Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview
Started out in Ukraine as an orphan, today Taya is a successful businesswoman leading several expat-focused psychology practices around Europe. As an orphan, she faced a diverse set of challenges in being uprooted from familiarity, a sense of isolation, and the need for connection all of which she observed within other expats who move to a new country. So, after arriving in the Netherlands over a decade ago, she was surprised to find that there was no one who could deeply understand these challenges. Using her experiences living in different countries, and her broad education in psychology, she set up her own practice in The Hague to help expats work through their hardships.
A decade later Expat Psychologist grew to be one of the leading expat-focused services in the Netherlands with several locations throughout the country. With the dream to help expats all over the world, she also expanded her reach to Switzerland. Amongst her clients, you can find expats working for large international companies, embassies, and Hollywood. You will also find gifted people in her portfolio as many expats demonstrate outstanding abilities in their field of expertise, which may go unnoticed by many. Taya takes pride in not only being a great role model to other psychologists but also in providing high-quality client-focused services to anyone who finds it challenging to adapt to a new country.
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I have been living in the Netherlands for over 10 years now. I am a woman on the mission, a successful businesswoman leading several expat-focused psychology practices around Europe. Curiosity and open-mindedness are qualities that I not only implement in my professional life as a scientist but also in my personal life. That’s why I love travelling. In fact, I am driven by my passion to see and experience every culture and cuisine in the world! I have always lived by the idea that I will not let others tell me how beautiful the world is - I will discover for myself. Having already visited 55+ countries, travelling so far has helped me to understand myself, the world outside these four walls, and my deep curiosity for learning. The same curiosity also got me interested in Scandinavian Runology. Despite not being good with languages or scripts, this somehow caught my eye. I think it helps me connect to my spiritual side, a side that I feel is harder to understand as a social scientist. Of course, it may not be for everyone, but understanding my spiritual side for me is part of what helps me keep an open mind.
When I am not pursuing my passions, I love spending time with my daughter Marie-Louise. She is preparing for her future study in Biological & Health laboratory research. She is a globetrotter just like me. Her biggest dream is to find a cure for cancer. She is also passionate about skincare - one day she dreams to start her own cosmetic line. Expats are not only part of my work-life, but raising a third-culture kid like her was quite the journey. Our expat adventures started early - when she was only 3 weeks old - when my husband and I took her to Syria. She spent her first few years there. She looked very different from the local children so it often happened that when she played outside with other kids on the street, cars would stop to take photos and bless her on the head. Later, when our family lived in Nigeria, I studied the Montessori method of teaching so I could provide her room to explore her interests and navigate her expat experience with extra homeschooling. Now we live in The Netherlands, and despite successfully integrating into the Dutch society, Marie-Louise acknowledges that her exposure to different cultures and childhood experiences make her different from her peers. Seeing her adapting to the expat lifestyle here gives me constant inspiration for my work.
What is your business name and how do you help your clients?
My business is called Expat Psychologist and our passion is to offer high-quality support to people who live far away from home. When I arrived in The Netherlands, it surprised me when one of my Dutch colleagues said there’s no practice to help expats specifically. After a brief moment of silence, he jumped up and said, “Wait a minute! Why don’t you start one, because you have both the education and the expat experience to provide the services expats need. You can even start from your living room!” And before you know the title of Expat Psychologist was born.
Our team at Expat Psychologists has a broad range of expertise. When building a team, it was very important to me that we, together with my colleagues, can assist as many people as possible in their native language or a language that they feel comfortable using. The clients are the center of the work that we do, and we aim to use evidence-based assessments and treatments to give them the help that they need, and equip them with adaptive coping skills they can use at any point in and outside of therapy. Our aim is to help clients to overcome challenges they face, be it day-to-day struggles or complex trauma.
What kind of audience do you target your business towards?
Our main target is, as you might expect, the expat community, their spouses and their children, too. We often work with ambassadors, international students, people who are working for international companies, NGO’s or UN-umbrella companies. We get clients from many different backgrounds, stories, and with many different kinds of complaints. Our goal is to always be here for our expat community - so, they know that help is readily available to them whenever they need it.
What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?
I want to stay on the top of the list of being an Expat Expert. It’s a title I take a lot of pride in, because it feels like the culmination of all of my experiences, hardships and determination that brought me to where I am today. It motivates me to keep reaching for something bigger than myself - I am actively working towards expanding my amazing and qualified team and the company to all over the world to fully accommodate the expat community and the internationals in their journey to fulfil their truest potential. And, of course, to provide psychological help to anyone who needs it!
It is also very important to me to be a good Leader. So, one of my goals is to complete my MBA in International Healthcare Management. I am very excited to incorporate what I learn about management and building sustainable relationships with what I have already learned over the years from managing my wonderful team of Expat Psychologists. I wish to grow even further in my role as a leader for people that help me to run my practice and to provide qualified support for many expats.
Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?
I think it’s my environment, the people around me, my friends and of course my experiences as an expat. I got the chance to gain a lot of experiences from my surroundings and I am fortunate to be able to share these experiences with others now. My amazing team of Expat Psychologists are a huge source of inspiration for me, both loyal and harmonious. We try to learn from each other and celebrate our successes, even the smaller victories, together. It’s truly a joy working with these empathetic professionals from many different parts of the world, all driven by the same passion to help others.
