If you’re living in Barcelona or Castelldefels and have found yourself sitting in a beautiful apartment, ten minutes from the beach, wondering why you still feel alone or just “off”, you’re not doing expat life wrong. You’re having a completely normal response to an enormous, underestimated change.

Maybe you’ve heard yourself say “I have everything I wanted. So why do I feel this way?”. 

I’ve certainly said this to myself and to my closest friends (who live back in the U.S.) many times; always with some guilt, confusion, and a sense of dread… “Am I just not capable of being happy anymore?” usually follows. And that’s always my cue that it’s time to do some inner work and unpack what’s really going on.

Loneliness Isn’t Just Missing People

We tend to think of loneliness as the absence of people around us. But expat loneliness is usually something more specific: the absence of being known. It’s possible to have a full calendar, dinners, meetups, a hiking group, and still feel unseen, because the people around you haven’t known you long enough to recognize all the things that make you feel “you”. They also may not yet know when something’s off, or don’t share enough cultural context to catch your references, your humor, or your shorthand.

Add to that the quieter losses that don’t get talked about as much:

• The friend who used to just show up when things were hard, and now lives an ocean and several time zones away.
• The version of you that existed in your old context with the people you already trusted, already understood.
• The daily texture of a place, how things work, what’s normal, what’s expected, that you used to move through without thinking, and now have to consciously figure out.

None of that is small. It’s identity-level work, even when it looks, from the outside, like you’re just living somewhere new and sunny.

Your Nervous System Notices Before You Do

A lot of what feels like sadness or “just adjusting” is actually your nervous system staying quietly on alert. When almost everything around you is unfamiliar, like the language on the street signs, the rhythm of the day, who to call if something goes wrong, your body doesn’t fully relax, even if your conscious mind has decided everything is fine.

Low-grade vigilance, sustained over months, is exhausting. It can look like fatigue, irritability, trouble sleeping, or a persistent low mood that doesn’t have an obvious trigger. This is why relocation stress often shows up in the body before it shows up as a clear thought like “I’m lonely.” Understanding that distinction matters, because it changes what actually helps.

Re-Building Belonging 

Belonging isn’t built just by adding more meetups to your calendar. It’s built by two things happening together: consistent contact with people over time, and a sense of internal steadiness that doesn’t depend entirely on your external circumstances.

That second part is the piece people often skip. If your entire sense of okay-ness is riding on whether this week’s plans work out, whether you made a friend at that event, whether the group chat replies, you’re vulnerable to every small disappointment feeling much bigger than it is. Building an internal anchor, a place inside yourself you can return to regardless of what’s happening around you, changes the equation. From that steadier place, it becomes much easier to reach out, stay open, and let new connections take root.

This is a lot of what I focus on with clients navigating relocation: not just “here’s how to meet people,” but helping build that internal steadiness, so the external work of building a life here doesn’t become so overwhelming that they feel like quitting.

Why This Work, in English, in Castelldefels

I speak from direct experience. Back in San Diego, I had a Reiki teacher I’d worked with for over ten years. An acupuncturist who got me through some difficult health experiences. My yoga classes and community. A gong master I loved going to for group sound baths. Friends I’d travel to the desert with for self-guided retreats. On basically any day of the week, I could find a meditation group if I just wanted to sink into a quiet, elevated space with others. Plus, I held Reiki sessions with my own clients, in my studio and in their homes, so Reiki was woven into so much of my day. My spiritual life felt rich, meaningful, and sustaining, and I didn’t fully appreciate how much infrastructure that was until I no longer had it.

Arriving in Barcelona, I realized I’d have to rebuild all of it from scratch, in Spanish. It’s been its own process, and I’m genuinely grateful for the support I’ve since found here. But it made something obvious to me: there aren’t nearly enough resources in this area for people who want this kind of support and can’t yet do it comfortably in Spanish – whether that means going without, settling for virtual sessions that still feel a bit disconnected, or trying to do deep inner work in a second language, translating your own feelings in real time. That last one is its own kind of exhausting, on top of everything else a relocation already asks of you.

Bringing Practical Alchemy to Castelldefels and Barcelona is my way of offering one place where you can process a genuinely disorienting chapter of your life in the language your feelings live in, so you can put your full energy toward the healing itself rather than the translation.
My 1:1 Self-Integration Counseling sessions are built specifically around this kind of work, weaving counseling, somatic awareness, and Reiki to help you build that internal steadiness while you navigate the external adjustment of a new country.

Ready to restore balance? Book a holistic session in Barcelona or Castelldefels today. Begin with a conversation.

In health and happiness,
Leilany🌻