A Psychologist Doing Her PhD Found Maternity Abroad. Then She Emailed Me.

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk
two hands holding

I love getting messages (phone calls are even better). I have said this before.

An email arrived from Karina Lagarrigue. A psychologist. A researcher. Someone doing a PhD on sensory processing sensitivity, maternal adjustment, migration and belonging. She had found Maternity Abroad through a friend and written to say the overlap with her research felt very real.

I have not read her paper yet. My daughter has been sick since last Friday and the paper is sitting on my list for next week when things are calmer and the medication schedule is less of a puzzle. But I looked at the title and I already know.

WHO KARINA IS

Karina’s PhD research explores maternal adjustment in expatriate and non-expatriate contexts, specifically examining the role of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS)

For those of you that do not know what Sensory processing sensitivity is, it a biological trait associated with heightened sensitivity to environmental and emotional stimuli. Her research examines how SPS and its dimensions may influence maternal adjustment differently depending on context. While her reserach focuses on maternal adjustment (for academic reasons), it also contributes to broader conversations around matrescence (the transition to motherhood) and to better understand the impact of expatriate contexts.

In 2025, she published her first paper in Frontiers in Psychology, one of the most widely read open-access psychology journals in the world. The paper is titled Maternal Adjustment in Expatriate and Non-Expatriate Contexts: Examining the Role of Sensory Processing Sensitivity and Perceived Social Support.

She is currently continuing this line of research by exploring additional variables related to expatriate motherhood and SPS.

Read her published paper here.

A researcher doing peer-reviewed work on the psychology of expatriate motherhood found a book written by an expat mother about exactly that experience and said the overlap felt very real. 

We are setting up a call. I will report back.

I also need to say something about this week because I do not think I am processing it correctly. Rhoda, Papa Balla, Julia Squassoni, and now a psychologist doing her PhD on the exact experience I write about finding the book through a friend. All in the same week. I must have had some sort of lucky spasm. Nobody has a week like this on purpose.

If any of this sounds like the world you work in or live in, I would love to hear from you.

And if you want to read Karina's paper, it is open access. Free. Available to anyone. The link is in the card above. It is worth your time.

Still sitting with it,

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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