One of my greatest “teachers” is my daughter. Raising a child is an enormous responsibility for any parent, but raising a child who is gifted is a whole another story! When my 2 years old daughter surprised a teacher in her International school in Damascus by confidently holding a painting brush like a professional painter, and started painting her emotions on the canvas, I realized that she has a talent and I thought to myself, “I am not ready to have a gifted child!” I remember we would often hide educational and complex toys from her because we just were not ready to see in my toddler her true potential - it was hard enough to raise a third-culture child, but to accept and nourish a gifted one meant something else! Of course, eventually, we overcame our initial hesitation and like any other parents, we wanted to give my daughter the best she deserves, including unconditional love and support. So, inspired by my daughter, I started to explore the topic of giftedness and reach out to other professionals who pioneered working with gifted individuals. I participated in many workshops, studies, and masterclasses on how to identify and support gifted people. This is still a group that fascinates me in my work, as it is intriguing to see how amazing these people can be in spite of often having an asynchronous development. Thanks to my daughter bringing me onto this journey, today I am still researching and developing my own methods to support the gifted.
Finally, my mentor, Hans Schenkel, a Dutch psychologist, is to whom I owe most of my success. Come to think of it, he was more than a mentor to me - he was a coach, a friend, and a father figure that I never had. He shared many of his methods with me and helped me to establish the psychologist that I am today. He was always in the background cheering on every one of my significant personal and professional developments. I asked him once why he is helping me and he said: “I help you and you will help your clients, so my work will be alive and spreading out even after my death.” These words still ring in my ears and fuel my passion to be a good leader and carry on his legacy. I am grateful for his kindness and warmth, and his unconditional acceptance towards me.
What is your work inspired by?
My inspiration for the kind of leader that I want to be comes from Daniel Goleman’s idea of the emotionally intelligent leader. He believed that although we are all born with a certain level of emotional intelligence, for example, IQ, we can learn and strengthen our pre-existing abilities through persistence, practise, and feedback from others, which is what I try to do in my work as both a leader and a psychologist. Connecting with the people who we work with on an emotional level makes our job more meaningful! The topic of leadership and in particular, emotionally intelligent leadership style is a fascinating topic that we will be exploring further in our blog post for Brainz.
Ever since I started my journey to help gifted people reach their true potential, I was inspired by the work of this Polish psychologist, Kazimierz Dąbrowski, who extensively studied gifted individuals. Giftedness is such a small field of psychology that there is still limited research on it. Inspired by Dabrowski’s ideas and that combined with my experience working with gifted people for years; I am in the process of establishing my own methods and techniques to help gifted people celebrate their life to the fullest, while helping them overcome their emotional struggles. It gives me a lot of pride and happiness to know I am one of very few psychologists currently working with gifted people.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far!
It is actually interesting to think about how I did not have to overcome any major struggle or setback to be where I am today - the leader of this private international psychological practice called Expat Psychologist. I feel extremely fortunate as this entire journey makes me feel like I was a butterfly, gently hopping from one country to another bringing more people to become part of my dream of helping the world. I don’t know when I became a popular Expat Expert in psychology. I now have clients spread out all around the world, from Africa to Denmark. I am thankful that the learning curve so far has been gentle and giving.
Being an expat made me feel like I was a guest in every country my family and I have lived in with no country of my own. There was no one around to reassure and help us with the existential questions about the home. So, when I decided to raise my daughter on the same nomadic journey, I made sure she knew she did not have to fear the unknown and that she would always have opportunities to learn about her place in the world, and that she is not alone in the journey. Raising her to accept herself and the uniqueness of her experiences compared to those of her peers is actually what made me feel so prepared to dive headfirst into starting this practice when we moved to the Netherlands. I believe that expats have two sets of eyes - one for seeing the world from their home culture and one to take in every other culture with openness and flexibility that others may not possess. Teaching my clients to celebrate this about themselves, like I was able to for my daughter, is probably my greatest accomplishment.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
My wish for the mental health industry from the start has always been that everyone, including and especially people from third-world countries would be able to receive the psychological help they need! Everyone deserves to be happy, right?
When our family lived in Nigeria, we lived in a compound with many staff members, guards and a few police officers (who were there for protection). I would often invite them to our living room, sit down and discuss a wide range of topics, for example, psychology. Psychologists are not existing there; when people have troubles, they turn to their religious leaders, to their Imams. So, being able to inspire them to take care of themselves, to give them the motivation they needed to study alongside work was probably the beginning of my journey to providing mental health help in the first place! I knew this was what I wanted to do for everyone wherever I went. Even now, my goal is to create opportunities and make support accessible for people like the staff in Nigeria; to seek help whenever they need it without any shame or guilt for learning how to take care of themselves.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
One of my earliest memories of growing up in the orphanage was being very short and small. From a young age, I had decent manners and was generally an easy, lively, and obedient kid, except that I was a very curious kid and would stop at nothing to explore! There was a large window that I really wanted to look out of, and I tried and tried but could not reach the windowsill. But one day, when I was finally able to, I was surprised to see a big beautiful yard! This experience started a journey in my head; I imagined being free as a bird, leaving the place and discovering the enormous world out there. There was something so fundamental about this memory, and how sad I had felt when I could not reach that window. It was as though I already knew that the world had a lot to offer to me, and I just could not wait to see it all for myself. I think this was the beginning of my “plan to action” to explore the world, but also set the stage for many of my goals and values in life. I believe that these goals took me out of that orphanage and brought me many years later to Syria, Belgium, Nigeria and Switzerland, where I got to enjoy the hospitality of the people from all over the world, and where each of these countries became a pivotal moment that provided me with new perspectives and opportunities that guided my decisions and my growth to date.
If you want to get in contact with me, my email address is: info@expatspsychologist.com
