“Identity Loss Doesn’t Happen All at Once.” Dr. Débora Pasin on What Parenting Unpacked Gets Right.

Parenting abroad book
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I sent Dr. Débora Pasin three questions.

I have written about her endorsement before — the phrase silent transformations, the deeply relevant, the chocolate covered pretzels I ate when I saw her Instagram story. But the endorsement was her reaction to the book as a whole. I wanted to know what she saw specifically. What a linguist and PhD researcher with 28 years of experience helping professionals navigate foreign systems and foreign languages actually found inside the pages.

She answered all three. I am not going to summarise them. I am going to let her speak.

You work with professionals who navigate foreign systems in a second language every day. When you read Parenting Unpacked what surprised you most about how the book described identity loss in expat parenting from the inside?

“What struck me most was how accurately the book captures the small moments that make people question who they are. In my work, I often meet highly competent professionals who suddenly feel less confident simply because they are navigating a new language, a new culture, or a new system. Jessica Gabrielzyk shows that identity loss does not usually happen all at once. It happens quietly, in everyday situations, and I thought she portrayed that with remarkable honesty.”

You used the phrase silent transformations to describe what the book gives voice to. Where did that phrase come from and what does it mean to you as a linguist and researcher working with internationally mobile professionals?

“The phrase came to me almost immediately after I finished reading. So much of what Jessica describes happens quietly, beneath the surface, and often without people fully realising it. Over the years I have worked with many professionals navigating life in different countries, and I have seen how change can reshape confidence, identity, and belonging in ways that are difficult to explain. What I loved about this book is that it gives language to those experiences. It helps readers recognise feelings they may have carried for a long time without ever quite knowing how to describe them.”

What would you say to a therapist or school counsellor working with expat mothers who has not yet read this book?

“I would tell them that this book offers a valuable window into what many expat mothers are feeling but not always saying. It goes beyond the practical aspects of relocation and explores the emotional realities of adaptation, identity, and belonging. I believe it can help professionals better understand the experiences that often sit beneath the surface of the families they support.”

Photo of Dr. Débora Pasin

Dr. Débora Pasin

About Dr. Débora Pasin

Dr. Débora Pasin is a linguist, educator, and PhD researcher with over 28 years of experience helping medical and healthcare professionals internationalise their careers through confident English communication. She holds degrees in Portuguese and English, specialised in Translation Studies, and teaches five languages. Her PhD in Medicine and Health Sciences was applied at PUCRS and the University of Turin. She has helped numerous professionals, including prominent figures in medicine, navigate foreign systems and foreign languages with confidence.

She endorsed Parenting Unpacked before it launched and called it deeply relevant. Now you know why.

Parenting Unpacked: Parenting Through the Loss of Self launches June 24th on Amazon.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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