A reflective circle for parents abroad and international couples, led by an integral counselor and parenting expert, offering connection, compassionate understanding, and emotional support across cultures and challenges. (EN/FR spoken)
Do you ever feel that parenting abroad asks more of you than anyone can really see?
Do you ever miss the village you thought you would have around you?
Do you ever feel the weight of holding so much for your children while also trying to hold yourself together?
Do you ever notice how living far from home can make ordinary parenting moments feel heavier, lonelier, or more intense?
Do you ever wonder why small misunderstandings in an international relationship can suddenly feel so big?
Do you ever feel stretched between cultures, languages, expectations, and ways of raising children?
Do you ever long for a place where you do not have to explain so much — where you can simply arrive as you are?
Do you ever feel that parenting abroad brings up parts of you that need support too?
Do you ever wish for more steadiness, more understanding, and more connection in the middle of family life far from home?
Do you ever wonder how much easier it might feel if you did not have to carry it all alone?
Many parents living abroad carry not only the daily realities of raising children, but also the emotional weight of distance, adaptation, cultural difference, and the absence of familiar support. In this circle, we make space for these experiences to be named, shared, and held in a way that brings more clarity, connection, and relief.
Parenting Between Worlds is a circle for parents abroad and international couples, rooted in an integral approach to parenting, relationships, and emotional life. It is a space to slow down, reflect, and be supported in the real complexity of raising children between cultures and far from home.
Together, we explore the emotional, relational, and practical challenges of parenting abroad: the loneliness, the pressure, the misunderstandings, the longing for home, and the question of how to stay connected — to yourself, to your partner, and to your children — while living between worlds.
This is not a place where you need to have it all together. It is a place where you can come with what is real. Through guided reflection, shared experience, and thoughtful conversation, we create a safe and supportive space where parents can feel less alone, more resourced, and more able to show up with steadiness and heart. Leave feeling more understood, more grounded, and more connected — to yourself and to the family life you are trying to build.
The events will take place with a minimum of 5 participants. The group is closing after the first session, no new members can join to protect the safe place. At the end of the first session, we will ask you to decide wether you commit to participating on the remaining 2 sessions.
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About the host: Eszter is a long-time expat, a mother of three, and an integral counselor. She left her home country at the age of 21 to study in Paris, where she first experienced how deeply financial resources — or the lack of them — can shape a person’s life. She began in the expat bubble with her boyfriend, then gradually opened herself to the people and culture around her. She had her first two children in Paris before moving back to Hungary after eight years.
Back in Hungary, she took over her mother’s company while raising children as a single mother after her husband left her. At the same time, her grandmother was living with Alzheimer’s, and her mother was caring for her, which meant Eszter carried the responsibility of helping provide for seven people. Trying to find a way out of this pressure, she moved to what became her second home, the Czech Republic, to join a man who later turned out to be toxic. Despite having three children, one of them still a toddler, she chose to raise them alone rather than remain in an environment that was harmful to them.
After surviving — and eventually thriving — alone with three children in a country whose language was difficult to learn, she took on several jobs. One of them involved guiding tourists, where she discovered her gift for building trust and connection with people within just a few minutes.
When the pandemic made travel impossible, she continued deepening this path by completing a coaching certification. Yet she felt coaching was not gentle enough for the kind of relationship she wanted to offer her clients. That led her to begin a three-year training in integral psychology and become an integral counselor. Because their rage required, she also took on the role of supporting her elderly parents, traveling 500 km twice a month to check on them. Since than she has been living the reality of so-called “sandwich caregiving,” caring both for (the more and more independent) children at home and parents who have become increasingly dependent on her emotional support.
Her parenting journey has also brought her through profound challenges: supporting a daughter caught in an anxiety cycle around visits to a narcissistic father until she could eventually stand up for herself; learning to hold and accept a son’s digital addiction while, over time, setting clearer limits around how she could support him; and enduring one of the hardest experiences of all, when her other daughter went through amnesia and cut off all emotional relationships, including with her.
These experiences led Eszter into a deep therapeutic journey of her own. Through it, she learned how powerfully defense mechanisms serve to protect life, how reparative emotional experiences — especially those within families — can bring healing, and how even one stable, safe attachment can become a life-giving container for a child shaped by trauma.
Today, her mission is to support parents in being parents. She believes that while therapy can be deeply valuable, the most important factor in a child’s life is a safe relationship with a caregiver. When parents can offer that, they do not only support their own children — they also help interrupt patterns that would otherwise be passed to the next generation. For Eszter, this work is not only about helping the individuals she meets directly, but also about contributing to a healthier future for humanity.
Having lived for more than 20 years as an expat in two different countries, she has learned both how to stand strongly on her own feet and how that same self-reliance can come at a cost. She lives with a condition that will likely remain part of her life forever and requires great discipline around food and daily choices. This has taught her something essential: freedom is never the absence of limits. Rather, freedom lies in the tiny moment of awareness between what happens and how we respond to it.
That is the heart of the work she now offers to clients: helping them hold multiple perspectives, become more accepting and compassionate toward their own choices, and meet both inner experience and outer circumstance with greater awareness.
Eszter believes that when parents become aware of their own triggers and can separate them from what belongs to the child, parenting becomes much easier. And when we understand the needs and impulses a child is acting from, we can meet them with more acceptance, more understanding, and more loving guidance — rather than fear, conflict, or control.
She sees therapy, in many ways, as a substitute for the good-enough, loving, accepting parent. And one of her deepest intentions is to empower parents to trust that they, too, can become that kind of presence for their child.
