Melissa Parks, PhD - Coach for Expats & Entrepreneurs
I'm a former therapist now providing coaching for entrepreneurs and globally mobile clients (expats, digital nomads, ATCKs, etc.).
I'm also the co-founder of the Location Independent Therapists Community, a self-compassion advocate, & soon-to-be author. I've been working in the field of mental health and wellness for almost 20 years now, in the USA, Spain, and the Netherlands. I have my PhD in Clinical and Health Psychology and worked as a therapist for many years. These days I provide coaching to expats and entrepreneurs. I primarily support my clients through transitions, helping them to cultivate resilience, coping skills, and a better understanding and appreciation of themselves and their values. I'm also the co-founder of “Location Independent Therapists," an online community made up of mental health professionals around the globe who are living and working across country lines. We support them in growing their private practice and finding ways to combine their career in mental health with international living. I'm currently writing a memoir that's primarily focused on the decade I lived abroad in Europe. I share about my journey to pursuing therapy myself, and becoming a therapist, making peace with my highly sensitive side, and discovering the power of self-compassion. I'm also the mom to an energetic preschooler who keeps me on my toes so I have a lot of empathy for my clients who are parents themselves. I'm married to a global nomad who I met while living abroad and we speak a version of Spanglish in our house, and keep our love for international living alive with as much travel as we can, staying in touch with friends and family around the globe, and enjoying international foods.
Really excited about this! For years my co-founder, Sonia Jaeger and I have been offering these one off consultations to other mental health professionals interested in becoming location independent therapists. But it was never something we advertised, just something we offered when people emailed us about it. We recently decided it was time to change that and we’re now spreading the word about this offer for mental health professionals who are curious about location independence, but might not want (or be ready) for the entire LIT Community experience.
Long time no see! I've posted in stories a couple of time since returning from my maternity leave, but am only just now taking time for a real post.
What a whirlwind the past 9 months have been since we welcomed our daughter and my son became a big brother! It's been busy and chaotic and more joyous than I could have imagined. 🤩
I've enjoyed the transition from 1-2 children so much more than I did 0-1. I'm not sure if it's because I had 4 years to practice as a mom, or because my husband and I have more practice as a parenting team, or because I started antidepressants for anxiety ...or maybe it's because it took us so long to get our second baby 🤔
BUT whatever the reason is, I'm really enjoying being a mom of 2 and even enjoyed the postpartum and infant stage so much more this time. 🥳
What's been tricky is juggling the demands of work alongside being a mom to two kids. The mental load is heavier, the sleep deprivation is worse, and childcare is more complicated. Because of that it's taken me a bit longer than I wanted to get back into the groove of things with work.
I've really tried to ease in, first by hosting events in the Location Independent Therapists community, then seeing former clients, and I've now opened up my schedule for new clients as well! 📆
You'll likely see some changes with my marketing as I lean back into working with expats and other globally mobile clients (more on that later). 🌎
I've been spending the past couple of weeks getting ready for my maternity leave.
It's been bittersweet to wrap up work with my clients. Goodbyes definitely aren't my favorite part of my work, but it's also given me plenty of time to reflect on transitions.
It's especially interesting to watch my clients enter into their own transition as I'm preparing for my own. When I was preparing to have my son I thought "I'm really good at transitions and I help people through them all the time so I'm ready for this!" But looking back I equated "good" with "smooth," and I've since decided that's pretty impossible when it comes to transitions.
Big life changes tend to be bumpy and not so glamorous. There's a lot of one step forward, two steps back. And it's all so much harder when you're sleep deprived! It took me quite awhile to find my "new normal" when my son was born, but I'm hoping I can go into this transition with more patience and self-compassion. It may not speed up the process, but it should help my emotional reserves.
I'm also excited to share that I was able to finish my memoir and it's now set to send to publishers! It's the story of the decade I spent living abroad - becoming a therapist, going to therapy myself, and finding my path to self-acceptance. I'll have more news to share about this in the new year!
I'll resume taking on clients in spring 2025. If you'd like to work together then, please fill out this form to be added to my waitlist - https://forms.gle/WiDTchxSNR9WUjbk6
07/23/2024
This is the year of babies! Of both the human and book variety 😃
I'm really excited to share that I'm expecting a baby girl in October. It's been quite journey to get here that's included secondary infertility, loss, IVF, and surgery.
On this journey I've met so many others whose infertility journeys have been much longer, or did not have a happy ending, so I'm beyond grateful and very humbled to be where I am today. 💖
I'll be going on maternity leave September 30-early April, but am still accepting a few clients for the next 2 months who need support with short term goals (a common one people reach out to me for is deciding whether to stay abroad or move back to their home country).
