own life journey, & committing to continuous personal
and professional development.”
Due to personal and professional challenges, my mother made the decision to leave Ukraine and brought me to Greece. This long journey of immigration involved financial instability, and constant relocation, which colored my childhood with tough diverse experiences. I met a wide array of people from different backgrounds and schools of thought. I learned to understand a broad spectrum of human behavior, tasted different cultural flavors, and observed various patterns of everyday life. I assimilated fragments from each experience to create a rich understanding of the mosaic of human psychology. I learned how to take responsibility for my opinions, empathize even when I disagreed, and manage emotions driven by subjective personal interpretations.
In early adolescence, life presented me with the loss of my mother. From then on, I had to apply all the lessons she had taught me to navigate my life independently. I started working, continued my education, and enrolled in a university to pursue a career as a psychologist—a path I had always known was my calling due to my natural curiosity and love for people. A demanding daily schedule brought me to deal with numerous life stressors triggering my prolonged grief and sense of unsafety. The quest for inner balance and healthy coping mechanisms was consistently postponed. The years were passing, but that time never seemed to come.
My healing journey began with a question I asked myself years ago, during a time when I couldn’t continue anymore the lifestyle I had:
“Why did I choose all this?”
This question marked the start of a challenging emotional awakening. Accepting personal responsibility for myself and my close environment was a pivotal realization, albeit an extremely threatening one for my self-esteem. I grappled with fear, self-doubt, mirroring, avoidance, and denial—factors that had influenced my choices in life until then. After consciously observing these aspects and genuinely accepting my past, I became prepared to choose a different life, one aligned with my dreams and reflecting my full potential.
Challenging my cognitive processes, reshaping my behavioral patterns, and re-experiencing my suppressed emotions were not easy tasks to go through. Step by step, I began to witness the results of these healing steps in my mind and body. I re-educated myself to prioritize self-care, transformed dreams into plans, built an unconditional connection with my partner, formed honest and healthy friendships with like-minded individuals, and started to practice my profession with authenticity and passion. I have chosen to live a joyful and fulfilling life in the present moment, without postponing my happiness for some elusive future time.