I’m here to help you overcome the cultural challenges of living in a new and different country.
We unconsciously learn to deal with our feelings when we grow up, during school, in societies who shape us accordingly. Sometimes it is hard to listen to your emotions in all the chaos this society has in store for you. When it comes to your emotions, you might be encouraged to speak your with family and friends.
The problem is that your family and friends are not always qualified to deal with these issues. They have their own perceptions, feelings, and challenges to deal with. Therefore, it is perhaps better to speak with someone who is neutral, trained to deal with their own feelings and others’. Someone who can explain what is happening under the process of moving and living abroad. Someone who can help you communicate in another way different than you are used to.
And that’s why I’m here for.
I am Gabriela Sirbu.
A therapist using the Gestalt method. Former journalist.
Speaker and writer about integration and cultural differences.
And I hold a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Transformation from The Arctic University of Norway “Peace mediator” (although I believe that “war” or “conflicts” are everywhere, from kinder garden to marriage).
A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME AND MY JOURNEY
I have been living in Norway for nearly 20 years. You can find out some more about it here. In all these years, I have stumbled over enough cultural differences to be able to help others overcome the cultural adaptation issue. This is not easy. Scandinavia has, in general, a completely different value system than the rest of the world. I noticed that here I can meet a different culture just by crossing a mountain, a fjord, or a valley.
Yet, immigrants, multiculturalism, and inter-culturalism have existed everywhere since the beginning of times, and the challenges are pretty much the same no matter which country.
This is why I became a Gestalt method therapist. Your story and case are confidential and safe with me. (We -Gestalt therapists- don’t have to keep journals in Norway). You don’t need to be sent by your family doctor either. You will experience how “being here and now”, with all that you are and have from your past, can help you to walk your journey faster and further.
I can assist you in English, Norwegian, French, and Romanian, and if you are far from Tromsø, Norway, where my practice is, or you prefer to have a session from the comfort of your home, we can also speak online.
What is Migration of Emotion
Here we’ll talk about things that maybe we don’t really talk about otherwise. It is to speak about what we do and not do in a foreign country. About what we speak and not speak, about which are the differences between what we left behind and what we found.
About what we miss from our past, and about what we are happy about here, where we live today.
About the feelings that chased us from our home country and about the feelings that we thought we were going to have once we reached our destination. Did those feelings meet our expectations, or we only became more frustrated because things did not happen as we thought they would?
People have migrated since forever.
In the beginning, migration had to do with people being chased by wars, in search for peace and the feeling of being safe. Other tribes migrated because of hunger, in search for food and water, so they could satisfy their primary needs. There are still people moving from place to place for the same reason, in many corners of the world.
I believe the feelings behind all these decisions we make about moving, about putting a physical distance between us and our roots, are worth talking about. Because it is not easy living on a foreign ground, and yet we choose to do it, because even so, it is still better than the place we left behind. And since I believe in feelings making us move away, I believe that these feelings, emotions, are migrating together with us. We take with us our history, our values, our life memories which we have made until we decided to move. Even many years after we left our native country, some of us still live after them.