> People open up to you because you're an impartial observer. A friend-of-a-friend claims that this has been very useful for her as a psychologist who works in

> People open up to you because you're an impartial observer. A friend-of-a-friend claims that this has been very useful for her as a psychologist who works in a country where she's a foreigner. A significant number of people, in her view, just feel more comfortable talking to a foreign psychologist, in part because foreigners seem less implicated in the local system of cultural norms (they might be implicated in some other system, but not the one that the patient is worried about). It's also not a very large city, so there may be an element of foreigners being perceived as safer confidantes, since they're not as strongly tied into the local web of social & family relationships.