For Those Who Carry Two Worlds

I am Paul Chifofoma. If you have found this page, I suspect you love deeply and have been carrying something for a while — and have been wondering whether things can still be different.

Perhaps it’s a marriage between two cultures that has grown harder than you expected. Perhaps it’s the weight of navigating it mostly on your own.

Or perhaps it’s a lifelong question of where you truly belong, after growing up between worlds that shaped you differently.

What began as a passion for couples therapy gradually revealed itself as something more specific — a deep pull toward the particular world of intercultural marriages: the quiet negotiations, the things each partner assumed everyone understood the same way, the loneliness of loving someone whose instincts were shaped somewhere else entirely.

Those are the people this practice is for — whether the work in front of you is a marriage, a life you are learning to carry on your own, or the question of where, after everything, you actually belong.

While I work with individuals and couples on many different things, I have chosen to specialise in intercultural marriages — alongside the identity and belonging questions that arise for adults who grew up between two cultures. This is where my clinical experience, ongoing learning, and passion for work converge. I do not claim to know everything about this area. However, I am sufficiently familiar with it to walk alongside you. I am constantly learning more.

My clinical training in systemic therapy provided me with the framework to understand what is happening between two people. My background in theology provided me with insights that clinical training alone could not — an understanding of why people remain, their beliefs about the cost of love, and the implications of choosing differently.

This journey began in Zambia, where I was born and grew up, and continued in Durban, South Africa, where I completed my bachelor’s degree in theology in 2008. A single class on Christian counselling was enough to send me looking for more — first toward the questions theology alone could not answer, then toward Vienna, where I studied Psychotherapy Science at Sigmund Freud Private University and completed my Bachelor’s degree in 2018. I am currently completing my master’s degree in the same field because, as I said, learning does not stop.

I am licensed by the Austrian Ministry of Health and affiliated with the Austrian Association for Systemic Therapy (ÖAS).