Hieu Tran
Clinical Psychologist
I specialise in:
About me
I am Norwegian-Vietnamese, and I trained as a psychologist in Norway. Six years of clinical training at the University of Bergen, a philosophy degree in Oslo before that, and then several years inside the Norwegian public health system. I moved back to Ho Chi Minh City after all of it. So I have spent most of my adult life as the person who arrives somewhere, learns the codes, and works out which parts of himself to keep and which to translate. When clients describe the particular tiredness of living well in a place that is not quite yours, I recognise it from the inside.
Before Vietnam I worked at Akershus University Hospital's outpatient clinic for personality disorders and at Modum Bad, an inpatient centre for people whose depression had not responded to previous treatment. That is where I learned most of what I know. These were people who had already tried, often several times, and the work was slow, close and unglamorous. It taught me not to be frightened by difficulty and not to promise speed I cannot deliver. I now see adults and adolescents individually in Ho Chi Minh City, work with couples, and run an in-person process group for English-speaking adults at Saigon Pearl, Binh Thanh, Ho Chi Minh City: one weekend a month, four 90-minute sessions. My particular areas are personality and relationship patterns that keep repeating no matter how much insight someone has about them.
Alongside my practice, I am co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of psylab, a company building AI tools that help therapists document their work and get feedback on their technique. I teach, I take part in research on measuring what actually happens inside a therapy session. All of this comes from the same place: I care about therapy being done well, not just done. Outside the consulting room I spend my time with music, film and art, which have taught me at least as much about people as the textbooks did.
I speak:
Location:
Approach
I work psychodynamically and relationally. In plain terms, that means I am less interested in managing your symptoms than in understanding what your symptoms are doing for you, and I believe that understanding happens between two people rather than inside one. Most of the patterns that bring people to therapy were learned in relationships, often early ones, and they tend to show up again in the room with me. When they do, we have something live to work with rather than a story about the past.
Sessions with me are active. I will ask about what you are feeling right now, in your body, while you are talking to me, and I will notice when something shifts and you move away from it. Feelings that were not safe to have at the time get pushed down, and the pushing down costs something: anxiety, numbness, exhaustion, a relationship you cannot get close in. My training in ISTDP means I work directly with that, at a pace you set. My training in mentalization-based therapy shapes how I work when things get overwhelming and thinking drops out, which it does for all of us under pressure.
Culture is part of the clinical work, not a footnote to it. I have sat on both sides of it. I do not treat family obligation, filial duty, or the pull of collective belonging as obstacles to individual health. Those are resources, and often the thing a person is most afraid of losing when they start to change. Equally, I know what it costs to hold a life together across two cultures, in a language that is not your first, without the people who used to know you.
I work in English and Norwegian. I offer individual therapy, couples therapy, and an in-person process group for English-speaking adults at Saigon Pearl, Binh Thanh, Ho Chi Minh City, one weekend a month (four 90-minute sessions). If you are unsure whether we would fit, an initial conversation is the cheapest way to find out, and I would rather refer you to someone better suited than keep you.