One of the things that's really helped my mental health as I hoped for another baby was staying focused on my book baby! I'm excited to share I'm 95% there with the final revision and I'll be spending the next couple months launching into my next adventure as a future author - figuring out how to get this book published! ✍️
Hi friends 👋 May has not gone according to plan for me. I’d really hoped to participate in but haven’t been able to. It’s still been so fun to see the posts of everyone who is participating when I log in here and I hope 2025 will be the year I get to rejoin the fun! 🌎
Instead May has been focused more on self-compassion. I’ve been practicing it a lot as I’ve needed to take some unexpected breaks from work. I always tell my clients that life gives you the best homework and this month has certainly given me lots of moments to practice filling my own cup! ☕️
I’ve also been thinking about self-compassion a lot as I work on the revision of my memoir which is about my time abroad, but also very much about my inner journey to discovering self-compassion. When I read back about the times in my life before I discovered self-compassion it feels like I’m talking about another life. I wish I could go back and give that version of myself a hug 💗 I’m now 1/2 way through with my revision and am on my way to having the final version done by this summer 🥳
Self-compassion has also been present in my client sessions as well as with meetups I’ve had with other therapist entrepreneurs in the (LIT) Community. I truly believe self-compassion is one of the greatest tools we have for navigating life and business (wherever in the world you are). 🌟
What about you? What has May had in store? Is it everything you’d expected or have you also had to rely on some flexibility and self-compassion? Leave me a comment and let me know 👇
04/26/2024
The memoir I'm writing doesn't start in my childhood. It also doesn't start when I first moved abroad. ✈️
It begins 4 years into my time living abroad when I was face with a dilemma 🤔
Move back to my home country? 🇺🇸
OR
Start a new chapter in Spain? 🇪🇸
Back then I had no idea how common this "should I stay or go" dilemma is amongst the globally mobile community. These days, I help clients wrestle with this decision each and every week. 💻
Ultimately, I decided to stay. To write a new chapter abroad and it was the best decision I could have made.
6 years later I made a different decision - to move back to the U.S. 🛬
Even now, 5 years into repatriation, I have days where this dilemma pops up for me. 🤯
This is why I like to think about life in chapters. It's very likely there's a future chapter where I'll go abroad again, but this current chapter is taking place in the suburbs of Seattle, and it's exactly where I need to be right now.📖
I'm so grateful for the therapists I had to lean on and the soul searching I did during my time abroad that helped me to get in touch with my own internal compass. That's ultimately what helped me to navigate the decision making process (and it's a big part of the work I do with my own clients now!) 🧭
This work helps us shift away from thinking "the grass is greener on the other side" to "the grass is greener where you water it." Then the question becomes - where do I want to water the grass right now in my life? 🌱
I share even more about this in my book which I'm currently revising (and very close to finishing 🥳). You can sign up for updates here - https://melissaparks.com/memoir/
What about you, where in the world are you watering the grass these days? 🌏
04/24/2024
One of my online friends (and fellow fan of self-compassion), Aracelys Sunico .feliz got me thinking today about the power of self-compassion for me as a mom.
Motherhood is such a rollercoaster and there are many contradictory moments. I know I'm not the only mom who counts down the minutes until bedtime only to then stare at my son on the monitor and miss him.
I really can't imagine how I would have survived this journey through motherhood without self-compassion. I've leaned on it at so many pivotal moments -
✨ letting go of control of my body as it grew with pregnancy (which has the potential to be very triggering for someone like me who previously had an eating disorder)
✨ making my way through the newborn haze and not beating myself up for having fantasies about running away
✨surviving through years of sleep deprivation until we diagnosed and treated my son's sleep disorder
I've overcome those challenges of motherhood, only to have them replaced by new ones, and the daily need to lean on self-compassion continues. It's often at odds with my desire to meet all of my son's needs. I don't know if I so much put on my oxygen mask first, or just make sure we've both got our masks on simultaneously. Or maybe it depends on the day?
In the memoir I'm writing I talk about discovering the power of self-compassion over 5 years ago. I'm so very grateful to have these life-changing tools in my toolbox. They've helped me find a home inside of myself, and to navigate the ups and downs of this journey into motherhood that I started nearly 4 years ago (even though it feels like just yesterday!)
If the topic of self-compassion piques your curiosity, be sure to sign up for email updates where I'm sharing even more about my book - https://melissaparks.com/memoir/✨
03/04/2024
📢 Announcement time! 📢
I scoured my phone for a relatively recent pic of me for this post and all I could find was this selfie of my son and I last month eating ice cream before dinner 🤣
The background is messy, it has nothing to do with my professional life, but actually it's perfect for what I have to share!
For the past couple years I've tried hard to focus this account on sharing about content related to entrepreneurship. I didn't share too much about global nomad life like I used to, or about other topics I'm passionate about like self-compassion or writing.
