Abu Dhabi

Psychotherapy and counselling for Abu Dhabi, online

For people in Abu Dhabi, Dr Philippe Jacquet offers confidential psychotherapy, counselling and coaching online by secure video. He is a Jungian analyst with twenty-five years of clinical experience and an executive coach trained at ESSEC Business School, working in English and French. The online format suits a city of internationally mobile professionals and families, and keeps the work continuous regardless of travel.

What is available

The practice works across the full range of adult difficulty, all delivered online: counselling and psychotherapy for anxiety, depression, stress and life transitions; EMDR for trauma, with more than twenty years of practice; specialist eating-disorder treatment, including particular expertise with men; confidential addiction counselling, including high-functioning presentations; and executive coaching for senior leaders. It also draws on Jungian analysis for the questions of meaning and direction that are harder to name.

What the move tends to do

Almost nobody arrives in Abu Dhabi expecting the difficulty to be psychological. The package is good, the work is substantial, and the practical problems are solvable.

What is harder to anticipate is the removal of everything that used to hold a life steady. The friends who would have noticed a change in you are thousands of kilometres away and hear the edited version on a call. The family who would have interrupted are not here. The professional identity that organised your sense of yourself does not translate at a dinner on Saadiyat, where nobody knew you before and half the room is professionally connected to you.

For a while that is liberating. Then it is not, and whatever has grown quietly in the space has usually been growing for a year or two before anyone says a word.

Alcohol, and why it behaves differently here

Worth saying plainly, because it is rarely written about and it matters clinically.

Where alcohol is licensed and its use socially circumscribed, drinking does not disappear. It moves indoors. It becomes domestic, private and unobserved, detached from the ordinary social rhythms that regulate it elsewhere: no colleagues at the next table, no walk home, nobody counting.

The result is a pattern I meet repeatedly. Consumption that would have been visible at home becomes invisible here, and the person has no external reference point for whether it has changed. There is also a real reluctance to raise it locally, for reasons that are not imagined.

So people arrive at this later, and heavier, than they would elsewhere. If that is your position, it is a common presentation rather than an unusual one, and the addiction work is conducted entirely outside the country.

The partner who came too

A population rarely discussed, and a substantial part of this practice.

One person is recruited; the other gives up a career, a network and an income to come. What follows is frequently a marked loss of identity, an unequal dependence neither party chose, and a difficulty that is hard to voice because the family is objectively better off and complaining feels ungrateful.

Isolated, unoccupied, financially dependent and not entitled to be unhappy is one of the more reliable routes into depression and into drinking that I encounter. It is also very treatable, and it is often the accompanying partner rather than the employee who does the most useful work.

When the package is the trap

For senior people the difficulty runs the other way. The role has stopped meaning much, and leaving is not simple, because the income is tax-free and not matched anywhere they might return to.

That is the golden cage in a Gulf-specific form, and it repays being understood psychologically rather than as a purely financial calculation. I have written about it in Finance: the Golden Cage, and about the capacity that built the career and now will not switch off in The Addictive Personality.

Why people in Abu Dhabi choose an outside practitioner

In a relatively small professional and social world, discretion matters. Working with a practitioner outside that world, online and in strict confidentiality, gives senior professionals and internationally mobile clients a space that is genuinely private, and a depth of training that is not always available locally. For executives, founders, public figures and internationally mobile families, this discretion is not incidental. It is the condition that makes the work possible: one to one, private, with no group setting and no institutional record.

Executive coaching for Abu Dhabi leaders

For founders, executives and senior professionals, the coaching here combines the rigour of an ESSEC business-school training with the creativity and depth of Jungian analysis. It works not only on performance and leadership behaviour, but on what drives them. You can read more on the executive coaching page.

Therapy that fits life in Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi’s professional world, built around government, energy and sovereign-wealth institutions, is senior, international and relatively small, which is exactly why discretion matters so much. Many residents are reluctant to seek help locally, and good depth-oriented therapy in English or French is not always within reach. An experienced outside practitioner, met entirely online, offers both the expertise and the privacy that local options often cannot.

How online sessions work from Abu Dhabi

Sessions are by secure video, scheduled around the modest time difference (Abu Dhabi is three to four hours ahead of London). The format suits frequent travel and keeps the work uninterrupted, and meeting from your own private space, with someone outside your professional and social world, is often what makes candid work possible.

Dr Jacquet also works with families on helping a son master his energy - confidential therapy for young men, at Harley Street and online.

All international work is delivered by secure video. How online therapy works here.

Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, a Jungian analyst and an HCPC registered art psychotherapist, with twenty-five years of clinical practice. His Doctorate of Professional Practice at the University of Essex examined male eating disorders from the perspective of analytical psychology. Registration can be checked on either public register.

International health insurance, or private

Many internationally mobile clients are covered by global private health plans, designed for exactly this kind of specialist care (see how to use your insurance for psychotherapy). Dr Jacquet works with major insurers including Bupa, Cigna, AXA and Aviva, and his training is international: the Hazelden Foundation in the United States, a Master's and Doctorate in the United Kingdom, and executive coaching at ESSEC in Paris. If you prefer to pay privately, without insurance, that is equally welcome; the work is exactly the same.

How the work is delivered from here

All international sessions are by secure video, in English or French. Online therapy is not a reduced version of consulting room work: it is the format that lets weekly work survive living abroad, travelling, or relocating. Sessions run in United Kingdom hours, which suits most regions, and if your time zone makes none of it workable, say so when you enquire rather than assuming it rules you out.

For clinicians and treatment services

Dr Jacquet supervises clinical teams in private residential addiction treatment and in a private psychiatric hospital. For treatment centres, psychiatric units and group practices looking for external clinical supervision, including in places where no supervisor of this seniority is available locally, team supervision is also delivered by video. For individual practitioners, see clinical supervision.