Britons who have moved to Poland share a peculiar problem with mental health care. They are well integrated enough to work and socialise in Polish, and often not fluent enough to describe a childhood to a stranger in it. The English-speaking therapy that exists in the country tends to be concentrated in Warsaw and priced privately, while waiting lists for state services run long for everyone.
Filip Pasterski, an integrative psychotherapist and accredited EMDR practitioner, has restructured his practice around that gap. After seventeen years working in the UK, including time in the NHS and at the Priory Wellbeing Centre on Harley Street in London, Pasterski has relocated to Poland and taken his practice online, seeing English-speaking clients over Zoom from his base there.
“The people who contact me are usually not looking for a service abroad,” Pasterski says. “They are looking for someone who already understands the British way of talking about these things, without an interpreter in the room.” His register runs from expats and international residents to UK-based clients who simply prefer working with a therapist whose approach they can research in advance.
Pasterski is registered with the UK Council for Psychotherapy and accredited with EMDR UK & Europe. His core modality, EMDR, uses guided eye movements to help the brain reprocess stored traumatic memories, and is recommended by the UK’s NICE guidelines as a treatment for PTSD. His interests run wider than trauma alone, into anxiety, depression, chronic pain and the particular stresses of military veterans and cross-cultural life.
Online delivery has shed much of its old scepticism since 2020, when most of the country’s therapy moved to a screen almost overnight. Pasterski argues the format suits his particular clients well, removing travel and time zone friction for people scattered across a country many British therapists never work in.
His practice details and fees are published at Filip Pasterski Therapy.