I was trying so hard to do things the right way and speak to my ideal client and it's sucked the fun out of social media for me. And the funny thing is, it seems like the more I speak to entrepreneurs, the more I attract globally mobile clients. 🌎
So for 2024 I decided to lean into my multi-passionate personality and make some changes to the content I share:
✨ I've stopped producing new episodes of my podcast (all the episodes are still available on my website and your favorite podcast platform)
✨ While I'm still taking on entrepreneur clients, I'll be talking about that topic less on here and switching the focus to other topics (see below)
✨ I'm also announcing to the world that yes, I still work with many globally mobile clients, especially supporting them through transitions
Going forward I'll be sharing more about my memoir which I plan to be sending to publishers in a few months 😍 and all the topics related to what you'll find inside:
✨ The challenges of living abroad, choosing to stay or go, and moving home
✨ My own journey of going to therapy and becoming a therapist
✨ Life as a deeply feeling/HSP/probably autistic woman
✨ The power of self-compassion 💖
This book has been a huge labor of love the past few years and I can't believe it's almost ready to share with the world! I can't wait to share more with you! Let me know what questions you have about the book or the topics I'll be sharing more about!
02/06/2024
It’s such an honor to welcome Kelly Redmon Loo on the latest episode of this podcast to talk to us about self-care as an autistic entrepreneur and how to cope with autistic burnout.
Kelly is an entrepreneur and therapist (owner of Seven Seas Counseling) and a pioneer in the field of autism in women+. In addition to this she comes at this topic not only with professional experience, but lived experience as well as she is autistic herself and also has ADHD, both diagnoses she discovered as an adult.
We cover a lot in this episode including:
✨How Kelly developed her passion for working with autistic clients and how she discovered that autism is nothing like what she learned about in grad school
✨Why she says “if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person”
✨Kelly’s experience of discovering she was neurodivergent later in life
✨The concept of masking and what’s helped Kelly on her own journey of unmasking and discovering she’s autistic
✨How alcohol consumption can serve to mask autism
✨How autism manifests differently in women leading to missed/late diagnosis
✨Why neurodivergent people sometimes feel “unemployable” and why entrepreneurship can be such a great fit
✨The challenges you may face when you’re neurodivergent and an entrepreneur, and what’s helped Kelly to deal with these challenges
✨The difference between occupational burnout and autistic burnout, and how you can care for yourself and recover if you’re experiencing autistic burnout
✨ Kelly’s tips on what to do next if you suspect you might be on the autism spectrum, including how to find a professional if you’d like to pursue formal diagnosis, and why self-diagnosis may be enough
I hope you enjoy and please share with anyone who may benefit from learning more about this topic!
02/05/2024
Hello and Happy New Year! 🥳 I heard someone else say the other day that the new year doesn't really start until February and I liked that sentiment!
I don't know about you, but I was more than happy to say goodbye to 2023. I recently told my colleagues in the Location Independent Therapists community (the online community I run for therapists) that 2023 was a sh*tshow. I really don't know of a better word to describe it!
Last year did not go according to plan for me at all and it was a year of loss, disappointment, and frustration. I'm sharing more details in an upcoming podcast episode so I'll hold off on details for now, but it seemed like life just threw one challenge after another at me last year.
The last straw came towards the end of the year when I wound up in the ER with pneumonia. I was in shock when I got that diagnosis! As I waited for the antibiotics to kick in and rested up, I realized I needed to take some drastic steps to up my self-care game and remove some things from my plate.
My words for 2023 were "hope" and "flexibility" and the year definitely helped me to cultivate those two things!
For 2024 my words are "no" (so that I can say yes to what's the most important) and "gratitude." I have so much to be grateful for and it's so easy to lose sight of that when life keeps kicking you down!
On the last day of 2023, I took some time to reflect and journal on last year and ultimately realized that despite the hardship, I can still look back on the past year and see a lot of beautiful memories and silver linings.
What about you? How was 2023 and how is 2024 going so far?
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Contact The Practice
Send a message to Melissa Parks, PhD - Coach for Expats & Entrepreneurs:
Hi there! My name is Melissa Parks and I have my PhD in Clinical and Health Psychology and I’ve been running this page since 2014 providing information and resources to support the expat and international community.
I provide coaching to expats and other international clients living around the globe to help them live joyful and fulfilling lives, wherever in the world life takes them. I lived abroad myself for 10 years in Madrid, Spain, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and repatriated back to my hometown of Seattle (USA) last year. However, because I’m in an intercultural marriage, speak Spanish in my home, and interact with clients, colleagues, friends, and family around the world on a daily basis, I still consider myself a global nomad. I also am fond of saying “once a global nomad, always a global nomad,” because living abroad changes your worldview and identity.
My coaching clients include expats, English teachers teaching abroad, international NGO employees, immigrants, adult Third Culture Kids (TCKs), location independent professionals, digital nomads, diplomats, accompanying spouses, and other internationals whose lives span cultures, countries, languages, and times zones.
In addition to coaching, I also co-facilitate a community for location independent therapists and coaches and teach the evidence-based Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program in the Seattle area. I really think mindfulness and self-compassion are essential skills for navigating the emotional rollercoaster that comes with living a globally mobile life. The MSC program is designed to help you cultivate these resources and learn to treat yourself in the same way you’d treat a loved one.
On this page I share resources related to globally mobile life, how to achieve work-life balance, live a more mindful and intentional life, and create a portable sense of home inside of yourself.
